Gaza. I agree it is a massacre and should stop immediately.

[Scootaloo]

32. As I've explained, I've been a critic of using "genocide" as well

But I've come to a point where I really see no better word. when we look at Palestine, we see a system designed to erode and demolish an entire class of people - Maybe not specifically to render them extinct to the last individual, but certainly to render the concept of "Palestine" extinct, to demolish the people's identity, to throw them from their land, to render their experiences inadmissible to the rest of humanity, to reduce them to a crawling, bleeding nothing. To leave them as a broken husk, brushed from the pages of history.

English doesn't have a word for this that isn't "genocide." We have the similar "ethnocide" and "democide" but both are really just subcategories or extensions of "genocide." Your suggestion of "massacre" fits the killing, sure... this killing, and the last killing, and the killing before that, and the killing before that... How many "massacres" have to stack up before it becomes something else? And what of the rest of it all?

I've come to the understanding that the word itself is apt, but that peoples' expectations of it are skewed. Like if it's not twelve million people and they're not dying under the swastika, it "doesn't count." I gave a few examples of other genocides to you - Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, the Kurds, that the world just sat back and watched, with wags like yourself clucking their tongues at people for using "the G-Word."

It doesn't help that most admitted genocides have been swift affairs - the holocaust took four years, Cambodia took four years, Namibia three, Al-Anfal two, and Rwanda just a month. But then we have the purge of Native Americans, a process of five hundred years - that is still ongoing in parts of central and South America. Siberians have taken a long time as well, at three hundred years. Australians, a hundred and fifty or so. I would say the Jewish diaspora in Europe, prior to the Holocaust, was no less a genocide, with Jews forced more or less underground and incognito, only to be driven and killed in violent paroxysms against them - the Roma as well, though with a somewhat shorter history in Europe.

A genocide does not require swift extermination of every individual, Bonobo. It can be a grinding campaign of attrition, where the "losers" aren't purged, but everything about them is - an example being the Ainu of Japan, or the "boarding schools" that Native Americans and Australians were subjected to, intended to destroy everything that made them part of their people. A genocide is the eradication of the people, not just the individuals, but also what defines them as that people.

I'm pretty sure you can grasp that notion, that of a people transcending just the individuals that make up the group, yes?