Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.
America did it to my people and never called it what it was and never made amends, and now Americans moralize to me about events across the planet lol
Y’all ever notice that arguments about how to call something steal oxygen away from what to do about it?
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass-murder are just words. Calling it a pumpkin pie won’t bring back one dead child.
Reality is independent from language. Words borrow meaning, they’re not the source of it.
There’s no such thing as just words.
Language is humanity’s superpower. It’s what allows us to share ideas, pass down knowledge generationaly, specialize labor, and form communities.
Words have meaning, and intentionally avoiding words that accurately describe events is incredibly harmful. There’s a reason that when a school is bombed, they call a bunch of the 13-17yo victims “military-aged males” instead of “children.”
Isn’t “ethnic cleansing” itself a euphemism for genocide?
No, ethnic cleansing does not necessarily imply killing. It is the forced depopulation of an area, which can be by means of deportation, economic pressure, threat of violence, etc. Genocide is the most extreme form of ethnic cleansing.
Genocide also doesn’t imply killing.
No, genocide is explicitly defined as:
the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genocide
-Cide is to kill or killing, and is derived from Middle French, from Latin -cida, from caedere to cut, kill
Yes, and you can destroy a group by means other than killing its members, such as forced sterilization, systematic abuse, or the transfer of children away from the community. It’s the demo that’s being killed, not necessarily its individual members.