I think it’s more like should be deep consideration on how can the United States of America as a country acknowledge that it committed genocide against several nations and discussion on how to best support the survivors of that genocide. There are living people now who are survivors of genocidal policies like forced sterilization and family separation; how is the United States acknowledging and supporting them?
What is the test for deciding whether a policy is “genocidal”?
And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies? They are in some sense, double harmful?
> What is the test for deciding whether a policy is “genocidal”?
I'm pretty sure "if the policy was driven by a desire for genocide, or results in genocide" would cover it.
> And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies?
Some things are worse than other things and we react different accordingly. The justice system of.... well, virtually every society with laws, is based on that idea. You do something bad, you get consequence X. You do something worse, you get consequence Y. The law says specifically what's worse than what other thing and what happens.
The only time that a lot of different things has had the same consequence was the Draconian constitution, which everybody agreed was shit. However, they all liked that it differentiated between different degrees of similar acts, and we still do today.
Right, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think the label genocide adds anything to the conversation. We can say there were this many murders and this many sterilizations and this much property damage and then do whatever restitution calculation. It’s being or not being genocide seems irrelevant.
Genocide has a specific meaning of a specific set of policies with the intention of causing a group of people to become utterly extinct. I’m surprised you’re unaware of this technical term?
