I suspect you'll find relatively few people who will use "genocide" to refer to the eradication of a culture without concurrent mass killing of the members of that culture.

I think the most notable genocides have involved murder, but that doesn't mean they all have. Look at what is happening to the Uyghur people in China; it appears to be more of an operation to destroy their culture and identity than to slaughter the people, at least at the moment.

> I think the most notable genocides have involved murder,

They usually do, but sometimes the overt murder stops while the genocide continues. If, and this is debatable, an endpoint could be drawn for the Native Ameeican Genocide in the US, its definitely long after outright killing based on being a Native not assimilated into the White society stopped being an organized practice.

I totally agree.

This is also why the current definition by some western governments/parliaments of what's happening there as "genocide" has credibility issues in some eyes. If everybody suddenly agreed that "genocide" means "systematic attempt at cultural assimilation" then fine (would also mean that such "genocides" have been taking place all the time, since group identities disappear and reappear in an endless ebb and flow, maybe not so much in the modern world with all these nation borders, but much more commonly throughout the history), but just as this chain of comment reveals, 1. a more universally accepted term (also in e.g. the Canadian government's own report) would be "cultural genocide" and seldom would people use "genocide" to mean something without actual mass murdering 2. even the idea of "cultural genocide" is to some extent subject to debate.

If you investigate you will find that the CURRENT Canadian Government released a report saying the CURRENT treatment of indigenous in Canada is an ongoing genocide. Specifically for the eradication of culture you mentioned.

Matters very little what people like yourself who are far away from any impacts want to call it, it's still happening.

The term they use, which should also resolve this absurd definitional argument completely, is "cultural genocide".

Yes good point.

I don't think it's irrelevant. If the current population is on board with adopting a more equitable relationship with the other cultures bthat were here first, then that stands a better chance at succeeding.

Well just so you know the past populations were not necessarily more in love with the treatment of indigenous.

Here is an editorial from 1888 about the first Prime Minister of Canada and his starvation of indigenous, doesn't necessarily seem to me that everyone was on board with the treatment back in 1888.[1]

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1888_Editorial_carto...

Also a better chance of what succeeding? Do you know the history of Canada? The displacement of indigenous was the point of the policies.

> “Killing a people” is genocide.

But people do change their identities all the time. And sometimes the destruction of one identity leads to the creation of a new one. This has been a key part of all nation-building exercises. It is a purpose of education and mass-media.

Is the unification of tribes, the destruction of difference, necessarily "genocide"?

Also, if you can speak of the "death of a people", surely you can also speak of a "birth"? What is the source material of the new group?

A grouping is an abstract concept. Individual people have a right to exist, but do abstract groups, just because we anthropomorphize them? Any adjective is an abstract grouping of all nouns to which it'd apply.

> But people do change their identities all the time.

People die all the time, and its not murder. A deliberate campaign to kill a people is genocide. A people dieing by processes that don’t involve a deliberate campaign is not genocide.

The attempted unification of tribes by removing their identity is different than unification. Unification is only so if whatever happens is a joint proposal of some sort

This distinction sounds quite contrived to me. Surely you could see that, in most cases throughout the history, when a united identity emerges out of several different tribes/groups whatsoever, there would be a leading group that exerted greater influence either by force or by (economic etc.) strength. Seldom is the case that all tribes decided that they were absolutely equal and would form a joint entity with the same amount of voluntariness from each side.

I don't think you'd need absolute equality, influence, or perfect agreement, you'd just need it to facilitate somewhat voluntary cultural diffusion to decrease the level of conflict. In the context of the thread, it's historically accurate that this was already present in some ways during the centuries preceding Canada and the US' founding, but fell apart quite dramatically.

So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide? But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state? (Interestingly, little would be so likely to cause such a shared identity to come into existence, as exactly this kind of shared threat.)

> So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide?

Yes.

> But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state?

No, acts directed at the extermination of a people, not that incidentally cause it, are genocide. You’d still be committing mass-murder-but-not-genocide, not that the distinction is likely to be more than technically significant, unless you are a acting in a context so as to not render mass murder an international crime but only one subject to local jurisdiction. (Genocide is universally subject to universal jurisdiction, while mass murder requires special additional circumstances to rise to an international crime — either a war crime or crime against humanity.)

And when mass killing does rise to genocide, its not “instead of” being mass murder, but “in addition to”. Same with deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, enslavement and other “act based” crimes against humanity when done as part of a mechanism aimed at destroying a people. The offenses are cumulative, not alternative.

So then the act rises to this special tier because of the belief, in the mind of the actor, that the victims believe themselves to belong to a common group.

And the goal, to the actor, is not so much killing, as it is the destruction of the belief in each victim's mind, that they belong to the group. The destruction of the body and mind holding the belief is just a means to this end.

This is all very strange.

You have a very good point. Seems to me happened is that the definition of "genocide" connected to a specific "people" has its roots in the definition of other war crimes. The concept became especially prominent after WWII. Before that I don't think such a distinction was so firmly rooted in people's minds. Sure, it's a way to enshrine the historical importance of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and it might have served as a way to more easily justify the UN/"peacekeeping" troops inserting themselves in the middle of certain conflicts such as the ones in Yugoslavia or in Rwanda.

It supposedly protects distinct cultural groups from being destroyed which is the right thing to do in today's definition. However, as Sapiens put forward, empires throughout the history have assimilated all sorts of people, and objectively speaking, they didn't necessarily made the lives of those people worse, and in many cases voluntary bi-directional cultural influence took place, until one is barely distinguishable from another. Therefore, I agree to some extent that it seems weird to elevate this definition of "genocide", even sometimes cultural, as something graver than the act of actual mass murder. Sometimes they do happen together, to some extent even in this example, where the children died en masse. But in many occasions throughout the history, the gradual disappearance of a cultural identity is a very distinct thing than people actually dying or having their living conditions worsening. As you said, group identities disappear and reappear in an endless ebb and flow, maybe not so much in the modern world with all these nation borders, but much more commonly throughout the history.

Moreover, a deliberate campaign to eradicate another group's identity, is now something that can be carried out by PR professionals. It puts into perspective that the most powerful companies in the world are in the business of advertising. Or, to use provocative language that is literally true: mind control.

No, because it depends on the executioner's intention.