Genocide names what to prevent, not what to commemorate

"Parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and early America’s treatment of indigenous peoples are stark. Once you know the twin histories, you cannot unsee it. ... Americans are discouraged to draw parallels between Native American and Palestinian history. ... If anyone should understand ethnic cleansing, it is Americans, because our country was founded upon the genocide of indigenous peoples, followed by centuries of cover-ups." &mdash Sarah Kendzior, "Trails of Tears," Substack newsletter, Jan 11, 2024

Noura Erakat says:

"The worst thing that can possibly happen to any Jewish person, the thing that they’re most traumatized by and afraid of, is literally happening to Palestinians. Siege for 17 years, occupation for 57 years, forced displacement, being placed on a caloric diet subject to systematic military campaigns, a restriction on movement, a lack of ability to determine your own future, and then on top of that, to be killed with advanced weapons technologies in the most painful way and to be denied medical access and then starved to death.

What else would we want to protect people from? And yet none of that, none of the pain that Palestinian flesh bears registers. And there’s this commonsense logic that this is not flesh."

"The Limits of the Law," Noura Erakat interviewed by Afeef Nessouli in the Fall 2024 issue of Acacia (Issue 2)

Genocide has a legal definition, yes, but I would say — as a descendant of survivors of the genocide that led to the term being coined — that what makes something a genocide is not numbers of deaths, but an attempt to fully eradicate an entire community through the destruction of family lines.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:33 AM

What is happening in Gaza is not a genocide simply because massive numbers of people are dying — though yes, genocide often leads to mass death. It is a genocide because a significant amount of Israeli government rhetoric has framed Gazans as a people who must be wiped out in entirety.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:34 AM

When I think about what the descendants of Gazan survivors will grow up with, I think of the shadows that haunt my own family legacy. The inability to talk about the past. The family trees that just stop. The generational trauma. That, for me, is genocide.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:36 AM

The most tragic thing about the way we wrestle with the concept of genocide was that the term was coined in the hopes of *preventing* future groups from experiencing what my family went through. But instead it only serves to acknowledge the lost and horror trauma in the aftermath.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:38 AM

Having your loss recognized as a genocide is a pretty abysmal consolation prize. And it sucks that 80 years after my own ancestors were being slaughtered en masse in an attempt to wipe out their people, this is the best we have to offer.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:39 AM

This is an important framing of the idea of genocide. It's not mass murder for cultural reasons, its the attempted murder of a culture (which often involves mass murder). Case in point: The residential school system for Native Americans would have been a genocide even without the mass graves.

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— Greg Muller (Dr Math) (@morilac.bsky.social) October 7, 2024 at 11:40 AM

Important: Israel's public channel (Kann 11) reports that the military effort that commenced today in Jebalia refugee camp is part of a bigger operation to expel all Palestinians from North Gaza, according to the "Eiland Plan".

— Yair Wallach (@yairwallach.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 7:19 AM

Estimated 300,000 Palestinians remain in North Gaza. The plan is to force as many of them to leave and then proceed as if no civilians remained edition.cnn.com/2024/09/22/m...

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— Yair Wallach (@yairwallach.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 7:23 AM

When the genocide is over, and everyone agrees that it was wrong and should have been stopped, the cheerleaders will console themselves with saying that they may have been wrong to support the war, but it was for the right reasons, unlike those who opposed it at the time for all the wrong reasons.

— Julia Carrie Wong (@joolia.bsky.social) February 11, 2024 at 10:13 PM

The word genocide certainly does not indicate what to do. "In Israel, calls for genocide have migrated from the margins to the mainstream." Tamir Sorek, The Conversation, April 2, 2025

Even if you think genocide is not the right word, you should be able to see why people use it: the scale of devastation, death, blockade. If you can't, and you are offended, then either 1. You've kept yourself ignorant 2. You don't care if it's true or not 3. You think Palestinians deserve it

— Yair Wallach (@yairwallach.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 1:46 PM

Nor is it what to escape accountability for:

"An explosive new report from The New York Times flatly contends that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has "prolonged the war in Gaza" to stay in power and avoid potential criminal prosecution."
'Profoundly Damning': NYT Report Says Netanyahu Prolonged War on Gaza to Stay in Power "He pressed ahead with the war in April and July 2024, even as top generals told him that there was no further military advantage to continuing," reports The New York Times. Brad Reed, Common Dreams, Jul 11, 2025

A party resolution accusing Israel of genocide divides Democrats in a key swing state, Eva McKend, CNN, July 17, 2025

"The people we starved to death were already kinda like that" is morally indistinguishable from holocaust denial

— Ian Boudreau (@ianboudreau.com) August 18, 2025 at 8:07 AM

The entire piece is just a bunch of tedious ligitation of terms used by activists. Whether or not Israel is *technically* white supremacist or *legally* committing genocide isn't relevant to the obvious fact that it is committing mass atrocities and needs to stop.

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— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) February 28, 2024 at 2:18 PM

Jimmy Carter (Talking Peace, 1995) explains the situation in Palestine/Israel

Today, Jimmy Carter turns 100. His book Talking Peace (1995) is free to read on Archive.org.

See how he explains this in the first few pages:

For 400 years, the Ottoman Turks ruled Palestine. After World War I, the League of Nations allowed Britain to take over. After World War II, the United Nations wanted to split the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. War broke out. Israel declared victory, though no surrounding Arab states would recognize it. Jordan took the West Bank. Egypt took the Gaza strip. In 1967, Israel seized territory from Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinians.

Jimmy Carter's background

A Rural Georgia Town Formed a U.S. President: Jimmy Carter’s memoir ‘An Hour Before Daylight’. Tucker Lieberman, May 19, 2024, 9-min read.

How Jimmy Carter's so-called betrayal of evangelicals led to MAGA: Evangelicals loved Jimmy Carter — until his anti-racism turned them against him. Amanda Marcotte. Salon.com, January 9, 2025

The administration that cares so deeply about fighting antisemitism: www.jns.org/pentagon-pro...

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) May 24, 2025 at 12:14 PM

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has unveiled a new settlement in the illegally occupied Golan Heights, named after US President Donald Trump. www.bbc.com/news/world-m...

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— Orange Dotard Slayer (@dotard-slayer.bsky.social) May 24, 2025 at 4:47 PM

Colombia: Noticias del reconocimiento de los falsos positivos

Selva por Elias Shariff Falla Mardini from Pixabay

Álvaro Uribe

En su sitio web, el expresidente Álvaro Uribe subió un video. La página web tiene la fecha 22 octubre 2022 aunque el video en YouTube tiene la fecha de 4 octubre 2023.

(Durante su presidencia, Uribe fue miembro del Primero Colombia, luego del Partido de la U (2010–2013) y ahora del Centro Democrático.)

El Espectador

"El acto de reconocimiento de responsabilidad que vimos esta semana, con el presidente de la República, Gustavo Petro, a la cabeza, tiene un enorme poder simbólico y deberá repetirse una vez la Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP) llegue al final del macrocaso que adelanta sobre los mal llamados falsos positivos. * * * Es la primera vez que el Estado colombiano, en voz de sus representantes, ofrece disculpas públicas de esta manera. Es un cambio histórico, pues antes el negacionismo y el silencio eran la norma. ... El expresidente de la República y quien fuera ministro de Defensa bajo la Seguridad Democrática, Juan Manuel Santos, terminó en aquel entonces su intervención diciendo..." — Un Estado que reconoce el horror va camino de sanarlo, El Espectador, 4 octubre 2023

Blu Radio

"En los últimos días, el jurista Rodrigo Uprimmy ha escrito algunas columnas de opinión sobre los falsos positivos, a propósito de las audiencias de reconocimiento de un grupo de militares en Yopal, Casanare, pues estas personas aceptaron su responsabilidad en casi 300 casos de ejecuciones extrajudiciales que se registraron en el departamento entre los años 2005 y 2008.
— Comisión de la Verdad apoya idea de responsabilidad política de Uribe en falsos positivos. El padre Francisco De Roux y los excomisionados respaldaron a Rodrigo Uprimny. Por su parte, el expresidente Uribe que hay un sesgo en este tipo de declaraciones, Mateo Piñeros, BluRadio, 3 de Octubre, 2023

La Comisión de la Verdad apoyó lo que ha dicho Uprimmy. Su publicación afirmó "la responsabilidad política y moral del expresidente Álvaro Uribe en los falsos positivos" y que Uribe posiblemente tenga "la responsabilidad del mando, aunque no haya ordenado directamente esos actos criminales". También dijeron que tenía que haber sido política del estado, por ser obviamente "un sistema de disposiciones legales y extralegales, estímulos y exigencias de resultados, acciones y omisiones, surgidas desde el mismo Gobierno e implementadas durante varios al interior de las Fuerzas Militares."

W Radio

Se llama "contundente" ese párrafo:

Uribe

Uribe les respondió y defendió su política de seguridad democrática. Dijo: "la política de Seguridad Democrática bastante mejoró al país".

Petro

Gustavo Petro (Colombia Humana, anteriormente Movimiento Progresistas)

'War eunuchs' in Hirschfeld's 'The Sexual History of the World War' (1930)

In 1930, Magnus Hirschfeld published Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges in German. Panurge Press produced an abridged, adapted English translation as The Sexual History of the World War in 1934. Another English edition was produced by Cadillac Publishing Co. in 1941. The last one, since 2015, is available to read free online through the Internet Archive. Chapter 12, "Genital Injuries, War Eunuchs, etc." includes the following information.

"Above all, it was shot wounds in the testicles and also injuries to the spinal marrow which induced a complete disappearance of the sexual functions. Injuries of this sort were not uncommon during the war which explains their frequent occurrence in literature. Yet it appears that poetry gave much more attention to this problem of emasculation during the war than did science. One of these cases became famous in medical literature because the patient became a subject for transplantation experiments."

Dr. Robert Lichtenstern reported having to remove both testicles from a soldier in 1915 in Vienna due to an infected gunshot wound. The patient immediately ceased to have erections "despite various devices calculated to arouse him"; he rapidly lost his facial and body hair; and

"he read nothing and manifested no interest whatever in the war....For the most part the patient sat near his bed or at the window, ate voraciously, slept a lot, and busied himself with absolutely nothing at all. The loss of both testicles resulted in a remarkable increase of adipose tissue, especially around the neck which gave the patient a peculiarly stupid appearance."

Doctors then transplanted another man's testicle into him, with these alleged results: "Various castration symptoms, such as adiposity, altered trichosis, loss of libido and psychic indifferentism, all receded temporarily so that the patient actually entertained the idea of marrying."

Dr. F. Pick's study found "commotion neurosis" in 10 out of 25 officers and in 7 out of 75 soldiers. These men were unable to ejaculate and in some cases also unable to get erections. Pick attributed this to physical and psychic stresses of battle, including sexual abstinence.

Several literary passages are referenced in this same chapter of Hirschfeld's book:

From an author named Bruno Vogel: "I saw Sczepczyk again. With amazing precision his generative organs had been shot from his body. 'Herr Leutenant,' he whispered, a little bit ashamed and in deep confidence, 'Herr Leutenant, and I have never yet had a girl.' He gladly accepted the cigarette I gave him and I softly stroked his hair and forehead. Finally I slipped my hand over his eyes and, as a little smile of pleasure curled over his mouth, I pushed my mercifully brutal sword into his side." The title was not mentioned, but possibly this was Vogel's Es lebe der Krieg! (1924).

The Siberian diary of Edwin Erich Dwinger The Army Behind Barbed Wire: A wounded soldier says that his wife (whose picture shows her to be "a perfect child-bearing machine") wanted at least six children. "Until now we weren't able to have any children because there wasn't any money for them." When he is told that he cannot have children due to his wound, "he turned around slowly and walked to his bed, stretched himself out painfully and never spoke to anyone else until they sent him to Siberia. It is significant that we meet the tragic figure of this emasculated man further on in the novel, but at this later stage, he rejoices that he does not have to suffer the sexual hunger which the others are being plagued by."

The poet Ernst Toller has a man named Hinkemann who "may be regarded as the final literary formula of the emasculated soldier who returns home from the wars, and the inability of his wife to continue a veritably inhuman sacrifice in his behalf....we are dealing with a group of men who will never be able to find their lost happiness by the side of a woman. From every outcry of Toller's hero, we hear the whole dismal and appalling tragedy of a creature who has gone through the vast hell of war, and it is a cry which can never be silenced. How brutal is the reply to Hinkemann by his wife's seducer, Paul Grosshahn, who rebukes the cripple for seeking to keep his wife a nun. Hinke- mann is informed by the seducer that he is in reality nothing more to his wife now than a ground for divorce!"

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A compressed 500-word summary of 'Perpetual Peace' by Immanuel Kant (1795)

Section 1

1. A truce ends a particular conflict for a short time, whereas a long-term treaty removes the grounds for future conflicts and thus produces lasting peace. Supposed treaties that are mere truces are beneath the dignity of kings.
2. States aren't property and can't be bought or sold. A state is more like a person than a thing, "a trunk with its own roots." If it could be bought, it would have no authority over people.
3. If a country is attacked by a foreign power, its citizens should volunteer to fight without pay. There should be no standing armies during peacetime, as their existence encourages war, nor mercenaries (contracted soldiers), as that employment is immoral.
4. A national credit system that borrows from other states, with a greater likelihood of bankrupting them than repaying them, encourages war and must be forbidden. States should ally themselves against any state that uses such a credit system (e.g. England).
5. No state has the right or authority to interfere with any other state's constitution or government.
6. War is, by definition, the violent striving of two states to reach agreement on a matter about which there has been no lawful ruling. During war, states should forbid the employment of tactics such as spying and assassinations, because "some confidence in the character of the enemy must remain even in the midst of war" if peace is to become possible. War of total extermination must be forbidden.

Section 2

Threat of war, if not open hostility, is the natural state of human society. Only in a civil state can neighbors agree to treat each other peacefully.

Three Definitive Articles for Perpetual Peace

1. "The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican"

All men are free, equal, and dependent on common legislation. A republican constitution requires the citizens' consent to fight in a war and pay for a war. "Republican" means that the executive branch is separated from the legislative; the constitution is more likely to be republican if the number of rulers is small, ideally monarchical. In a democracy, violent revolution is inevitable because everyone wants to be king.

2. "The Law of Nations Shall be Founded on a Federation of Free States"

Without losing their distinct identities, states should be bound by a joint constitution similar to their own.

Even warring nations pay lip service to the idea of law, because each human retains the hope of lawful behavior. A league of nations would require states to resolve disputes before a tribunal.

A treaty of peace ends one war; a league of peace ends all war. The idea that there ought to be no war can only make sense if there is a league of nations to generate and enforce the idea.

3. "The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality"

Everyone must have the right to temporarily visit any place on earth. Hostility to visitors is contrary to natural law. Universal hospitality is the only way to peace.

Immanuel Kant. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. (1795)

This summary was written in 2005, along with a series of other 500-word summaries of philosophy books, as an exercise in brevity.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium, for example, about the Jena collective during the end of Immanuel Kant's life.

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Skull by 849356 from Pixabay

Andrea Long Chu, in her essay "Authority" published for the first time in her 2025 book of the same name, explains something this way. Kant addressed a certain problem like this: When someone observes an indisputable fact about a piece of art, they’re just making a practical observation like whether it can be hung on a wall, whereas judgments about whether it’s beautiful are always disputable. Art critics’ belief that there is some standard by which to judge art is what gives them their air of authority, yet the standard (if there is any) will be forever indefinable. It makes sense to see someone as an authority if you believe their claims can be shown to be true; but if they believe something and no one can prove it, in what sense are they an authority? Kant’s debate interests, as Chu explains, prioritized aesthetics over politics, and he thought people should just obey the current political order and reserve their energy for intellectual discussions about the beautiful and good. In this way, Kant’s understanding of politics was perhaps primarily aesthetic.

Hobbes: Learn the "Rules of Civil Life" and Stop Civil War

"The end of knowledge is power," Hobbes wrote. The point of thinking is to get things done. One of the most important tasks to achieve, he believed, having lived through the seventeenth-century English Civil War, is the cessation of wars.

Hobbes blamed civil wars on the citizens' ignorance of their moral duties: "The cause...of civil war is, that men know not the causes neither of war nor peace," he wrote. "Now, the knowledge of these rules [of civil life] is moral philosophy." More philosophy, more peace.

But this does not seem right. Many of the people who initiate civil wars surely have an over-developed sense of their moral duties as citizens, and they are outraged by people and institutions with fundamentally different beliefs. Such thinkers resort to violence, not for lack of philosophy, but for lack of dialogue with other philosophers.

If one of the warring sides is defending a political belief that is popularly considered to be more obviously right--perhaps democracy against totalitarianism, freedom against fear--then one could also argue it demeans the people and degrades their ideals to imply that both sides are ignorant, when one appears to be correct. It may also be unproductive to blame either side for a lack of education or moral literacy if each perceives itself to be defending itself against imminent physical aggression.

Source:
Thomas Hobbes. Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body. Part 1: Computation or Logic. Chapter 1: Of Philosophy. (1655, Latin; 1656, English.)

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See my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses Thomas Hobbes. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. If you buy a paid membership, you don't have to worry about the paywall.