It doesn’t help at all that the definition of “Genocide” has become so muddied as to be almost a liability rather than a useful term. China detaining Uighurs (often spuriously) suspected of extremism and making them sing patriotic songs is genocide. Russia invading Ukraine is genocide… somehow. I honestly don’t know what Libs think Russia is doing that is genocide because I got sick of listening to them ages ago. The 1932 famine is genocide, and even if you finally get them to admit that it wasn’t intentional and there were many factors that combined to lead to the deaths, and that the Soviets did, eventually, badly, try to provide relief, they’ll still say it was genocide because the word is just vibes now.

And most of them here “Genocide” once and assume that China is feeding Uighurs in to a giant wood-chipper. Like, don’t get me worng, China’s treatment of Uighurs a few years ago when their counter-terror operation was going was unfair and clearly in violation of western concepts of civil rights, but what provably happened is that people were arrested, held in detention for a few months (and made to sing dumb patriotic songs for reasons i can’t fathom), and then released. I’m sure that caused a lot of hardship and upset, but it’s so far from genocide that the accusation is farcical. And the actual goal of the government; Quashing Salafist infiltration and terrorism in the region, is never mentioned or considered because that would require evaluating it against the west’s “Kill em all and let god sort them out” approach to counter terrorism.

Same with Ukraine. People act like Russia is rounding up Ukrainian’s and feeding them in to wood chippers. There was all that totally fabricated BS about mobile crematoriums early in the war, reporting that Putin was going to destroy Ukrainian people and culture. They presented the massacre of civilians at Bucha as part of a systematic program of extermination, even after it turned out that most of those people were probably killed unintentionally by shrapnel from air bursting artillery (not excusing this, it just wasn’t part of any official or unofficial program of mass killing). When in reality the RF was shockingly restrained in it’s attacks on infrastructure and places with a high likelihood of civilian casualties for months and months in to the war. The US’s approarch to shock and awe warfare is to flatten everything and destroy as much infrastructure as possible on day one, while the RF spent months carefully avoiding damage to the infrastructure that Ukrainians relied on. And forgive me for being an optimist and believing in humanity, but the only reason I can see for that restraint is that they didn’t want to cause unneccesary suffering and hardship for Ukrainian civilians. That might have been hard headed pragmatism; Don’t antagonize people who might form an insurgency against you, but it also might just be, you know… Russia and Ukraine are deeply interconnected nations and cultures that had a friendly relationship with borders that were basically a formality for nearly a century, and this ultra-nationalist Nazi turn only really took power in 2014.