Thursday Essay: Hey, Kids — Let's Talk About Genocide!

Sebastian Scheiner

We need to have a grown-up talk about real genocide while the overgrown children are busy shouting in the streets about a fake one.

My apologies for the glib headline on such a serious topic. But I decided early on, if only for one moment, that I'd treat the most deadly serious topic in history with as much seriousness as those currently throwing around the word "genocide" like confetti at a parade. I promise you the headline is as glib as I'll get today. Mostly. 

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In my long-running, wide-ranging, and almost completely haphazard study of history, I've come across just three kinds of genocide: neglect, old-school, and industrial.

There's also a fourth kind: totally made up. But put that thought on hold for a short while because it's my big finish.

And Another Thing: There will be plenty of "And Another Thing" sidebars in this week's essay, mostly to provide much-needed breaks from this week's terrible topic. You're welcome.

The Nazi Holocaust against the Jews remains — and hopefully will forever remain — history's most shocking attempt to wipe out an entire people. 

Before the Holocaust, trains were how we moved goods and people around, from ugly coal trains to the storied luxuries of the Orient Express. Factories churned out the products we loved to buy, generating an unprecedented increase in human productivity and prosperity.

The Nazis turned all that upside down. 

"Never before in history had people been killed on an assembly-line basis," historian Raul Hilberg noted about "the grotesque efficiency" of the Holocaust. Hilberg researched Operation Reinhard, "when the Nazis efficiently shuttled about 1.7 million victims" to various death camps in just 100 days. "Almost all of those who arrived at these death camps were murdered, usually within hours in the gas chambers."

The industrial-scale murder petered out after three months because "there were hardly any Jews remaining in the area to kill."

And Another Thing: As I've written here several times before — as an observation, not an endorsement — while ethnic cleansing is just about the worst thing one people can do to another short of genocide, it can work. Stalin cleared Poland and Czechoslovakia of Germans (and the Soviet Union of Poles), and those nations have since been free of the ethnic strife that Hitler exploited. Again, this is vehemently not an endorsement. I'm from the Rodney King school of race relations and want us all to just get along.

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Nearly a third of the Holocaust's estimated six million Jewish victims perished in just three months.

Those numbers still boggle the mind. Yet the Nazis managed to exterminate another six million people — mostly Romani, Poles, Soviet POWs, gays, the disabled, and other so-called Untermenschen with the same shocking and murderous efficiency. The tools of progress — railroads, factories, bureaucracy — turned into instruments of death.

What Stalin did to the Ukrainians — more on that in a moment — Genghis Khan or Mehmed II would easily recognize from hundreds of years in the past. Hitler systematized and industrialized mass murder, using the civilized tools of modernity in pursuit of primeval madness.

But enough of that. Let's move on to some old-school genocide.

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" — Adolf Hitler, in a speech from 1939, referencing that genocide as a blueprint for impunity in his own genocidal plans.

History didn't work out that way for Hitler or the Turks.

And Another Thing: Terrible as war is, nothing short of total victory can bring justice to mass murderers. Surviving Nazis stood trial at Nuremberg, and many of them were found guilty and hanged. Nothing of the sort happened to the Turkish perpetrators of the Armenian genocide because Turkey's loss in that war fell far short of total. Similarly, I don't get worked up about Russia's (admittedly much lesser) war crimes in Ukraine for the same reason — nobody is marching on Moscow to arrest Putin or his coterie. C'est la guerre.

I suspect Turkey's Armenian genocide gets so much attention for two reasons. One, of course, was the scale of the damned thing. Historians estimate that between 800,000 and 1.5 million Armenians perished, with the high side being the generally accepted figure.

The other reason is that it occurred in broad daylight, under two different governments, and at a time when nascent global communications made it impossible to hide atrocities of that scope.

Even so, the Turks used purely old-school methods, including forced movement of civilians through rough terrain, denial of food and medicine, plus the occasional slaughter — mass shootings, drownings in rivers, live burnings, and stabbings — to keep people moving. 

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Other tools included the widespread rape and abduction of Armenian women and girls, plus sexual slavery and forced conversion to Islam.

None of these methods was new or particularly clever.

"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race," U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, reported. "They understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact."

And Another Thing: Morgenthau would later author the Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany — never seriously entertained by FDR — to de-industrialize Germany and thereby reduce the population by more than half to just 20 or 30 million people. Would the Morgenthau Plan have been genocide? Rough justice? Something else? Discuss.

So we’ve covered industrial and old-school. That brings us to the murkier business of genocide-by-neglect — and, eventually, to the kind of genocide some people just make up.

Genocide-by-neglect lives in the gray areas — from wartime necessities to communist monstrosities like the Holodomor.

The Holodomor was the forced starvation of somewhere between 3.5 and five million Ukrainians during 1932-33. Fully establishing totalitarian control over Ukraine required collectivizing the small farms that dominated the landscape, and eliminating the kulaks — comparatively wealthy peasants — who were hardly thrilled by having their lands seized. 

NKVD troops (precursor to the KGB) sealed Ukraine's border with the rest of the Soviet Union, confiscated grain and food, and (mostly) let nature take its cruel course. Resistance was met with torture, public hangings, shootings — the full smorgasbord of Soviet joy.

Stalin's aim wasn't to wipe out the Ukrainian people — although he certainly wanted to eliminate Ukrainian nationalism as a potential rival to the Communist Party. In his own words, Stalin wanted to turn "Ukraine in the shortest possible time into a fortress of the USSR, into the most inalienable republic." If a few million eggs needed breaking to make that particular omelet, so be it.

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But was it genocide? If a Ukrainian called it that, it might be unwise to argue. 

And Another Thing: Judging by everything we've seen since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago, Stalin utterly failed to crush Ukraine's national identity. Don't you just love it when commies fail?

The Bengal Famine of 1943... now there's a gray area.

While an estimated two or three million Bengalis perished, there was no murderous design. A major cyclone in October 1942 disrupted local food production while Allied and Japanese forces fought a protracted series of battles for control of neighboring Burma. The crop failure, compounded by local inflation and Britain's warfighting needs, meant locals were either unable to afford or find enough food.

Early cries for help went apparently unheeded, but things began to improve late in 1943, when Winston Churchill replaced Viceroy Lord Linlithgow (criticized for downplaying the crisis) with Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, who mobilized the British Indian Army for food distribution, along with increased grain imports and necessary rationing.

Still, it wasn't enough. Official neglect during the famine's early stages — perhaps a side effect of old-school British disdain for "wogs" — probably sealed the sad fate of two or three million Bengalis.

Was that genocide? I'd argue that it wasn't, but perhaps only because of Britain's belated effort to remedy the terrible situation. 

And Another Thing: Winston Churchill is supposed to have said about the Bengal Famine, "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." The first two lines — harsh and real — came from a year before the famine, and appear to have been Churchill’s way of provoking UK Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery in a moment of gallows humor. But the "breeding like rabbits" quote? Total invention. Don’t hang a genocide charge on a fabricated line.

Now let's take a breather and discuss what genocide isn't.

Our Western Civilization-hating friends on the Left like to say that European colonizer-settlers — the absolute worst people in the world — committed genocide against the peace-loving indigenous people of the New World.

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Well, no.

Is it fair that gun-toting Europeans unwittingly brought smallpox with them to the New World, and that it turned out to be deadly to the indigenous populations — and returned to Europe with nothing worse than an embarrassing new venereal disease?

Nope, there’s no justice in one side showing up with guns and deadly infectious diseases. But calling the unintended fallout of humanity’s basic urge to explore — setting aside the conquering, for now — a genocide pushes the word past recognition.

Or as Jeanie from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" might say, "I've got a gun and a scorching case of syphilis!"

And Another Thing: To those who say the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, etc., should have just stayed home where they belonged, I have just one question: Where did the indigenous peoples of the New World come from? Oh, right — they came from the Old World, too. They were just lucky enough to get here first, and unlucky enough to have little better than Stone Age weapons when Cortez and his buddies showed up. But picking up your things and getting moving just to see what's over that next hill, down that river, or across that ocean is fundamental to human nature.

Speaking of stretching the meaning of genocide beyond meaning, let's take a tough but fair look at the Gaza Strip.

For that, let's go to John Spencer, infantry combat veteran, military author, and Urban Warfare Studies chair at West Point's Modern War Institute. 

"Genocide is not defined by a few comments taken out of context, by estimates of casualties or destruction, or by how war looks in headlines or on social media," Spencer posted on X in response to a New York Times op-ed by Omer Bartov, decrying an Israeli genocide in Gaza. "It is defined by specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part."

Since the start of the Oct 7. War, Spencer has been to Gaza four times as an embed with the Israeli army. Here's what he saw — and forgive the lengthy excerpt, but every word is necessary:

Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.

Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime. More than 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid have entered the territory. Israel has supported hospitals, repaired water pipelines, increased access to clean water, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad.

The IDF has coordinated millions of vaccine doses, supplied fuel for hospitals and infrastructure, and facilitated the flow of food and medicine through the UN, aid groups, and private partners. The U.S.–Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation alone has delivered more than 82 million meals—one to two million a day—while weakening Hamas’s control over aid. This is not genocide. It is responsible and historic mid-war humanitarian policy.

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"What is happening in Gaza is tragic. But it is not genocide. And it is not illegal," Spencer concluded.

TL;DR: War sucks, but Israel does everything humanly possible to make it suck less for the Gaza Arabs. 

The only people taking "GAZA GENOCIDE!" claims seriously are the same people making the ridiculous claim: anti-Western Leftists and Islamists bent on clearing out the Jews "From the River to the Sea" by any available means.

Let's call today’s unholy alliance of hard-Left activists and Islamists the "Left-Islamic Axis" — and file that title away for a future Thursday Essay. 

One last thought.

A genocide like the Holocaust requires laying cultural-political groundwork, beginning with establishing a police state ruthless enough to do it, and demonizing the victim population so thoroughly that the public is willing to help commit mass murder, or at least turn a blind eye to it.

Ironic, isn't it, when the Left-Islamic Axis uses the word "genocide" to demonize Israeli Jews — at least among themselves — almost as thoroughly as Hitler and the Nazis ever did to European Jewry? Then remember that neither Islam nor Leftism recognizes many — if any — hard limits on the use and abuse of power, and the historical ironies congeal thicker than all the blood spilled in the name of Nazism, Communism, or jihad.

Because genocide is real, terrible, and — one hopes — ready for the ash heap of history. It isn't a punchline, a protest chant, or an accusation to toss around like blood-soaked confetti.

Last Thursday: Migration Doomed the European Project

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