I tend to eschew the traditional political dogma of ‘left’ vs ‘right’ finding myself making decisions on a case by case basis rather than on the basis of what a particular party platform plank has to say. However, one trend that is becoming increasingly distressing is the frequency with which the ‘left’ bandies about terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘denier’.
Without getting into a drawn out debate on climate change I find myself asking some troubling questions when proponents of climate change are quick to dismiss critics as ‘climate change deniers’. The parallel, of course, is with holocaust deniers.
The trend continues this week with an article where Dr. Julio Montaner, president of the International AIDS Society, accuses the Conservatives of genocide. In a Yahoo News Article he says,
“When you neglect purposely a percentage of the population that can be defined on the basis of a particular characteristic, that’s genocide. And I will tell you that is exactly what they are doing,”
Now, I may not be a doctor – or president of the International AIDS Society – but I do know that the good doctor’s definition of genocide is particularly wanting. A quick hop to wikipedia gives us the following:
Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.
While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2, of this convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”[1]
Avoiding the moral and political debate that surrounds the efficacy of safe injection sites that isn’t really germane to this post I find myself again focussing on the ease with which someone from the left-end of the political spectrum throws around the term ‘genocide’.
This constant barrage of quotes from pundits, protesters, and sundry other people does nothing to raise the quality of debate and succeeds only in polarizing opinions. Further, it trivializes the suffering of real victims of genocide, like the people of Darfur, of Rwanda, and of the 6+ million Jews killed during WW2.
I’m sure they’d all agree that not having a place to shoot up is the least of their problems.
We may not be able to erase the suffering of victims of genocide, but its immoral to trivialize their suffering by comparing mundane events in the present day to past horrors.
- Rafael.
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