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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26075 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Alright, I'll say it. Advocating for genocide is political speech. It does not incite imminent lawless action. It should not be categorically banned. Genocide could conceivably be a good policy option in certain hypothetical situations. Also most things labeled "genocide" are actually ethnic cleansing or forced assimilation.

America used to have entire political parties advocating for 'genocide.' The American Colonization Society comes to mind. The first amendment seems to just get whittled away over time, not unlike the second, not to mention the rest

American Colonization Society

Isn't that the group that set up Liberia? That's not genocide.

'Just take the people and move them somewhere else' is (one) absolutely 100% rock-solid acting definition of genocide these days.

No, that's "ethnic cleansing". Even the UN definition of genocide doesn't include that.

Unfortunately even Raphael Lemkin, after coining the term, quickly pivoted to including cultural cleansing or race-based eviction as "genocide".

God forbid we have a word for the uniquely evil act of cēdō-ing a genus!

I take a view that "genocide" rhetoric has been diluted to be meaningless.

No moral politics can accept genocide. But nowadays genocide is thrown about so casually that it's a meaningless term. The Jewish genocide, the Palestinian genocide, the Xinjiang genocide, the white genocide, the trans genocide.

Genocide is the mass slaughter of people based purely on their ancestral heritage. No one--not Israelis, and not Hamas--either publically or privately wants or plans for genocide. There are bad things outside genocide different sides may want, but they are desires centered on power, not murder as an end in itself. The fact that Hamas wants an Islamic caliphate from river to sea (to sea and sea again) is about as far from actual genocide as can be imagined: if Jews peacefully accepted Islamic dominance (and ideally converted), Hamas would be plenty content and wouldn't kill anyone.

Israeli culture, despite its flaws, is better than Palestinian culture, so many people want it to win. But they're uncomfortable acknowledging that some cultures are better than others, so they feel the need to frame Israeli desires as desires to avoid genocide. They're not: they're a desire to maintain Israeli dominance over Palestine because the alternative is worse, and that's a good thing.

Hamas's charter publicly advocates for genocide.

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

That's their defunct charter from 1988; they dropped that language and their current charter from 2017 states their war is not with the Jewish religion but against Zionists occupying Palestine. Not saying they are lovely human beings, but they don't have that in their charter now.

Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.

Note that's a direct quote from an Islamic hadith.

I agree. The problem is that universities, especially the ones that were represented in the hearing, have not been enforcing this policy. Further, their policy has been nearly the exact opposite. "Silence is violence" after all. So please don't begrudge me a little bit of delectable schadenfreude.

And, indeed, it is generally protected speech under the first amendment - including at public colleges!

Part of the (in large part correct) justification for this is that strongly motivated political activism from all sides often comes along with calls for mass violence, and that criminalizing such calls would be an easy tool to shut down political speech one disagrees with.

Even without that, and even if you believe genocide is Always Bad, I still find it very personally valuable to let ideas circulate and grow and mutate and see what people advocate for and why without restrictions. Banning advocacy for various kinds of bad things stifles that.

Yeah, but it's pretty hard to make a free speech stand when you've been expelling students and revoking offers for racism, not to mention shaking your fist futilely at those damn kids who post the "It's OK to be white" papers.

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