Careless Killings, Careless Language

There seems to be a pall of confusion settling over the nature of Genocide, an often rather perverse muddle. 

This is what it looked like in early 80s Guatemala. Some regions saw sharp population declines of over 15%, the majority of the deaths occurring in very specific, geographically constrained, ethno-cultural communities. 

This was almost entirely deliberate state action targeting civilian populations, not collateral damage from careless conflict between armed groups. Mass executions, mass graves. Infants burned, bayoneted etc. Orders from above, not rogue units, or random callousness. 

Now Gaza. Up until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 the territory was occupied by Egypt, not Israel. Their defeat led to a bit of an exodus, such that the population declined by around 1% per year up to 1970. EVERY year since, including 2005 when all the Jews left, and this past twelve months which has seen heavy casualties to both militants and civilians, the population has expanded overall, by around 2% in fact October 2023 to October 2024. 

Thus, however you feel about this war and about the way it is being conducted, no genocide has occurred and no genocide is in the process of occurring. 

Mis-use of this term not only does a significant disservice to the people of Gaza (by shrouding their plight in the idioms of partisan propaganda) it does an even greater disservice to the populations that have experienced verifiable genocide in the past — such as the Ixil Maya, who fought long and hard for formal legal recognition of the crime committed against them — and one specific population who suffered the worst genocide in human history, whose global numbers have yet to fully recover from it over eighty years later. 

When that disservice is done deliberately, especially when the intent is shrouded by the semiology of political or religious righteousness, something truly repugnant is occurring.

Orwell’s concern was for the use of euphemisms — imprecision where precision would have been more lucid. But here we have the contemporary alternative: bogus precision, to the point of inversion. The relationship between fact and linguistic camouflage remains broadly the same.