this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Politics
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You could also argue, though, that the genocidalism score should be dependant on the amount of potential victims.
Depending on the estimate, for example the California Genocide had a higher murder ratio.
I don't think it's fair to let genocidists "off the hook" just because they ran out of people to murder.
I agree, I'm just not sure what this is responding to. I didn't intend, and I hope didn't imply, that this was at play here. The Holodomor isn't better than the Holocaust simply because one ended with fewer deaths, and I agree with what I think is undergirding your comment, that there's no real way to "rank" genocides, they're all bad.
Yeah, that was basically my point.
I've had a few discussions that went like "Nazis where the pinnacle of evil due to the holocaust, which was the most evil thing that ever happened, thus nothing else is really evil".
And while I totally agree that Nazis/holocaust are really evil, there are a lot of other events and groups that are really evil, and I disagree with ranking genocides just by the size of the "genocidable" population.
I did put "letting off the hook" in quotation marks, because I didn't think you implied that anyone who murders people on a massive scale is ok, just because somebody else was worse. So no worries, you didn't imply that.
A genocide, by definition, is an event where as many people are murdered as possible. They are usually limited by the size of the victim population and by the resources the murderers have. Not by how evil the murderers are.