What’s Wrong With Genocide

Apart from the mass murder, that is. Or, to put it another way, if a government slaughters millions of its own citizens, does it really matter why they do so? The question is occasioned by a recent Jonah Goldberg column on the controversy over whether the Ukrainian famines of the 1930s (engineered by Stalin) ought to be considered genocide:

Last week, Russia’s lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalin’s man-made 1932-33 famine — called the Holodomor in Ukrainian — wasn’t genocide.

Not even the Russians dispute that the Soviet government deliberately starved millions. But the Russian resolution indignantly states: “There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines.” It notes that victims included “different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country.”

Translation: We didn’t kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers.

And that’s all it takes to be acquitted of genocide.

The United Nations defines genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Left out of this definition are “modern” political labels for people: the poor, religious people, the middle class, etc.