What Counts As Genocide?

 I regularly attend a lot of monthly book clubs. Like, six (or more) each month. It might actually be too many, but it's fun to see all the different groups of people, so I will likely stick with them all for a while. I attended one on Wednesday where we read "The Lost Year" by Katherine Marsh. The book is a middle grade story that follows three narrators; a boy living through quarantine in 2020 with his mother and great-grandmother, who is 100 years old and was a Ukrainian refugee during the Holodomor. In case you didn't know (as I didn't), the Holodomor was the great Ukrainian famine in 1932-33, which was orchestrated by the USSR government and killed millions of people in Ukraine. The other two narrators in the book are cousins living in Brooklyn, NY and Kyiv, Ukraine during the timeframe of the Holodomor, one of whom is the grandmother in the present-time narration. 

This book was heartbreaking, mostly because of its depiction of a human-made famine. For the most part, Ukrainians would have had enough food for their own survival, but the government wasn't allowing them to keep enough to survive. It calls to mind the more widely known Irish potato famine, where the British forced the Irish to give up what little food survived the potato blight to the point that they Irish weren't able to subsist on the food they had left. At one point in the book, a child gives a description of soldiers coming to demand food from her mother, insisting that they must have kept some hidden for themselves because they hadn't met their quota of contributions, all the while the mother and three children were clearly succumbing to starvation. It was brutal to read and I kept thinking, "Who could do this?!? Who could look at people so clearly malnourished and insist they were being selfish and withholding food meant for others??" 

But the reality is that stories like this are still happening. Look at the forced starvation happening in Gaza right now. Those people have no idea when food or supplies or relief will arrive because it's being withheld from them. This is the most immediate and obvious example in the current world, but another example I thought of while reading was a bit closer to home. 

Right now in Austin, the weather forecast says the temperatures will barely go above freezing for the next week. That's not crazy cold for other places, but it's pretty damn cold for here. Houses here weren't built for weather like this. Almost nobody has a basement and all of the plumbing is directly under the house and still above-ground. When the weather gets close to freezing we're supposed to leave all our faucets dripping to (hopefully) avoid frozen and burst pipes. But these inconveniences are nothing to what the unhoused population in the city faces. Just days ago homeless encampments were being swept out and trashed. What little these people have been able to accumulate for themselves is totally gone in mere hours. What will these folks do when the temperature is deathly cold? There are some resources available, like warming shelters, and the library is an often-used resource for people without homes- but the library will be closed today and tomorrow in observance of MLK day. So that option is unavailable to them during this critically cold time. It's scary.

I brought up homelessness as an example of socially acceptable genocide in our society, and I think it blew the mind of the librarian who runs that book club. Now, the technical definition of genocide according to the Oxford English Dictionary is "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." Perhaps disregard for people experiencing homelessness doesn't completely fit that definition, but it comes pretty close. Too close for comfort, in my opinion. I don't know how many panhandlers I drive pass each day, but I rarely give out money to them and I know I'm not alone in that. As "successful" members of society, we view these people as a blight, as an inconvenience, as dangerous, as any number of things but most especially as lesser than. These people, who exist on the fringes of society, are barely seen as human. We have collectively decided to overlook them in our daily routines and it often comes at the price of their lives. We look the other way when winter weather comes and kills these people. Or when they die of heat exhaustion in 115° temperatures in the summer. 

I'm not saying that it is each individual's burden to care for every person in need they see, but I do think it's important to address how, on a systemic level, we have deemed certain members of the population sub-human and refuse to give them access to life-saving resources. Because really, in America (or anywhere in the world) if people are dying because of cold or hunger it is because a choice has been made not to help them. There is absolutely no reason for those things to ever cause deaths here, let alone with regularity, and yet people will die in Austin in the next week because they couldn't find somewhere to be safe and warm to ride out the cold snap. People die every day because of preventable hunger. People keep dying in Gaza under Israeli occupation and we, as US citizens, are culpable. I'm not sure how we got to a point where we justify preventable death and even murder. I'm not sure why such cognitive dissonance exists around the value of human life. 

But what I do know is that some day, hopefully not too long in the future, it will be glaringly obvious that what's happening in Palestine right now is genocide. That what's happening there is inherently wrong and evil. And I suspect that someday within my own lifetime, young people who have to learn about this genocide through history lessons will wonder how people could possibly have been so callous about human pain and suffering and we'll have to chose to either face the reality of our decisions or double down on the cognitive dissonance (and based on American history, I wouldn't be shocked if we chose the latter). I know that when we consider how we might have behaved if witnessing the Holocaust or the American Civil Rights movement or any other well documented, state-sanctioned violence, we need only consider how we're reacting right now to human rights atrocities happening in Palestine.