MeanwhileOnGrad
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
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This is not a position that would be taken seriously by most scholars of genocide, including the man who coined the very term genocide, and would exclude the vast majority of genocides, including the Native American genocides, from the term. Ethnic cleansing itself is, by definition, genocide.
In the sense that you are using 'exterminated', no, they generally were not. Most Native polities were reduced by restriction of movement, impoverishment, and destruction of their way of life. All the massacres performed by white genocidaires in Native American history, horrific and repulsive as they are, are only a tiny percentage of the reduction and elimination of Native peoples in the vast majority of the USA.
Obviously we're talking about a huge range of events both geographically and temporally here, so it's hard to make any concise statement that applies to the whole process. But I feel there was an extensive effort both through direct killings and other violent policies to eliminate (or at least dramatically reduce) many native tribes. So to me that goes beyond the situation in Xinjiang and meets my standard.
I'm not a genocide scholar so maybe you're right that my definition is too specific. However, my impression is that Lemkin had a much broader definition of genocide than how the term has come to be used by most people, including experts. As you said, words are powerful, but they are also used slightly differently by different people. There needs to be space for some good-faith disagreement without immediately jumping to "you're basically a nazi if you don't agree on my classification of every violent event in history" which seems to be the de facto opinion of everyone on Lemmy--including all sides of this debate.