Preserving the Term “Genocide”

Some words should rarely be used and instead be saved for only the most extreme circumstances. If overused, such words will lose their power. And if that happens, we are left in the dangerous situation of not having the vocabulary to deal with a crisis.
 
One such word is “genocide”.

My concern is that we are currently overusing the term. It seems that almost every travesty, atrocity, injustice, or death now qualifies as genocide. Whether it is domestic events such as a person being shot by police or someone suffering from an unjust law, or international conflicts where there are civilian casualties and dislocations, the claim is the same: it is genocide! 
 
I understand the impulse to call something genocide – for how can one not be distressed and outraged at suffering and injustice? 
 
I also understand the political rationale for calling something genocide – it can provide moral clarity to rally support and end (and perhaps revenge) the suffering.
 
Yet I think we need to be very careful about how often we use the term genocide.
 
The word “genocide” was invented in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin to describe the Turkish handling of Armenians and the Nazi treatment of the Jews. The term is based on the Greek genos (people or nation) and Latin suffix –cide (murder).[1] The United Nations adopted the term on 9 December 1948 in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, often referred to as the Genocide Convention. The Convention defines genocide as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”[2] It is more than deaths because of war, or localized pogroms; rather, it is a systematic and concerted attempt to wipe out a people. The term has its detractors, and is contested, but at its core is the recognition that genocide seeks to eliminate a particular people, and for that reason the word serves an important purpose.
 
Since that time there have been many events where the use of the term made sense; such as horrors in China, Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, and elsewhere.[3] Those experiences clearly indicate that there is a need for the term genocide in order to identify activities of an extraordinary scale and ferocity. Stated simply, there are people in the world with such wicked intensions as to annihilate an entire people, and fortunately we have a word to identify such actions. But the reality is (at least in a formal and legal sense) there are atrocities, casualties, injustices, and dislocations that are appalling but do not fit the UN criteria of genocide.
 
I recognize that there are complex legal issues surrounding formal recognition of alleged genocide.
 
I recognize that there are domestic and international politics behind identifying what is and what is not genocide.
 
I recognize that there is much to be gained by activists, victims, and governments labelling something genocide. 
 
I recognize that the very nature of genocide makes it hard to know what exactly occurred (after all, most or all victims are dead and thus cannot be witnesses).
 
I also recognize that it seems insensitive to debate the usage of a term when so many people suffer.
 
That said, I take the reality of genocide so seriously that I want to keep a word in reserve for labelling it when it occurs. 
 
Right now the term still seems to evoke a sense outrage - and that is good. However, I fear that if we keep using it the way we do, the term will have run its course and we will be left without a word that evokes outrage. And then what will we do when abominations happen? What word will be left to prick our consciences and stir us to action? It will be a very sad and dangerous state of affairs when we get to the point when people just shrug their shoulders or change the channel when yet another person shouts “genocide!”


[1] Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton University Press, 2003), 8.

[2] UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf

[3] For depressing reading, see Samuel Totten and Willian S. Parsons, eds., Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts(Routledge, 1997); Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (The New Press, 2012). The Wikipedia list also makes for grim reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides