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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Covid should have slowed down economies, but instead governments pumped the gas. This was the widely recognized disconnect between Wall St and Main St. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and not in any particularly predictable way because everything has been thoroughly distorted. There should have been a slew of predictable debt defaults in 2020, but after many trillions in helicopter money who knows anymore?

Also the war itself puts a strong damper on international commerce. We had basically been operating in a mostly peaceful world where war was limited to US/China/Russia busting up isolated third world countries. But Russia launching a full state-on-state genocide is a severe departure from that time of relative peace in most of the world.

Now we get to test the hypothesis that nations who trade with one another are disincentivized from going to war, and are about to find out how big that incentive really is.

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Genocide?

I know we've gotten into the habit of redefining words whenever it suits us, but at some point doesn't it muddy the waters if we just make shit up?

Oxford Languages via Google: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group

Dictionary.com: the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group

Merriam Webster: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group

Would you care to find me a source with a definition that doesn't apply?

Isn't it more in the interest of conquering rather than exterminate and destroy? If Ukraine were to surrender, I don't think Russia would continue to kill them all.

Genocide is a part of that. People capable of leading a country (top politicians, lawyers, academics, businessmen, military leaders, etc) must be murdered so that there is no-one to lead the opposition to Russian rule. After WW2, former leadership of countries occupied by the Soviet Union was methodically exterminated the same way. After people capable of leading a nation are murdered and prohibitions of cultural practices are placed on the remaining, they begin to lose their group identity (language, religion, etc) until they cease to exist as an independent entity.

Many Native American tribes disappeared this way, for example. They weren't murdered to the last person. Instead, they were put into conditions that lead to their irreversible decline.

So we committed genocide against the Iraqi's, right?

30 legal scholars of genocide have compiled a comprehensive report explaining how Russian actions match the legal definition of genocide: https://newlinesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/English-Rep...

Their definition fits several genocides committed fairly recently by the US.

Please, do make that argument!

Despite being against the (2nd) US invasion of Iraq since before it happened, I've never personally felt the need to apply the label genocide (estimates of 300k violent deaths and 1M excess deaths notwithstanding). But I am very much willing to admit this may be a result of biased US propaganda that seeks to justify that war and downplay the atrocities, regardless of my not buying into the overarching narrative.

But if you yourself find the definition of genocide appropriate to the second US invasion of Iraq, or any other US military action, then please make the arguments to apply it! I'm not playing some game of "which country's unprovoked war is worse", but rather condemning it all.

Illegally invading a nation, killing upwards of a million people and destroying their way of life in order to institute a top down US-centric view of how society should function - fits their definition perfectly. And not just in Iraq, but Afghanistan as well.

And that's just in the last 20 years. I could also make a case in Syria and Libya as well but that would require first convincing you that our CIA/State Dept. were up to their usual tricks which I suspect would be a waste of our time. And let's not forget our role in this whole Ukrainian boondoggle going back to at least 2014 with funding & fomenting the coup/revolution that gave Putin his "justification" to annex Crimea.

Then we sit back as moral arbiters and want the whole world to still pretend we are always the good guys.

> I could also make a case in Syria and Libya as well but that would require first convincing you that our CIA/State Dept. were up to their usual tricks

Good news, no convincing needed! I do agree with you that the US government is continually meddling in foreign countries, and I agree that this is a bad thing.

> the coup/revolution that gave Putin his "justification" to annex Crimea.

But here is where you lose me. Even to the extent that the US supported pro-western political movements in Ukraine, it still does not justify overt war by Russia. Russia was surely playing the influence game as well, and ultimately lost. Losing that game doesn't justify escalating to the next level, especially when that next level is full on war of attacking civilian infrastructure and razing cities.

NATO proved in Yugoslavia that it's not "just a defensive alliance", and since their stated goal is to fuck over Russia, then you can see exactly why they responded the way they did when NATO keeps closing the circle tighter and tighter around Russia.

This doesn't require guesswork, our own intelligence agencies have stated this as the likely outcome for decades.

> NATO proved in Yugoslavia that it's not "just a defensive alliance"

Yes, it also stepped in to stop genocide where it could (and waited too long, if you ask me). Even by the highest estimates, the whole 78-day aerial warfare campaign killed less people than several atrocities commited during Yugoslav wars did in a single day, and the campaign brought a lasting peace to the region.

> NATO keeps closing the circle tighter and tighter around Russia.

Yes, that's why until Russia invaded Ukraine, NATO countries in Europe kept cutting military budgets, reducing troop numbers, disbanding units, closing military bases, selling off equipment. All a fiendish plot to encircle Russia!

The best defense against what aboutism is. Yes, both are bad, I’m glad we’re in agreement.

If you’re in agreement, could you explain absence of sanctions against the US coming from the EU?

> Genocide?

> I know we’ve gotten into the habit of redefining words whenever it suits us, but at some point doesn’t it muddy the waters if we just make shit up?

Yes, which is why people need to stop trying to excuse the actions of forces practicing what is exactly genocide as defined in international law by making shit up in the form of a more limited definition that is restricted only to mass direct extermination.

From the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

By this definition, did we commit genocide against the Iraqi's?

Also, is Russia's invasion of Ukraine demonstrably worse or less justified than our invasion of Iraq?

> By this definition, did we commit genocide against the Iraqi’s?

I’m pretty sure I didn’t, I don’t know if you did.

> Also, is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrably worse or less justified than our invasion of Iraq?

I don’t really care, since I’ve argued that the decision-makers responsible for the latter should be arrested and tried for war crimes and the crime of aggression.

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