droid said:
Most armies dont pursue campaigns of genocide against civilian populations. Even the war crimes committed by the allies in WW2 dont come near that category, and the US's postwar campaigns of terror in South-East Asia, Latin America and elsewhere, terrible as they were, did not have the genocide of entire ethnic groups as its primary motivation - rather the victims were irrelevant 'unpeople' - considered to be utterly disposable commodities at best.
I agree, but i don't quite see why that would be relevant. the impetus behind assuming that genocide is worse than other forms of mass killing of the same or larger size is essentially that what really matters about humans is their race or religion or nationality. this i cannot agree with. essentially, the stipulation of genocide as worse than numerically comparable forms of killing thus remains racist.
you make this point forcefully, when you say "the victims were irrelevant 'unpeople' - considered to be utterly disposable commodities". the key term here is "victim",
rather than race, religion or nationality of the victim.
incidentally, stalinist purges contained many genocidal elements, various population groups were wiped out almost completly through starvation and relocation (to fine and hospitable siberian lands) policies, or what about shooting officers because they were poles? this is just not very well publicised. furthermore, the soviets were builiding up the red army with the expressed purpose of imperialism, of spreading their poisonous regime across the globe. in fact on of the first acts of leninist foreign policy was an attack on poland, though that failed for various reasons. germany was often mentioned as first or one of the first target for soviet territorial expansion.
