Will Hitler be seen in a more positive way in the far future?

[Lord Baal]

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[GoodGame]

Hitler is a misspelling of the common German name 'Heidler,' as GoodGame said, so it was never that common to begin with. Most Hitlers have since changed their surnames, for obvious reasons. There are a few exceptions; an Austrian man refused to change his name from "Adolf Hitler" until the day he died. Hitler had family in the US, one of whom actually enlisted in the US military during WWII. I would presume the Ohio Hitlers are related to that branch of the family, but I really don't know.

I question that last one, and there is still the question of Alois Shickelgruber (Adolf's father) paternity, since the father is only guessed. So Adolf Hitler might really only be superficially related to most people living with the surname Hitler, since Alois only had so many offspring and adopted the name Hitler from his step-father (who is assumed not to be Adolf's biological grandfather).

 

[Lord Baal]

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[r16]

ı would say assuming Adolf declared his grandfather to be a Jew , named something like Frankenberg or something , only to take support of the Businessmen of Ruhr or something in the name of protecting them from the looming Communist threat ; when he was weak compared to what he became in June 1940 . One certainly doesn't need Jewish blood in his veins to be evil . Goering himself fought in person like lions to protect Milch , that guy in charge of aviation industry and who was beaten up by a British Colonel specifically because the Commando Commander and some Lord or something had just been to a concentration camp .

 

[Pangur Bán]

That's impossible.

What is?

And of course genocide has to be a political term ("but I meant politicization, not political!") because it's a political act. And of course it fits into identity politics because genocide is precisely about the eliminating of an imagined community. You are removing that identity's agency in a permanent way as an identity. You don't have to kill the person to kill the identity.

Another part of the problem with using the term in that sense, of ethnocide or 'cultural genocide, in a discussion of historical comparison. If nothing else Julius Caesar and such people could never have committed genocide because such imagined communities didn't exist in the same way. To the extent they existed they were not the bases of state legitimacy, and therefore were not worthwhile political targets. So even if you were indulging in the moralistic 'history' people so love and paying lip-service to 'relative cultural settings', you could never legitimately use committing of ethnic genocide for saying a modern leader is a bigger baddie than an earlier one; obviously the vast majority of past leaders would have committed as much ethnic genocide as they could if it was possible and any perceived benefit to them.

 

[Hygro]

I meant I don't see how you can have a term like genocide give it a meaningful definition that avoids politicization. We might be discussing different things.

 

[Pangur Bán]

If you use the term in its popular sense, mass-murder, you limit its meaning to verifiable fact. When you have mass murder hierarchies then obviously powerful states like the US and USSR will have their mass murders low down the hierarchies and their defeated enemies' higher up. You can talk of Saddam's 'genocide' against the Kurds, but the USA/Iraq's 'killing' of Iranians. The strong get to remain within the norms of the political order and selectively move their enemies out of it when needed. So basically a genocidal dictator among the international community becomes analogous to a witch in an early modern village, an isolated individual whose has suffered political defeat in a community setting and is to be destroyed by his/her enemies.

 

[Tahuti]

I meant I don't see how you can have a term like genocide give it a meaningful definition that avoids politicization. We might be discussing different things.

Well, there are definitions of genocide that do not involve killing people at all. For instance, the destruction of Armenian cultural artificats by the Turkish, Azerbaijani and Soviet governments has been called the white genocide. Likewise, the White Australia policy involved taking Aboriginal children from their parents in order to culturally assimilate them into mainstream Australian society, which counts as genocide under international law.

...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.
— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II

To be honest, I disagree with any non-lethal definition of the word, and it would be better to consider it an ethnic subset of democide (e.g. mass murder of a demographic group for political purposes).

 

[Pangur Bán]

Having Breton children take classes in French could be genocide on those grounds. So would exporting cheap mass-produced culture replacing local alternatives. Michael Jackson and Micky Mouse could be accused of genocide!

 

[Tahuti]

Having Breton children take classes in French could be genocide on those grounds. So would exporting cheap mass-produced culture replacing local alternatives. Michael Jackson and Micky Mouse could be accused of genocide!

Precisely my issue as well.

 

[Lord Baal]

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[Hygro]

If you use the term in its popular sense, mass-murder, you limit its meaning to verifiable fact. When you have mass murder hierarchies then obviously powerful states like the US and USSR will have their mass murders low down the hierarchies and their defeated enemies' higher up. You can talk of Saddam's 'genocide' against the Kurds, but the USA/Iraq's 'killing' of Iranians. The strong get to remain within the norms of the political order and selectively move their enemies out of it when needed. So basically a genocidal dictator among the international community becomes analogous to a witch in an early modern village, an isolated individual whose has suffered political defeat in a community setting and is to be destroyed by his/her enemies.

I think you're making a super interesting point, but with regards to the definition, I think that your point is why we should use a more proper, i.e. "politicized" term for genocide and get comfortable with its uncomfortable ambiguities--because it is talking about something very specific that isn't just mass murder, and matters for similar reasons as to why we have the distinction for the term in the first place--the political killing or eliminating of an identity via force is such a wet topic we need a word like genocide to deal with it.

 

[Tahuti]

If by doing so you forcibly destroy their culture, then yes, you would be committing genocide.

Destroying cultures and assimilation by force is barbaric but should not count as genocide. If it does, then the whole term stretches to a point where the term becomes a totally useless catch-all phrase. "No state-subsidised Arabic language TV in the Developed World? GENOCIDE!"

 

[Lone Wolf]

What is?

Avoiding politics, I guess.

 

[Lord Baal]

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[Masada]

Destroying cultures and assimilation by force is barbaric but should not count as genocide. If it does, then the whole term stretches to a point where the term becomes a totally useless catch-all phrase. "No state-subsidised Arabic language TV in the Developed World? GENOCIDE!"

Genocide only requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group. The means don't matter much. So if a government did wipe the airways clean of Arabic language TV with the intention of killing off Arabic culture it would count. On the other hand, the mere absence of public funding - with no malicious intent - for an Arabic language TV channel wouldn't count. This isn't even a huge stretch to be honest. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide uses forcibly transferring children of the group to another group i.e. the deliberate attempt to impede cultural transmission as one of its examples.

 

[Tahuti]

No. That is a fairly basic misunderstanding of the word "force."

Genocide only requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group. The means don't matter much. So if a government did wipe the airways clean of Arabic language TV with the intention of killing off Arabic culture it would count. On the other hand, the mere absence of public funding - with no malicious intent - for an Arabic language TV channel wouldn't count. This isn't even a huge stretch to be honest. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide uses forcibly transferring children of the group to another group i.e. the deliberate attempt to impede cultural transmission as one of its examples.

That's my whole point: "Force" can be understood to be a lot of things, including withdrawing public funds (hand something over to the "force" of the free market). If withdrawing public funding from an Arabic language channel gets support from a right-wing populist party, weird discussions will be held what intent it will have. Killing is however a much more narrow term, to put it this way. It gives less leeway for political opportunists to exploit it it, and there are less reasons to believe it may have been done for any other purpose than destruction. It may not be always the case, but if a term has a more narrow definition, it has less chance to become a useless abuse term.

If words mean anything, they mean nothing, and genocide should not be such a word, especially since the Greek-Latin terms it descended from are crystal clear.

 

[Lord Baal]

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[DemonicAppleGuY]

Is it genocide if you're murdering for what they have rather than who they are?

ex. Settling the New World. The natives and the colonials were not super enthusiastic about working together. So the colonials did what any sensible people would do. Slaughter the natives and take the land.

Is that genocide?

 

[Lord Baal]

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