On genocide

I have complicated feelings about genocide as a concept. They've evolved a lot over time and generally come to become broader in what events fall within that category. Once upon a time it was just the Holocaust and Rwanda. Then the Holocaust and Rwanda and Cambodia. Then the Holocaust and Rwanda and Cambodia and eastern Ottoman Empire (against Armenians/Circassians/Greeks and more). Now I don't even know. Those and more? Unpopularly, I don't favor labeling the atrocities in Gaza as genocide. But I do favor it for the Rohingya and Uygurs. Look at me, so persnickety.

Anyway, I am posting in these wee hours, violating my 30-day goal, in part because earlier today my sensitive self got triggered by a Chinese national in Discord who denied that the Uygurs were suffering at all. The best was when he said:

Minorities have much more priorities than us, sad

So it's true that nationalities are not equally treated, but for minorities they're better treated

Muslims in northwest areas discriminate us, yet we still have to take tax budget to build infrastructure for them, ironically

This guy doesn't live in China; he is currently visiting, but I'm pretty sure he lives in Europe. And yet the Chinese government narrative has so thoroughly ingrained itself in him that he parroted it uncritically. Honestly, the denial of the atrocities didn't bother me as much as the uncanny similarity his words had to some of the terrible things you hear right-wingers say stateside. How much these feelings pervade. Earlier in the day I was bitching about Bolsonaro and whining to myself about that guy too.

Past-me had an American ecumenism that I long for today. But present-me doesn't have the privilege of sharing a reality with most people who disagree with him from the right. It makes everything harder. And then to have the reality-denial from a Chinese person who should know better--don't call it genocide, I don't care, but don't dismiss it as "fake news"--it makes me despair. I think about the Chernobyl disaster, and how it so encapsulated Soviet falseness, which every free-minded person thought was a scourge: now we have Russian, Chinese, Brazilian, Argentinian, Turkish, Republican falseness that all demonstrates we have so much rot to debride.

I don't fully know how I feel about genocide as a concept. My feelings will evolve over time. But even when I didn't call the Armenian Genocide a genocide, I didn't deny the murders and deportations. Even as an ethnic Turk with no education in this, I didn't buy into Turkish denialism and counter-narrative as a teenager. Fie unto folks who can't even manage something similar as adults.

(Side note: I learned when I was with my family earlier that my great-great-grandfather was not, in fact, governor of Aleppo. He was a high official (possibly governor) in Damascus during World War I. It would seem my past is tied more with Arabian revolution than genocide. Woo.)