100% cosigned. I talked to some random internet stranger, more than two years ago, who was willing to tolerate someone else NOT thinking it was a genocide - a very rare experience - and asked him to explain what makes people so instantly sure it's a genocide. His explanation was that "a lot of people are being killed."
I don't remember where we ended up beyond, "that is a thing that happens in war." But people are very "this is the first war I've ever paid any attention to."
I still vividly remember having to read All Quiet on the Western Front in high school, where soldiers are dying coughing up their own lungs because the chemical weapons are so bad.
I remember reading multiple British kids' books that start out with the kids being sent on trains, with their gas masks and hardly any belongings, to villages in the country, to be placed with total strangers who just show up at the train station to get them. Because their parents are hoping that if they send their kids to live with strangers in the country, the kids will survive the Blitz.
For fuck's sake, that's what the entire Narnia series is about.
For at least a year, it boggled my mind that everyone could have forgotten these things. That that's what bombing a place indiscriminately looks like. That that's still not a genocide, because it's not an attempt to wipe a people off the map. That it doesn't contain ANY of the hallmarks of a genocide either.
That there ARE hallmarks of genocides, if you study them as a whole. Burning entire villages and towns to the ground at once, in the process of trying to burn everyone to death who you can't get to otherwise. Systematic sexual violence. Mutilation. In a genocide, you double-tap people like you're trying to kill zombies.
When archaeologists aren't sure whether a mass grave is from genocide, or from something else - war, natural disaster, plague, etc - they look at whether the bodies were desecrated, or treated respectfully. In a genocide, you see bodies that are broken, that have clearly been tortured or mutilated, that are missing parts consistently enough that it has to have been deliberate. You see bodies that were shot before being burned, burned before being buried, or shot and then shot dozens more times.
You don't see a lot of airstrikes. It's too impersonal. Too distanced.
If some group was trying to commit genocide through airstrikes, they would do what Russia did in Mariupol. They wouldn't hit part of a shelter by accident. They wouldn't leave survivors who could tell others about it. They sure as fuck wouldn't spend almost two years doing it and take out 3% of the population of the area, or 1.3% of the population of the country. They wouldn't leave the people able to cross a border into Egypt.
They would surround the entire area. Cut off all power, internet, radio, TV, water, and supplies. Keep them cut off for as long as it took, until the last civilian died or surrendered.
They would bomb every shelter hard enough to take out everyone in the building, and then they would do it again just in case. And then they might come back and double-tap it again, to make sure.
And, like Russia, as soon as they took the area - in Mariupol's case, by killing 75,000 civilians in 3 months - they would wipe out all evidence of Ukrainian language, history, and culture.
THAT, you could argue is genocide: the war that everyone erased so they could put all their eyes on Gaza.
We only know about how bad Mariupol was because of reporters who hid out there, staying till the last possible moment.
We only know how bad the RSF is because the Yale Humanitarian Lab has figured out how to track its current, ongoing genocide through satellite photos - and because the piles of dead bodies and the blood are big enough to see from space.
It's the ones where you don't hear the death tolls from anyone on the ground that you have to worry about.
And also the ones where you do -- and you're hearing death tolls an order of magnitude higher, or death rates an order of magnitude faster, than Gaza. Like Iran, where the dictatorship killed an estimated 40,000 protesters in 2 days -- a number of deaths it took Israel about 310 days to reach.
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