The distinction is that Jews can and indeed repeatedly have been rounded up and slaughtered. Not something that will ever happen to 'men' as a whole class (who would do it? Women?)
Ummm what? This is maybe the dumbest thing I've ever read.
The Massacre of the Bani Qurayza (627 AD): According to Islamic sources, during the siege of Medina in the aftermath of the Battle of the Trench, the Jewish tribe of Bani Qurayza was accused of conspiring with the attacking Meccans against the Muslim community. After the Meccans retreated, Prophet Muhammad's followers turned against the Bani Qurayza. The men were executed en masse, while the women and children were enslaved.
The Sack of Isfahan (1387): Timur, the Turko-Mongol conqueror, laid siege to the city of Isfahan, which was then part of the Jalayirid Sultanate. When the city finally fell, Timur reportedly ordered that every soldier in his army should return with at least two severed human heads. The total number of people killed is estimated to have been about 200,000. Women and children were often spared to be taken as slaves.
The Massacre of Nanking (1937): Also known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking, this atrocity was committed during the Sino-Japanese War when the Imperial Japanese Army captured the city of Nanking. Over a period of six weeks, mass killings, rapes, and looting were perpetrated against the city's residents. While not every man was killed, the death toll was incredibly high, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Many women were raped, and some were killed or taken away.
Srebrenica Massacre (1995): This was the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II, perpetrated during the Bosnian War. Over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically executed by units of the Bosnian Serb Army. Women, children, and some elderly men were forcibly transferred and deported, making it an example of ethnic cleansing.
The Assyrian Empire: The Assyrians, who built a powerful empire in ancient Mesopotamia, were notorious for their brutal military tactics. Their treatment of conquered peoples often included mass killings, forced deportations, and enslavement. However, it's important to note that not every city they conquered was subjected to this treatment; it was often employed as a form of psychological warfare, to intimidate other cities into surrendering without a fight.
The Mongol Empire: While not exactly "ancient" by some definitions, the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors in the 13th and 14th centuries were known for their ruthless conquests. Cities that resisted Mongol rule could expect no mercy; the men would often be killed and the women taken as slaves or wives. This strategy was also a form of psychological warfare, encouraging other cities to surrender without a fight to avoid a similar fate.
The Roman Empire: The Romans are known for their tactic of "decimation", which involved killing one in every ten men in a unit as punishment for serious infractions, like desertion or cowardice. But when it came to conquered peoples, the Romans were sometimes ruthlessly thorough. For example, after the Third Punic War, the Romans reportedly killed or enslaved the entire population of Carthage.
Right, but not men as a whole class simply for being men. They were killed for being men from the opposing side (perhaps killing women and children was considered too barbaric, or women were considered useful for some reason). With the exception of your last example, where decimation was used as punishment for serious infractions, again not simply for being men.
I trust you can appreciate the distinction, if you think this through a little.
If only the men are killed because women are considered useful, is that really so different from men being killed simply for being men?
As for the whole whether "Kill all <historically persecuted/minority group>" should be considered equivalent to "Kill all men", I suppose one way to justify treating them differently is the likelihood of anyone actually taking such a suggestion seriously. We know there's been at least one massive-scale attempt to kill (virtually) all Jews, and we know there are still people around today who admire the ideology behind that and could potentially develop the capability to carry out such an attempt - I don't think, despite the list of examples just given, you could seriously suggest there's a group of people with sufficient admiration of an ideology that says "all men should die" and a capability to attempt carrying it out.
But should it be assumed that you can appreciate that distinction? What it is to be a man is /rooted/ in being killed for being men from the opposing side for millions of years. There is no biological purpose for low status man, which is in stark contrast to women of all status.
They were conscripted for being men, and then sent into battle to die, or be decimated, or what have you.
> They were killed for being men from the opposing side (perhaps killing women and children was considered too barbaric, or women were considered useful for some reason).
Or because they were men and thus seen as being future potential combatants where women and children were not. Men were seen as potentially future detriments and thus were killed.
The distinction is thin to the point of being indistinguishable.
Under that logic, eugenics isn't genocide either. The intent isn't to eliminate a specific group, it's to get rid of some trait they attribute to that group.
I'm not aware of any instances where Jewish people were rounded up purely for being Jewish. There was always some misguided and wrong justification, like a belief that the plague was caused by Jewish people poisoning wells, or that their numbers were enough to threaten the Christian institutions, or that they sabotaged the war effort. In other words, they were perceived as "the opposing side" in one misguided way or another.
I can't recall any sort of -cide where the cause is purely because of membership in some group. In purely practical terms, it's too expensive and too large an undertaking to randomly decide to do. There's always some kind of twisted logic underneath it.
> I'm not aware of any instances where Jewish people were rounded up purely for being Jewish. There was always some misguided and wrong justification, like a belief that the plague was caused by Jewish people poisoning wells
At that point though, those Jewish people were in fact persecuted and murdered purely because of their ethnicity. It matters not that the persecution was justified with stories of poisoned wells. What matters is that those stories pertained directly to a specific ethnical group, and that group was subsequently hunted.
Sure, and I'd agree with that. My point is that under GP's argument of "it wasn't because they were men, it's because they were from the other side" the same thing applies to other instances of persecution.
Flimsy excuses either matter or they don't, and the application is universal.
Longtime lurker here. I am taken aback by the suggestion that Jews have never been rounded up purely for being Jewish. I find this notion historically unfounded and antisemitic.
Your comment broadly argues that killing of one group by another is never done with purity of intention. I submit almost nothing people do is for its own sake, but rather woven within individual and collective stories. To think otherwise is to deny the role narrative plays in human consciousness.
A cursory glance through a list like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom shows numerous examples of massacres of Jews (and others, but mostly Jews). The attackers always claim justifications--again, no group attacks any other group without somehow justifying it to itself, either initially or post-hoc.
1. What about the many massacres of the Jews for rejecting Christianity? Surely those are examples of being rounded up for the sake of being Jewish, since the Jewish religion is incompatible with, for example, the concept of the divinity of Jesus. A key point here is that Judaism is a tribal and not universal religion. Thus, it is hard to divorce attacks on the Jewish religion from attacks on the Jewish people.
2. What about the massacres justified by absurd pretenses, such as (As you mentioned) poisoning wells, corrupting the host (Communion), or the blood libel (That Jews kill Christian children and use their blood to bake Matzo). These justifications, which do not hold up to scrutiny, only work for a population that wants to believe them in the first place. The sheer number of nonsensical justifications points to the underlying fact--there is no justification at all.
3. Need I mention the Holocaust, in which the stated aim of the Nazis was to eliminate the Jewish race? Even those with Jewish ancestry but with no religious practices (and who were not considered Jews by themselves or other Jews) were nonetheless sent to the death camps.
By the way, I have focused on historical violence from the Christian world, but this is not to the exclusion of violence from the Islamic world, of which there has been much as well.
In sum, if there was ever an example of a group persecuted for purely "being themselves", it is the Jews.
I appear to have struck a nerve, and I apologize for the offense. My intent wasn't to imply or argue that Jewish people have never been persecuted. I would agree that Jewish people have certainly been persecuted for their faith.
My point was primarily that in a world view where flimsy excuses like the side of a combatant makes something not a gendered massacre, those same flimsy excuses would also apply to other instances of mass killings. I'm essentially arguing that if a mass killing predominantly or solely impacts a certain group of people, then it counts as a targeted killing of that group. The justification is largely irrelevant.
Given the 2 responses, I apparently did a poor job of conveying that and should have been more clear.
Thank you for clarifying. I'm interested in your argument, but confess I don't understand it.
Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all. And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism. But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers? And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
Apologies for the delay, life has been busy the past couple of days.
> Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all.
Certainly, but I don't think those actions are the troubling part. The troubling parts come before and after. The decision to only conscript men (that part'll be below), and the decisions to conduct massacres after combat had ceased. It wasn't uncommon to massacre the male civilian population once a city had been seized or an army subdued. The strongest counter argument there to me is that women weren't killed, but rape may have been prevalent. I don't know what the occurrence would have been in those situations, and I don't want to hazard an uneducated guess.
> And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism.
To some degree. The minimum age for Roman conscription was 16, and I think that gap is a lot closer when you're comparing fully grown women against boys. In other words, if conscription was gated by some kind of "minimum strength requirement" where the lower bound was set by 16 year old boys, I think the sexual dimorphism claim loses some weight.
Even then, some of these events happened after the invention of the firearm where raw strength became almost entirely removed from the "who wins a fight" question.
> But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers?
Sure, but they weren't. To turn it around a little bit, would it not seem problematic to forcibly place solely a particular group of people into an incredibly dangerous job? If only Native Americans were eligible for conscription, I don't think "but other races would be killed too, they just aren't soldiers" would be an acceptable excuse.
> And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
The likeness, to me, is that they have the same end result, but with different mechanisms. A mass killing is hunting down people with the intent to kill them. Conscription is hunting down people with the intent of repeatedly exposing them to events with a high probability of killing them.
I do think the moral valences are divergent. Genocides seem to be an act of outright hate to me, where conscription largely strikes me as the result of indifference. They both end with a lot of deaths of a somewhat homogenous group of people, though.
So violence is fine because it's not as bad as some other horrific events in the past? The barometer shouldn't be the frequency of violence reaching a certain threshold. It's should be zero for everyone.
You should genuinely be embarrassed at this remarkably stupid and pathetic distinction.
The point is that the threat cannot be real (to the class as a whole). Indeed, it is hard to consider it real to an individual, unless you think there are gangs of women going around beating up men just for being men.
Surely you can see the distinction between a real and possible threat, that might genuinely put fear into the object class, and words that can never be actioned? "Kill all men" might as well say "beware of the vicious rabbit"
> The juror stated that he found that Depp and Heard "were both abusive to each other" but that Heard's team failed to prove that Depp's abuse was physical.
Not sure how any of that substantiates whatever point it is you are trying to make. Unless making allegations of violence is now considered violence itself?
Plenty (in fact the majority) of Jews murdered in the Holocaust were not German.
They were murdered because they were Jews. In your examples the men were murdered for being on the opposing side, and so a possible threat (unlike the women and children).
This comment presumes a modern understanding of citizenship. Jews living in Germany were seen as Jews, not Germans (just as Jews in Russia were not seen as Russians). This humorous quote by Einstein is based on this notion: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/93643-if-my-theory-of-relat...
I admit I used the word "citizenship" in an inaccurate manner. Please allow me to clarify and correct myself.
In terms of technical, legal citizenship, that (presumably) became available to Jews in Germany upon their emancipation in 1871. This opportunity was revoked a mere 64 years later in 1935 with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. Citizenship in this sense is a modern invention.
What I meant above was citizenship in the sense of belonging to a particular group. A person could be a German in a legal or social sense, and I meant it in a social sense. The Jews were never seen as being "authentically" German. They were seen as a foreign people living on German land. This certainly contributed to the ease at which their legal status was stripped.
Thus, not a single Jew who was a German (in either sense) was murdered in the Holocaust, since that is an empty category.
By the way, this attitude wasn't particular to Germany, but all over Europe, from Russia to France.
Well you see, war rape is actually not a women's rights issue. After all, women aren't raped because they're women, they're raped because they're women from the opposing side. It's completely different!
(Before anyone takes it seriously: this is a parody of how stupid the parent sounds.)
