Genocide

My first blog post... and most recent salvo in my attempt to explain why I am not happy with "genocide" as defined by "Genocide" (Gov 1235).

- Ideas are materially embodied. Ideas in the mind also "exist" in the brain, even if outside observers cannot directly perceive them. Further, certain material conditions (genetic or environmental) contribute causally to the formation of certain ideas.

- Certain ideological approaches further reify these material ideas by assigning them permanence; in particular, by labeling a group of persons as irredeemably holding a certain idea. These designations can be considered more damning--that is, the bearer can be considered more essentially evil--than can membership in a biological group. If genocide differs from the Inquisition (and is worse than the Inquisition) because biological membership was considered harder to evade than religious belief, violence based on the type of ideological differentiation I am discussing resembles genocide more than it does the Inquisition.

- In particular, a fundamental assumption of the "war on terrorism" is the existence of the "terrorist" individual. Who are the terrorists against whom war has been declared? The prototypical terrorist in the popular imagination is the (nine-eleven) suicide bomber. The war on suicide bombers cannot be pursued retroactively, but being a terrorist is punishable by death. Those associated with the terrorist ideology are therefore to be considered terrorists for the purposes of the war; and this is not an ideology which one can renounce to avoid death.

- The war on terror thereby attempts to annihilate a large group of people, "terrorists," essentially sharing a uniquely and unabsolvably terroristic form of evil. The only way to eliminate the bad action, terrorism, is to eliminate the bad people, terrorists. How is this not genocide? The argument that this type of violence does not make a sufficient appeal to the biology of the victim misses the point, since it is applied with a framework as inflexible and methodologically questionable.

- If the term "genocide" must exclude this particular type of ideological violence, it ought to be replaced with new concepts which group types of violence based on broader goals. To say that genocide out to remain distinct (and thus in practice distinct as a matter of academic and legal concern) is to exhibit serious bias in favor of societies who practice large-scale violence using justifications other than one highly contingent biologistic grouping based on a particular concept of "race."