What does it mean to call Canada's treatment of Indigenous women a 'genocide'?

by Guest Thu Jun 06, 2019 3:03 pm

From the moment it was coined during the Second World War by Raphael Lemkin, the word "genocide" has carried an emotional charge like few others. For good reason: at its heart is the "intention to destroy" a whole people.

Even as Lemkin joined the Greek word genos ("people") to the Latin suffix cide ("killing"), history's most infamous genocidal killers were implementing their "Final Solution." But already in 1943, people recognized that this was but "a new word to denote an old practice."

The hope of Lemkin's generation — that the genocidal events of the Second World War would never be repeated — was not fulfilled. There has been no other genocide event on the scale of the Holocaust, but Cambodians, Rwandan Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims and Iraqi Yazidis have all suffered systematic campaigns of mass killing.

In Myanmar, a campaign aimed at driving the Muslim Rohingya people out of the mostly Buddhist nation has reached proportions that "constitute genocide," according to a motion passed in the House of Commons in September 2018.

Now, the debate over the unique nature of the crime of genocide has become part of Canada's political dialogue going into the fall election campaign. In its final report, released this week, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls described those thousands of victims as casualties of a "genocide."

Yesterday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau adopted that language as his own, telling an audience in Vancouver that "we accept the findings of the commissioners that it was genocide."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/indigenous-missing-murdered-women-genocide-trudeau-1.5162541

Tad lost how they think many individual murders by individual murderers, constitutes genecoide????

Also, how did he vote saying vote against a motion on saying that ISIS committed genocide

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/isis-genocide-tory-motion-1.3635632

There is another interesting article on this

https://quillette.com/2019/06/03/the-ultimate-concept-creep-how-a-canadian-inquiry-strips-the-word-genocide-of-meaning/