Slobodan Milosevic Has Died In Prison, page 2

Originally posted by Lanton

We're not talking about a single murder or rape here; we're talking about genocide.

"Genocide" is a strong word. I don´t say there is no such thing as genocide, but be careful not to misuse of the word "genocide" too much. It´s easy to get carried away and become a tool of the propaganda machine...

Srebrenica: Reposted (FTS) (by Soj)

Imagine this for a moment, ok? Just imagine... imagine that the people killed from Srebrenica didn't die in a "genocide" but in a series of massacres. Would that make them any less dead? Would it change how they died, or who killed them? No of course not. The only difference is the label, and it's quite a powerful one.

A massacre is a tragedy. A massacre is an outrage. A massacre is a terrible event. A massacre is one of the horrors of war, which occur in all wars. But genocide is something else... it raises the bar to a whole new level of "evil". As an advocate for peace, I'm always slightly puzzled by this concept that there is "right" war and "wrong" war. Like roadside bombs in Iraq are somehow "wrong" but Apache gunships are "right" somehow. So massacres, shelling of residential areas of towns, rape, terror tactics to get residents to flee (i.e. ethnic cleansing), destruction of houses of worship, historical buildings and monuments, bridges, hospitals - even the bombing of refugee camps - somehow these are "ok", or at least tolerated aspects of war.

It's quite well documented that all sides participated in the above activities. More than a million people are displaced from that war because another ethnicity or group used terror, mayhem and death to frighten them into fleeing from their home. But see all that is "ok" or at least relatively "ok", because it was done by all sides. It's when it comes to this topic of genocide that the ball game changes, because just one group did it, and they did it just one time, over a period of just one week, with their victims coming from just one town.

If it was just an "ordinary" series of massacres, then it wouldn't even have been commemorated earlier this week. Do you see the irony of that? Hundreds of thousands of people are just as dead from the same war, killed under different circumstances, but only the ones from Srebrenica are commemorated by world leaders and given extensive media coverage.

In other words, that title "genocide" really does make a huge difference. It makes the dead from Srebrenica some kind of extra special dead and it makes the perpetrators an extra special kind of evil.

The problem with questioning whether or not it was genocide is that it makes one look like one is defending or justifying these people's deaths. It's like people who talk about how German POW's were treated in Allied camps after the war... if you criticize it, then you must be defending Nazism and Hitler. It's quite rational however to say that both Nazism was horrible and the way many German POW's were treated was also wrong. Not wrong on the same scale, but wrong nonetheless.

Massacring unarmed men is unquestionable wrong and horrific and I condemn it. But that doesn't make it genocide.

Very wise words and something to think about. This was a big quote but just a necessary snip from the full article which is way much bigger, very detailed and interesting. Click to read the whole thing.