Relax, It's Not Technically Genocide

By 2030, Elon Musk is projected to have killed about 14 million people, and I think that should be the primary thing that he is known for. I think this fact should be in the first paragraph of his Wikipedia entry and that it should come before mentions of him being the head of a car company. I think that Elon Musk being known primarily for cars and rockets should sound as weird to us as Charles Manson being known primarily as a musician.

 You might not actually know this about Elon Musk because nobody really talks about it, and that’s because, as is my understanding, what Musk did was not technically a genocide. Genocide has a very specific definition as per the United Nations. To wit:

 Any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

 -          Killing members of the group;
-          Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
-          Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
-          Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
-          Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

 When Donald Trump was elected and temporarily deputized Elon Musk as the de facto administrator of the federal government, his first act was to completely shutter the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a broad agency responsible for helping feed, educate, and combat disease, among other things, in developing nations around the world. Without this aid, millions of these people will die. We have already almost reached the first million deaths milestone. To link this with something that actually has reached the media: this is why Ebola is ripping through the Congo right now.

You can say what you want about America’s responsibility to do this in the first place and you can say what you want about Soft Power being Bad Actually and you can say what you want about the third world’s overreliance on aid being a long term net harm, whatever whatever. The fact remains that they didn’t end USAID by trying to wean nations off of it or wind it down in a way that would limit the harm of ending it. As Musk boasted, he “fed it into a woodchipper” in one weekend. He fucking loved doing this. Aid workers around the world were told to drop what they were doing and get on the first plane home to receive their termination letter. Ships halfway across the Atlantic laden with food and medicine were turned around and their cargo destroyed as its intended recipients just buckled over and died.

 Elon Musk and everyone else who signed off on immediately ending USAID knew that it was going to kill lots of people. I’m willing to believe they were so ignorant that they wouldn’t know it would be millions, but they knew it would be many, many. They didn’t care. 

But this is not technically genocide because killing 14 million people, half of them children, is not the primary motivation. Now you can do a record scratch freeze frame here and say “but Sped, these are fascists,” and I agree with you wholeheartedly. Elon Musk in particular is a craven white supremacist and I have no doubt that killing 14 million brown-to-black people has him all aflutter. But it is not, or cannot be proven to be, his primary motivation for doing this. The primary motivation was domestic political theatre. So it isn’t a genocide, so people don’t talk about it.

 Fun? Here’s another:

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Donald Trump is currently starving the nation of Cuba to death. He thinks that finishing off Cuba will make him remembered as the greatest American president. But he’s not going to do it via diplomacy even though he’s allegedly the greatest dealmaker who has ever lived, and he’s not going to do it via war even though he commands the most powerful military on Earth. Instead he’s doing the cowardly thing and smothering it with a pillow.

 Cuba was already in the midst of a deep economic and health crisis. Make no mistake, Cuba’s government sucks and its treatment of its own people sucks. Trump is not the first American president to decide the response to the Cuban people’s woes is greater cruelty rather than kindness. He is the first to decide to just kill them.

 So, in February, he imposed a total naval blockade on the island nation to prevent any fuel reaching its shores. His hands around its neck, now he’s just waiting for the body to stop spasming like the experienced rapist that he is.

 Now Cubans have no power. They can’t refrigerate what food they have. Garbage is piling up in the streets. With sanitation breaking down, people are forced to defecate into the garbage. The hospitals can’t run properly. People have started dying of dengue. Soon, people will start dying of hunger.

You might not know much about what’s going on in Cuba because nobody really talks about it, and that’s because, as is my understanding, this is not technically a genocide. Extinguishing the nation of Cuba is not the primary intended purpose of Trump’s blockade, it is merely its likely result. The primary intended purpose is the fall of the Cuban government. Never mind that, like with any repressive regime, the people in the government are going to be the last to starve, there is no number of Cuban civilian corpses that Donald Trump is unwilling to step over in order to earn his head on Mount Rushmore.

 But—not a genocide. Not technically. And you might think, well, the Soviet Union tried to starve Ukraine to death in the Holodomor, and if that’s a genocide, then surely this is pretty much the same. And well, yeeeah that’s just the thing: Even if you’re not a big ol’ tankie, there are reams of heated scholarly disagreement about whether the Holodomor was technically a genocide, even though there is almost universal agreement that Stalin did it deliberately, because we’re not entirely sure what his intentions were.

 Words have meanings, and genocide is likely the greatest crime that we have a word for. It was defined right after World War II as a way of making sure everybody was on the same page about what just happened, and to make sure the severity of it can’t be watered down by comparing it to less heinous acts, and part of what’s heinous about it is how deliberate it is. This is why we can’t call China’s “Great Leap Forward” famine a genocide even though it was the largest non-wartime human-orchestrated loss of life in history. The Chinese government didn’t mean to kill up to 55 million of their own citizens. They just fucked up.

Crimes, at least those dealing with human life, operate under a balance of the three main systems of ethics: Deontology, utilitarianism, and what’s known as virtue ethics. These are the three ways in which we decide why something that’s wrong is wrong.

 The best way I’ve ever heard the difference explained came from a professor of mine who asked us to picture a man attacking a child with a bat.

We can all agree that this is wrong. Hopefully. But why is it wrong? If I gave you a pin and asked you to stick the pin in the picture at the source of the actual “wrongness,” where would you place the pin? You’ve got three options, here:

The deontologist puts the pin on the bat. That is to say, it’s wrong because of the act. Hitting a child with a bat is against the rules. Whether the rule comes from the government, or from God, or from the fabric of the universe somehow, you are not permitted to do this and there is no grey area or context that would make it okay. It is wrong qua wrong.

 The utilitarian puts the pin on the child (carefully—remember we’re trying not to hurt the kid). That is to say, it’s wrong because of the result. Acts that are wrong are wrong specifically and only because of the harms that they do, and only if they do more harm than good.

 The virtue ethicist puts the pin on the man (firmly—so that he really feels it). That is to say, it’s wrong because of the intent. This guy wants to hurt this child. He is an asshole. It is our duty to punish this piece of shit.

 Unless you’re Kant or Bentham or somebody nobody really adheres strictly to any one interpretation of why wrong things are wrong, it’s just kind of a soup. While we do treat the law deontologically sometimes—we do what we’re told because it’s the law and punish people because they broke it—we do also take the intent of the criminal into account when we judge them. If you decide to kill someone because you want them dead, and you do it, that’s called murder, and the seriousness of it depends on how premeditated it was.

 But the utilitarian argument still exists as well. The lack of intent doesn’t make it okay. Unless it was either true self defense or otherwise an honest-to-god complete and total accident that happened through the course of you otherwise doing exactly the right thing in the right way, if your actions cause someone else to die then you’re probably getting in serious trouble for it. Unintentional killings, depending on what you did, are called various things like manslaughter or negligence and you’re still, ideally, held accountable for what you did, because the result is still the result.

 That you didn’t mean it or you feel bad about it doesn’t mean nothing but still doesn’t make it okay, and nobody really thinks it does. It’s crazy to think it does. Somebody is dead because of you.

Scale this concept up, however: If you decide to wipe out an entire category of human beings because you want those people dead, and you act on it, that’s called genocide. If you do it for any other reason then it’s either called war or tragedy or coercion or maybe it’s not really called anything and the fact that you’re doing it kind of gets lost in the news cycle. In any case, the bafflingly prevalent undertone is yes, if it’s not technically genocide, then it sort of is okay.

 For some reason we seem to treat genocide specifically as a strict virtue ethics situation. If you meant to kill all those people because you wanted them to die, then you are among history’s greatest monsters, but if all those people died as a side effect of some other goal, whether or not you knew that they would die, then you’re just a politician or a businessman.

 Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger killed over a hundred thousand civilians in Cambodia, a neutral country they were not at war with, but that technically wasn’t a genocide because it was part of a strategy to fuck with the Viet Cong, so not only did they get away with it, Nixon went down in history as the guy whose primary wrongdoing was bugging a hotel room, and they gave Kissinger the fucking Nobel Peace Prize and he continued advising governments until Satan mercifully reclaimed him peacefully and happily in his sleep at a hundred years old.

The elephant in the room when we’re discussing genocide in present times is Gaza. It’s a topic I have rarely touched on because I rarely have anything unique to say about it. But one thing that annoys me about both sides of the Gaza issue is the focus that everyone puts on pinning down whether or not it is technically a genocide. I’ve seen some of the most hardline pro-Palestine voices go through a Bluesky cancellation dogpile gauntlet if they merely hesitate on whether they’re certain that it is technically a genocide as defined specifically by the 1948 UN Convention guidelines.

 This annoys me because to get upset about this specific issue heavily reinforces the very idea that men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk hide behind—that is, if it’s not technically a genocide, then it’s basically okay.

 Trump and Musk know that they are killing people and they are doing it deliberately and with malice, but they also know that, for whatever reason, most people, from the average voter right up to The Hague, are treating this in their minds as a purely virtue ethics domain. All they have to do is obfuscate all of their death under the veneer of some other motive. Then we turn a blind eye to the fact that Musk and Trump took the money that would have saved millions of lives in the developing world, and reallocated that money into ending lives in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and the streets of Minneapolis.  

I tend to think of what these men do as vice ethics. They cynically exploit the “technically not genocide” hack to magically smooth over their atrocities, because they know that, if it doesn’t map to the strict 1948 UN Convention definition of “genocide” then the act itself isn’t technically illegal, and as for the actual effect … well, to repeat a cliché popularly misattributed to Stalin, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

 But the results are the same. The people they kill will still be dead, and they won’t get a memorial garden with their names chiseled on a big marble wall and they won’t get a day of remembrance and the perpetrators won’t see any punishment, because this isn’t technically a genocide. It’s just politics.

I'm writing a book about toxic masculinity, online culture, and how it all led to Trump. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:

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