I don’t think you can: committing a crime makes you a criminal; while, obviously, not all actions carried out by a criminal are crimes.

Your legalistic definition just doesn’t work in real life and you only invoke it to muddy the water when you got hots for one particular monster ot another. You probably won’t insist on the guilty verdict to call Hitler or bin Laden a criminal.

I used to work a dock with a guy who claimed he fought the Sandinistas. He certainly claimed the fighting in the East was genocide, but then he thought pretty much everything the Sandinistas did was genocide since they were trying to erase his culture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meskito_Indians

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Miskito supported the Contras, and many anti-Sandinista groups were formed, and composed entirely of Miskito tribesmen. As a result, the people often incurred fierce retribution from Sandinista guerillas, with reported massacres of Miskito.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista

Lacking support from the population in that part of the country, Sandinista troops committed their most controversal activities (as far as human rights are concerned) on the Atlantic Coast, including the forcible relocation of 8,500 Miskito from their land to create free-fire zones for combatting the Contras. They also killed and imprisoned several indigenous people suspected of Contra collaboration. On two separate occasions in 1981 and 1982, Sandinista troops committed massacres in which approximately (UNHCR Report) 34 Miskito Indians died. However many Sandinista supporters claim this pales in comparison to the 100,000+ murderered by the Contras. [1]

But if you want to count the treatment of the Miskito Indians as genocide, then the contra attacks were genocidal, the Honduran death squads (tiny compared to what was going on in El Salvador and Guatemala) were genocidal, and what happened in Guatemala was ultra, super genocidal. The Vietnam War was genocidal on a monstrous level—I’d almost be willing to defend that proposition, but Daniel Ellsberg disagreed, though literally millions of Vietnamese peasants were bombed out of their homes. Some of America’s actions in Iraq are “genocidal” by your definition (see Fallujah). What Israel did in 1948 more than qualifies as genocide, by the Jet definition—they massacred hundreds of Palestinians and forced the majority (hundreds of thousands) from their homes and in the later stages of the war, they did this for demographic and not military reasons. That is, at the beginning of the war, according to Benny Morris, the Israeli expulsions were motivated by military considerations (similar to why the Sandinistas moved the Miskitos), but by the end of the war they wanted to greatly alter the demographic balance. Incidentally, in saying “military considerations” I’m not giving my benediction to either the Sandinistas or the Israelis. I’m normally a harsh critic of Israel, but I don’t call their actions in 1948 genocide because, well, I don’t think that using words inaccurately would make me a better person.

By the way, you don’t seem to know much about the chronology of what happened in Nicaragua—the worst acts of Sandinista brutality towards the Miskitos happened in the early 80’s. That’s when the Reagan Administration started using the word genocide, at the very same time they were denying the (comparable or larger) atrocities of the contras and the vastly more numerous murders of their pals in El Salvador and Guatemala. Your argument that in hindsight we know that the Sandinistas were guilty of genocide and at the time a reasonable person could have thought the contras and Sandinistas were equally evil just isn’t how it all happened.

With that said, I’m out of here.

I guess in your eyes it can’t be genocide if it is just a small tribe of native Americans in Central America and the aggressors help make Reagan look bad. But you’d probably have a different take on the matter if it was a small tribe murdered and displaced by the 19th century US government. And I love all your flack you throw up about the other horrible things going on in order to make the “tiny” matter of the Miskotos not so bad in comparison. If it was genocide in Kosovo, then it was genocide in Nicaragua.

“the sort of evidence that says that because the Sandinistas and Stalin were both Marxists, they were both guilty of genocide.” Yeah, obviously the lesson to be drawn from the Moskitos is that if the Sandinistas would have been as powerful as Stalin they would have been absolutely nothing like him, right? Is that the “flaw” in my logic? The free fire zones, the bombing of civilians, the mass starvations, is that the difference?

According to dictionary.com as well as webster.com, in the civilised part of the world a ‘criminal’ is…

One that has committed or been legally convicted of a crime.

Dropping bombs at midnight (or midday for that matter) and causing collateral damage is not terrorism per se.

This simply is not true in the case of the proposed legislation.

Bob b at 90: Relax: Dewsbury and Beeston are safe from bulldozing at the moment. However, Tony is obviously learning from the Israelis: a senior Met policeman was in Jerusalem last week for a few lessons from Israeli cops. I guess some Labour voters regard blowing up the Tube as a ‘universal crime’.

sean at 94: Dropping bombs at midnight (or midday for that matter) and causing collateral damage is not terrorism per se. Targeting innocent civilians is. As for anti-Semitism, double standards applied to Jews/Israel is a useful rule of thumb.

maunga at 97: Oy vey, boychik. What did they put into your chicken soup?!

The purpose of blog comments is not to say YesYes! to parts of posts you agree with. BTW I am not a CDU supporter. Maybe the inaccurate assumption that I was has been the cause of all your rancour, and your irritation with me for things that I do not say? That assumption is rather amusing given your thoughts about generalisations below. I am not defending, nor do I have a responsibility to defend, anything except what I write. Your assumption here betrays your childishly personal and ad hominem way of arguing and, perhaps, thinking.

“amazing lumping of all German Turks into a single monolithic group, as well as the apparent implied support for discrimination”

A remarkable and bizarre comment. When talking about German Turks as a group, I make generalisations, of course, as I did with regard to several other groups. So did you, just less plausible ones. And the suggestion that there was any support for discrimination WHATSOEVER implied is another disgrace for your intellect, and further evidence for a casual approach to insulting people, just when I thought it was not possible for you go further. Arguing that disadvantaged ethnic groups commonly vote their interests in redistribution rather than their social conservatism in no ways whatsoever implies approval for the sources of their disadvantage (duh!), which obviously include discrimination (duh!).

I think I’ll have one more go at this before taking up your advice to get drunk and shout at myself.

And yes, perhaps electoral tension does have me on tenterhooks, even though (or perhaps rather, specifically because) I am relegated to an observer’s role.

You didn’t defend Kauder’s remark. But nor did you attack it. I doubt very much that Kauder is personally a racist. But that simply makes him all the worse; just as Dick Cheney is probably no homophobe, but is willing to cavil at homophobia for electoral benefit. Insofar as I understand the ideals ‘Christian democracy’ purports to champion, I should have expected any decent supporter of the Union to be all over Kauder’s remark. You weren’t, though. (In fairness, I have some friends who strongly support the Union and absolutely hate that sort of thing.)

Also suspect is your amazing lumping of all German Turks into a single monolithic group, as well as the apparent implied support for discrimination (that another respondent pointed out). Here I am wiling to give you the benefit of the doubt and presume, absent further evidence, that this was down merely to linguistic imprecision on your part.

What remains, however you might like to spin things, is that the Union parties in Germany are, to an extent that should be inconceivable in the post-Nazi world, völkisch belastet. There is no possible excuse for that.

In the unlikely event you wish to continue this chat, we should do it at afoe or else by email; we are wandering much too far OT here. To touch briefly back on topic, though I agree with you that the 20.7. conspirators didn’t target innocent civilians (though truly innocent German civilians would have been few and far between in those days). But most cases aren’t quite so clear cut. One of the examples cited was ETA’s ridding Spain of Franco’s designated successor. I have no use for ETA. They are normally little more concerned about innocent civilians than are the IRA; and indeed, though I do not generally like violence, it is a pity that insufficient violence has been brought to bear on ETA. But this particular act was a service to decency, no matter who performed it. So tell us, would it have been better had Franco’s plans not been disrupted as they were?

Brendan