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Notes -
You made the (inverse) claim, not me. I merely questioned its veracity. You don't get to accuse your opponent of motte-and-bailey when they object to a very specific claim of yours (and explicitly do nothing but).
Also not interested in your whataboutism. Let me rephrase: there was (at least) one plan to round up and kill all the Jews (or as many as possible given external constraints) within the European territories under German control. This is ethnic cleansing AKA genocide. I don't care to what degree this does or does not line up with "mainstream history".
I also believe that Allied fire bombing was a war crime, but that is irrelevant to our discussion. Were there plans to round up and kill all Germans or Japanese within the territory controlled by an Allied power? Then that, also, is a genocidal plan. Not that it would be relevant to the central claim under investigation here.
A minor nitpick. Ethnic cleansing traditionally means removing an ethnicity from an area, backed by threat of violence. By this definition, the Paris Peace Treaties signatories engaged in genocide by repatriating ethnic germans from Eastern Europe to Germany after WW2.
I'm not a fan of attempts to expand the definition of genocide, as it eventually waters down to "bad thing I don't approve of". (In the most extreme, I've heard HAES activists say Michelle Obama was engaging in an anti-fat genocide with her MyPlate program.) I'd prefer genocide just mean "an intentional attempt to prevent a category of people from leaving descendants, thus genetically eradicating them".
Interesting. I was under the impression ethnic cleansing referred to systematic killing (within a certain area). I do agree with your definition of genocide, which fits the plan detailled in the Wannsee conference protocols to a T.
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