A term meant to describe the worst crimes imaginable has lost its meaning through overuse.
Genocide happens very rarely. Or all the time. What seems like genocide to you may not be even close by my standards. “Genocide” has become an endlessly elastic code word for everything bad that happens in the world. Overuse has polluted it. It’s time to drop that word from our political vocabulary.
Last month, Armenia issued a report supporting its charge of genocide against Azerbaijan, which is blocking food shipments into a besieged enclave. That tactic is as odious as it is ancient. Does it constitute genocide? Depends on whom you ask.
President Biden has described China’s treatment of its Muslim minority as genocide. He refuses, however, to use that word to describe Israel’s bombing of Gaza. At a recent news conference, a reporter suggested to Secretary of State Antony Blinken that this seemed contradictory. “We’ve been very clear about the meritless nature of that particular charge,” Blinken replied.
The term “genocide” is supposed to describe the most horrific crime imaginable: destruction of an entire group of people based on their race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. It has come to mean something quite different. In today’s political discourse, it is too often used to describe any coercive policy carried out by a regime the accuser dislikes. When we want to demonize a country, we accuse it of genocide.
Because of the power of this word, every brutalized group tries to be recognized as a victim of genocide. There is no shortage of claimants. The storm of death that enveloped Cambodia in the 1970s is often considered a genocide, even though there was no ethnic difference between killers and victims. So is the 1995 massacre of 8,000 men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and the wave of killing that decimated the Yazidi community in Iraq and Syria two decades later.
It was during this period, as the West was looking for new ways to defineits enemies in the post-Soviet era, that the idea of genocide as a unique evil began to be corrupted.
Samantha Power’s 2003 book “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” helped position her for a meteoric rise to power in Washington. In that book, all perpetrators of genocide are Asians, Arabs, Slavs, or Africans. No Western power is deemed guilty of anything worse than well-intentioned misjudgment. Guatemala, long a Cold War partner of the United States, is the only country in which a former head of state has been found guilty of genocide by a court in his own country, but the word “Guatemala” does not appear in this book’s index. Nor does the word “Kenya,” even though a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Britain’s torture and murder campaign in Kenya during the 1950s, “Imperial Reckoning,” concluded that Britain was guilty of genocide there.
The idea of inventing a new word to describe extermination campaigns might have made sense when the Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin came up with “genocide” in the 1940s. In 1948 the United Nations, voting in the shadow of the Holocaust — one of the few indisputable genocides — made it an international crime. The UN definition as laid out in the Genocide Convention, however, is breathtakingly broad. By its standard, causing “mental harm” to members of an ethnic group can constitute genocide. Most lay people would reject that definition in favor of a far narrower one, like that in the Oxford dictionary: Genocide is “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”
Even that definition, though, raises perplexing questions. What is the difference between “deliberate killing” and any other kind? How many victims does it take to make up “a large number”? If murder is used as a tactic to scare a minority group out of one region, but not with the aim of destroying the entire ethnicity, is that genocide? Which impartial authority decides whether one outrage amounts to genocide while another does not? Should only those who wielded knives and guns and bombs be punished, or should guilt rise through chains of command to taint world leaders?
“Genocide” is too loose a concept to have value in international law. In daily discourse it is just as meaningless. Many terms in our political lexicon have been thrown around so often and so loosely that they have lost all meaning. Among them are “terrorist,” “freedom fighter,” “fascist,” “Nazi,” “human rights,” and “rules-based order.” Add the word “genocide” to that list. When you hear it from a political leader, prepare yourself for pious hypocrisy.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
