Zelenskyy’s Right — This Is a Genocide. And the World Must Act. Why Genocide Probably Isn’t What You Think It Is, And Why It Matters

Zelenskyy’s Right — This Is a Genocide. And the World Must Act.

Why Genocide Probably Isn’t What You Think It Is, And Why It Matters

Image Credit: Maxim Zmeyev

It was the Volodomyr Zelensky who said it first. Genocide. And now America’s and Canada’s Presidents have said it, too. Other Western leaders? So far, they’re about as reluctant to say this word as my wife is to try my cooking. I don’t blame her — but them?

Who’s right? Is what Russia’s doing in — to — Ukraine genocide?

Genocide. Think of the word for a second. Most of us use it casually, but, sadly, reflecting the rather pathetic state of the modern world, we have no idea what it means. Ask the average young person who Tati is, and they’ll lecture you for three hours about what you don’t know about how awesome and necessary and great influencers are, mom, dad, how else would we buy makeup? God!!! Ask the average broski about anything, literally anything, from inflation to Bitcoin — and prepare to call Switzerland, because in about two hours, you’re about to be begging for euthanasia.

But ask them about genocide…and their faces will go blank. It’s not their fault — the modern world is designed to make idiots of us. Nobody actually teaches us what genocide really is. Most of us imagine it’s something like “wiping out an entire group or kind of people,” and since that almost never happens, we go on happily living in a make-believe world where genocide is science fiction. “Hey — the Holocaust never happened!” This, friends, is how you get there.

It’s crucially important for each and every one of us to understand what genocide really is. Not just because of what’s happening in Ukraine — but because if we want to be responsible, thoughtful adults in this world, then we need to really grapple with the famous lines: “never again.” And we can’t do that until we know what it really refers to.

Let’s begin with some myths about genocide, and then I’m going to give you the formal definition that every single person should learn about in grade school, memorize, and get a big fat F if they can’t recite it, instead of being able to tell me and everyone else over the age of 35 everything you could possibly never want to know about the Kardashians and their boyfriends slash gigolos du jour. It’s time for Grandpa Umair to sit you on his knee and guess what, it’s not Christmas.

Myth one. Genocide is “wiping out an entire population, down to the last person.” Myth two, based on myth one, “if any person survives who’s part of a group, then it’s not genocide.” This is, like I said, where Holocaust denial comes from, that grotesque form of anti-Semitism. Myth three: “genocide is trying to eliminate a gene pool — you know, gene, it’s about biology, and so it can’t be genocide against people who don’t really share one.” This, by the way, is where the myth of “white genocide” comes from — the imagined fiction of a “white” gene pool. I hate to tell you this, but all of us have more genes in common with baboons, slugs, or even bats, than we do different from each other….but guess what, that doesn’t make us vampires. Only I get to be one, because yes, the sunlight can actually kill me. Myth five: “genocide is about killing people.” Actually, as we’re about to explore, you don’t even have to outright kill people to be guilty of genocide.

If you’re confused, don’t be. Genocide — the idea of it — is one of humanity’s highest accomplishments, unlike my cooking, which can also cause it. It’s a sophisticated and nuanced idea, because the whole point is to do the highest kind of justice there is, for the gravest crime we know of.

Now let’s talk about what genocide actually is. Here’s the formal definition — as established by the Rome Statute, the treaty which instituted the International Criminal Court, which tries it. Don’t worry — it’s so simple that even a child can understand it — and yet it makes everyone who reads it think. Really think, deep and hard and long. Reflect. On the nature of life, truth, goodness, human suffering, and evil. That is what truly historic ideas do. In this case, just a few simple sentences.

“For the purpose of this Statute, “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

That’s it. That’s what genocide is.

Now let’s talk about what makes that definition — the formal, legal — so challenging, interesting, thought provoking.

You don’t have to kill a group to be guilty of genocide. The definition is subtler than that. It’s about “the intent to destroy” a group — and its framers were wise enough to understand that you can accomplish that horrific goal in ways that aren’t just outright murder — but still monstrously destructive. Like what?

Like taking people’s kids. Like mass deportations of a group, away from their homeland. Or like “inflicting conditions calculated to bring about its destruction.” Genocide is about all these things. It’s not just about going out and incinerating people the way the Nazis did — and the reason is to prevent the spiral that led the Nazis there.

You can be guilty of genocide long before you’ve gotten to the point of forcing millions of desperate people into ovens where you poison them with gas. That’s way, way past the point of actual genocide.

Let’s break down this idea of genocide the way a philosophy teacher might, into necessary and sufficient conditions, and into ends and means, to really understand it. Genocide is about an end: the destruction of a group, “in whole or in part” — whether it’s ethnic, national, religious, or racial. In whole or in part. It doesn’t take the destruction of a group down to the last member to make something a genocide. The destruction of a group in part is a sufficient condition for this terrible crime.

So what makes it different from murder, or even terrorism?

What’s necessary for genocide is intent. That’s why genocide is so hard to prove, and cases of it are relatively rare. There has to be a mens rea established — which in legal terms just means a mindset, a motive, a will. That will has to intend to destroy a group. That’s the high crime. Then there have to be the everyday crimes — murder, rape, torture — which cause that destruction in whole or in part.

Does all that make sense?

Now. What’s hard about genocide is proving intent. And that’s because when this horror arises, usually, it’s kept hidden. Nobody goes out there and really says much: “Hey, we want to annihilate you guys as a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, a race, a culture.” Not anymore. They used to. A lot. The world was full of genocidal statements once upon a time — from the Nazis against the Jews to Asia’s internecine conflicts to what settlers did to indigenous peoples, too, even if that makes you uncomfortable (sorry). The reason that nobody says it much anymore — openly declares they want to exterminate another group — is that we have laws against genocide.

Hey, can I interest you in being tried at the Hague? No? Ah, what a shame! It’s the deal of a lifetime! You see my point maybe. Nobody wants to end up on trial for genocide.

What’s remarkable — head-spinning, even — about Ukraine’s situation is that it’s not hard to establish intent. Nobody’s going about it secretively, at least in the Kremlin. They seem to just be out there openly shouting from the rooftops that their intent is…genocidal. Putin does not appear to think that Ukraine has a legitimate right to exist as a country, because it’s people do not to him have a legitimate claim to their own ethnicity and religion and nationhood.

I mean, even Hitler was more subtle about it. I’m not kidding, though even my Jewish friend Rob would find that one funny, because. The Nazis spent much of the early 1930s proclaiming to nations like America that, hey, no, we’re good dudes, guys, we like beer and guns, but we don’t want to exterminate the Jews! Who would even do that? What are we, Nazis? And America was painfully, hilariously gullible enough to believe them — there’s a now famous series of New York Times articles from those days defending the Nazis.

Here’s where we are in history, guys. Irony is dead and hyperbole roasted itself on a barbecue. Even the Nazis weren’t this open about their genocidal intent. They took pains — serious pains — to hide their slaughter of the Jews, because they knew that the world would be sickened and turn against them even harder. So they did everything they could to hide the Final Solution, to pretend it was just rhetoric.

Meanwhile, here we have Putin and his Kremlin openly saying what they want for Ukraine, and it easily meets the definition of genocide. Let’s go back to the definition, in case it’s not clear why. The intent to destroy, in whole or in part. Intent, remember? That’s the hard thing to prove in genocide trials. Here, it couldn’t be clearer that Putin thinks Ukraine does not have a right to exist, as a nation, as a people, as an ethnicity.

That’s all the intent you really need to meet the formal definition of genocide. That’s all. At that point, it’s not proven — that’s what a conviction for genocide is — but it at least rises to the bar of, “yeah, we should prosecute this case, because it looks a whole lot like genocide.”

The case for the prosecution is so open and shut it’s ridiculous, to be frank, which is why, no Joe Biden’s not going out on some kind of shaky spring limb by saying the word.

Imagine, I don’t know, that there’s a bunch of dudes wearing all black who park a van in front of your house, get out, and proceed to squint at your windows. Hey, uh…guys? Are you…like…are you burglars? Casing my house? You’d be wise to ask. What? Us? No! Bro! No, man — we’re just….we’re just Jehovah’s Witnesses! Here — pamphlet?

You see my point a little bit. Criminals usually try to hide it. The graver the crime the more serious it is, the more efforts and pains they take to hide it. But not Putin and his Kremlin. This is like if Bernie Madoff turned into King Kong, climbed the Empire State Building, beat his chest, and bellowed, “New York City! Florida! I am running the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme! On you!”

It’s like if the guys from Theranos private-jetted into TED — you know, the conference — walked up on the stage, to cheers, high-fived each other, and then turned to the audience, the cameras, and said, “Guys, we have some great news! We’ve taken a few billion dollars in investment — and our products never worked! They were never going to! We don’t need a drop of your blood! We need all of it! We’re going to drink it at dinner tonight!! Salud!!”

Criminals usually try to…hide it. So this level of completely absurd is so ridiculous that it’s hard for me to even do justice to it. I’m left kind of speechless by a head of state who announces his genocidal intent so loudly that even the Nazis would be like, dude. Dude. Chill out! Calm down. Relax, there, Cujo. One step a time, Jesus.

OK, fun time’s over. Let’s go back to the definition, because now we’ve established intent, and it was about as hard as establishing a smart two year old’s gleeful intent to pee all over Donald Tr — never mind.

What about the lower-level crimes? Well, Putin’s regime has already done those, too. Causing serious bodily or mental harm? There’s plenty of evidence that Russia’s military has targeted civilians — hospitals, schools, apartment buidings, even shelters — as doctrine. Forcible deportation? There are reports already of people — huge numbers of them — being sent to camps in Siberia, thousands of miles away. How about “inflicting conditions calculated to bring about destruction”? There’s plenty of evidence of withholding food, water, medicine, power, in besieged cities like Mariupol, where tens of thousands appear to have died as a result.

That appears to look a whole, whole lot like genocide. If all that’s not genocide, then it raises the question, what is? Here we have what seems to be an open-and-shut case of genocide. A dictator and his regime who’ve openly announced that the war they’re waging is because they think a neighbouring country has no right to exist, as a nation and ethnicity. Intent. That war is made of numerous crimes against humanity, from extermination — that’s the legal term for withholding emergency aid like food and water — to forcible mass deportation to the deliberate targeting of civilians as military doctrine. Action.

This — to me — looks like the clearest case of genocide there has been in decades. Putin’s intent is flamboyant. He is to genocide what Elton John used to be to sunglasses and sparkly capes, what Joe the Tiger King was to mullets, or what Liberace used to be to interior design — it’s so loud and in your face you can hardly miss it.

And the actions match up, too. Eerily so. See how the action of the Russian Army are almost predicted by the definition of genocide in the Rome Statute? That’s how wise the framers were. Their whole goal was to recognise it before it spiralled into a Nazi-level annihilation of millions, the attempt to fully destroy a race or ethnicity down to its last member. That’s what genocide can be, yes. But genocide is not just that — it is something much, much smaller than that, precisely because the point of defining it as a crime is to prevent the vicious spiral into Final Solution level annihilation.

So. Is what’s happening in Ukraine genocide? The horror of it, does it reach that scale, cross the line into the gravest crime that we, as humanity, can charge anyone with? Now you know what genocide really is. You tell me.

Umair Haque

April 14,  2022