The persecution of Christians in the USSR and the others communist regimes was recognized as Genocide
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Then why do you say it was not a genocide strictly legally-speaking? It most certainly fits the legal definition.
It was unofficially supported by the Empire. Now take this with a grain of salt because I read it on Wikipedia when I was 12 but apparently the perpetrators of the genocide were bandits who were backed by the state. Then the empire paid those groups with the land of their victims.
It is not true. We have telegrams and a plethora of documentation proving that the genocide was orchestrated from the very top of the Ottoman imperial government, most notoriously Enver Pasha. Not to mention the Ottoman state had a history of murdering Armenians, as exemplified by the Hamidian Massacres committed by the Ottoman army a few years before the Young Turk revolution.
Thanks for the information, sorry if I was spreading misinformation.
The problem is that the nature of international law means that the “legal” definition of genocide is actually a political one. Of course it’s going to be mealy-mouthed and inconsistently applied, because lacking any higher authority it’ll be subjected to the interests and wills of state actors, some of whom are more equal than others.
I've never really seen anybody call the Great Leap Forward a genocide. Even with the most liberal definitions, it doesn't fit... really anything outside of some of the worst governmental incompetence in human history, and even then on the whole it achieved its main goals. After a few years of complete and utter failure.
Yeah, the Great Leap Forward was monumental and malicious incompetence, but it lacks the intent and unchanging nature (usually ethnic) that the perpetrator views the victims as having that tend to be included in academic definitions of genocide that are applied with any serious degree of rigor. That latter aspect is also why I have to roll my eyes at the OPs suggestion that Marxist-Leninist behavior towards Christians was genocidal. Even Christians acknowledge that one can cease to be a Christian, even if they view such a move as theologically and usually also morally wrong. Likewise, both Communism in general and Marxist-Leninists more specifically also accept this and would spare many (though, not all) former Christians who renounced their Christianity from further persecution.
The Soviets did not view Christianity as inherent to a person and most persecutions of former Christians who abandoned their faith were based on paranoia that they were secretly still committed to the faith or some other evidence of what they regarded as "Anti-Soviet activities", not because they believed Christianity was an immutable and unchangeable characteristic of Christians. By contrast, a Jew in Nazi Germany, Armenian near the end of the Ottoman Empire, or a Tutsi in Rwanda could not renounce their Jewishness, Armenianess, or Tutsiness and expect to be spared in a similar manner because their persecutors did view those elements as a unchanging part of their very being.
The Soviets did not view Christianity as inherent to a person and most persecutions of former Christians who abandoned their faith were based on paranoia that they were secretly still committed to the faith or some other evidence of what they regarded as "Anti-Soviet activities", not because they believed Christianity was an immutable and unchangeable characteristic of Christians. By contrast, a Jew in Nazi Germany, Armenian near the end of the Ottoman Empire, or a Tutsi in Rwanda could not renounce their Jewishness, Armenianess, or Tutsiness and expect to be spared in a similar manner because their persecutors did view those elements as a unchanging part of their very being.
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Intended or actual destruction of a religious group arguably falls under the definition of genocide per the UN Genocide Convention, no matter whether religion may be a marker of ethnic or national identity.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Whether Soviet persecution of Christians rises to the level of genocide is debatable, but categorically dismissing the possibility that it might have constituted genocide out of hand would be IMO wrong since the Soviet state committed such crimes against Christians - but also against other religious groups - with arguably the intent to ultimately destroy Christianity and other religions within the USSR.
If Soviet persecution of Christian doesn't rise to the level of genocide, it would IMO fall under the definition of cultural genocide, the systematic destruction of a (cultural) group's traditions, beliefs etc. that makes them distinct from another (cultural group). Now, cultural genocide isn't defined as a matter of international law but AFAIK the concept has been discussed within the wider debate about genocide since the beginning.
From a cursory glance at Wikipedia, it looks like the Soviet state didn’t disproportionally single out Christianity and Christians for persecution, for example the destruction of mosques in Central Asia seems to have reached levels comparable to destruction of Orthodox churches in Russia in the same time period.
USSR anti-religious campaign (1928–1941) - Wikipedia
Do you have sources showing that Christianity and Christians were singled out for persecution in comparison to other religious groups within the territory of the USSR?
The destruction of religious groups is literally part of the definition of genocide in the UN charter. Also by that same standard the Cambodian genocide was not a genocide because the Angkor only attempted to exterminate urbanites. You can stop living in a city after all. It's not like they also targeted other characteristics of urbanism like wearing glasses and cosmopolitanism after all. They were leftists, they could do no wrong! (Sarcasm obviously)
We've actually already established in this very thread why the UN Charter is a bad definition. Remember my spiel earlier in the thread about how definitions in international law are actually political ones, not a strictly legal one? Now tell me: what type of law is the UN Charter?
It is a definition built to enable prosecution when politically convenient for a certain majority of members of the UN and all the members of the permanent security council. It is too broad in letter[1] and too narrow in practice[2], which has the addition of horribly tainting it's spirit (if the fact it was partly drafted by Stalin's Soviet Union didn't already do that). For the purposes of understanding genocide as a historical phenomenon, it might as well be useless.
[1] Every war in history has been undertaken to with the "intent to destroy" at least "in part" "a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" via "killing members of the group", "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group", and "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". Yet I'm sure we can both agree that it would be stupid to say every single war in history has been a genocide.
[2] Only two genocides have ever actually been recognized by the UN: the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide. Every other attempt by the UN to recognize any other event as a genocide has foundered either by getting voted down in the General Assembly or a Security Council veto.
Now this? This I can buy. Yeah, the distinction between “cultural genocide” and just plain “genocide” did come to mind and I can definitely see a convincing argument mounted that’s the case. But on the other hand, Christianity - as an universalist religion like Islam or Buddhism and not an ethnically embedded one like Judaism - isn’t so much a culture entirely as it is an element within many different cultures. But then we don’t really have a better term for an attempted killing of a religion without necessarily killing off the culture it’s within. I’d coin the term “Theocide” if I could, but alas I don’t have that influence.
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I've seen the Great Leap Forward called genocide on many occasions. It does not meet the UN definition, because unimaginable stupidity and negligence of oversight are not included in the factors. It is even somewhat difficult to label it, overall as a "Crime Against Humanity", mainly because the term actually refers to a series of programs/actions that are each, separately, a Crime Against Humanity.
That the Great Leap Forward can not be "properly" called "Genocide" in a legal sense is an indictment of the way the Convention is written, not any sort of indication that it did not result, using the upper end of the estimates, in the deaths of more human beings over a four year period than the 3rd Reich and USSR managed during the Reigns of Hitler and Stalin combined
It should be noted that the limitations identified in the UN definition were that it was deliberately limited in scope to allow the signatories to avoid condemnation for their own actions. You seem to be advocating for the opposite. That the UN definition is too broad since it includes religious groups as a target of genocide. This seems to go against your premise that the UN definition is lacking due to political interference since it is unlikely any of the signatories were shielded due to the definition being broader.
Partly, but that falls under the “too limited in practice” part of my post.
Lol, what? That’s not what I actually said was the problem with the UN definition in being too broad in the letter was at all. Reread my footnote there and get back too me with an actual response too it.
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I mean, that the Soviets committed an atrocity against one of their own people and that it was awful isn't in dispute. The precise nature of the atrocity is what's in dispute. The difference in all the quibbling is more academic than it is moral. We're sarcastic about because this forum is full of snarky assholes, myself included.
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I'm a little bit bummed that I'm never going to find out how Tsarist Russia was going to become the world's richest country by the 1930s
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