this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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Points and disagreements can and should be made without petty personal attacks like this. They add nothing and make a serious discussion less serious.
Just because American "leftists" spend a lot of time in the (english speaking) spotlight does not make them "prominent leftists" apart from in the eyes of many western liberals. So called "prominent" American leftists are generally prominent in the US only, which should tell you something. This is especially true for the zionist Chomsky who I've never heard described as a leftist except outside of ML circles.
Regardless, someone being morally bankrupt (e.g. affiliated with Epstein), does not immediately disqualify someones analysis or the conclusions thereof. Morally bankrupt people can provide really good analysis, just as those with acceptable morals can do the opposite -- it is actually quite irrelevant to the point, which is why I think the opening paragraph is silly. (In the case of Chomsky, his analysis is usually quite bad, and at best partly good)
As should be known by now, "genocide" as a term is historically contested in numerous ways. Importantly, in modern political discourse, it has a binarizing effect. The label is often weaponized by imperialist powers to establish an uncritical "good vs. evil" narrative, effectively short-circuiting any critical investigation into the geopolitical complexities of a conflict. It raises the social cost of analyzing the situation objectively, labeling anyone who deviates from the NATO line as an "apologist."
We have to recognize that the term itself, and its legal framework, is highly politicized and somewhat arbitrary. The UN definition was a post-WW2 political compromise that, for example, deliberately excluded the targeting of political groups. International law is not an objective, neutral truth handed down from above, but something shaped by bourgeois hegemony. When the West loudly invokes the "genocide" label, it is in many cases to manufacture consent for intervention—in this case, the dismantling of Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO—not out of a genuine humanitarian concern. It is often more important to answer what happened and how it was shaped by class-dynamics, rather than whether it can be binarized as "genocide or no genocide". Most western states contest that the Israeli oppression & extermination of Palestinians is genocide (for various reasons), here the term is used in the opposite way -- to sway the discussion away from the important questions: what is happening in Palestine and how are western states perpetrating it, to a discussion about legality, pseudo-definitions, vague arguments about "intent", etc. It holds little material benefit for the Palestinians if the Israeli oppression is (correctly) categorized as a genocide or not, compared to actually destroying the zionist state.
Furthermore, appealing to the authority of specific (maoist) communist publications simply because they are from the Global South (or Norway lol) does not automatically make their historical analysis correct. Some of the publications you cited take dogmatic or liberal-aligned stances on modern multipolar conflicts (such as characterizing Russia as an imperialist power on par with the US). A group's geographic location or self-proclaimed title does not replace the need for rigorous dialectical materialism. I don't think many would contest my view that neither Norwegian or Kenyan maoists have a large influence (or any at all) in global south leftists circles. Invoking them as some kind of non-western gotcha does not instill confidence that you are in tune with any part of actual non-western leftist discourse.
None of this is to say that atrocities, ethnic cleansing, or war crimes did not occur. The collapse of Yugoslavia was a tragedy driven by reactionary bourgeois nationalism on all sides, exacerbated by IMF debt traps and Western meddling. But refusing to unspool the NATO narrative, and instead resorting to ad hominem attacks and guilt by association, is a not materialist analysis. We have to be able to critique the weaponization of the "genocide" narrative without falling into bourgeois moralism.
Yeah, that's completely fair, thank you for your insight.
The petty attacks and bizarre lines are because the entire post was written by AI
I thought it looked really weird the first time, and I see it now when re-reading.
Extremely unserious thing to "write".
I mean not to discredit Kenyan maoists who I know little about, but who the hell refers to them as a "major communist party" in the Global South as some kind of puritan gotcha. And I am not even gonna mention the Norwegian trots or w/e...
I feel a bit silly taking the time to answer now. For shame! (...lmao)
Yes, sorry, I can get sort of heated — it's not like the Bosnian genocide is a personal thing for me, the closest connection I have to it is that I had Bosnian refugee neighbors once many years ago, but I was never very close to them — but if I feel like I'm getting played for a fool, I get upset, and then I become worse at arguing. I ended up taking shortcuts, very hypocritically, so if anybody would like to make any attacks on my character in retribution, you've earned the right to and I'll just have to look down at my penny loafers and take it.^[I'm actually just in my socks right now.] I wasn't originally going to do that appeal to the authority of Random Global South Publication, anyways, since it doesn't strengthen my argument (as you point out, the same publication takes liberal-aligned stances elsewhere) and it is sort of exploitative anyways. On that note, I did also look into Lalit Mauritius' position, but all I could find there was a quote that went "The loss and its perilous consequences can be measured by the bestiality of the massacres in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in India, in Algeria and in too many other parts of the world." — "massacres," not "genocide," we can't know their position — and a PDF from Marxist Group of Namibia hosted on Lalit's site that said "From our founding in 1955, we have sought to recreate that vision of Marx, who found voices of freedom deeper and lower, identifying workers and others fighting capitalists within the U.S. while expressing solidarity with the 1956 Hungarian Revolution defying Russian state-capitalism. Solidarity without borders has been in short supply in uprisings of this generation in battles for self-determination in Bosnia and Ukraine and in revolutions against oppressive regimes propped up from abroad in Syria and Myanmar." — which is a passage that frankly made me laugh out loud. Or maybe I rolled my eyes. Or maybe both. I can't remember. So at least we know what Marxist Group of Namibia thinks. There's a lot more Maoism and Trotskyism and even Hoxhaism in Africa than you may realize. The communist party in Togo is Hoxhaist, but their website's been down for years, and they release new publications on the open Internet so rarely it's as good as impossible to know what they think about anything unless you just live in Togo and can contact them in person.
In any case, my original purpose with that exercise was "Can I find at least three communist publications from different countries that acknowledge the Bosnian genocide?" — the aim was to establish that such publications do exist, which means that it is not a universally accepted point that the Bosnian genocide didn't happen. I'd already pointed out Prolewiki, so there was my first. I went with Norway as my second because I can speak Norwegian very well and am familiar with a number of communist publications from Norway. Tjen Folket is an easy first pick: I'm not a Maoist, but Tjen Folket provides good analysis most of the time. Really, if I didn't feel so pushed for time — writing the bulk of the comment in the very narrow window between the end of some very long and draining family commitment and the start of spending time with my friend — I would've also looked into what the other Marxist publications in Norway say, and looked into more than just two Global South parties. I looked into Lalit first and then CPMK when Lalit was unfruitful, and truthfully I didn't even know CPMK was Maoist until I wrote that comment (there goes my credibility!), and I knew the moment that I checked their stances on Gonzalo that I was building a pretty blatant single-point-of-failure in my hasty Sutyagin house of an argument by citing two Maoist publications (plus Prolewiki).
So, being heated, being pushed for time, being drained from that family commitment, but feeling a need to respond quickly and not wait hours or days to respond: these conditions are not conductive to my best and most rigorous work!
You rightly point out that Chomsky's analysis is usually bad and that he isn't even really a "leftist" as such. My point in highlighting his moral bankruptcy is that anything Chomsky says, you have to keep his moral bankruptcy in mind when you read it. People can do terrible things and still be correct, yes, but the question is always "what do they want you to believe and why do they want you to believe it" as I was writing in a previous comment. In the case of him denying the Bosnian genocide, that comes from his Zionism: he said there was no Bosnian genocide because genocide was a "sacred word" to him, right? He wanted to push a narrative that the Holocaust was a uniquely evil crime the likes of which weren't seen before or since, because this somehow makes "Israel" a "legitimate state." So, regardless of whether any individual point Chomsky makes is correct or incorrect, this was the sort of formula he used to calculate it, which is about as precise as throwing dice. There's also the point of how "Israel" was apparently involved in providing arms and training for Serb forces, and how if you can discredit the ICJ's handling of Bosnia you can accuse the ICJ in turn of crying wolf in Gaza. These things could also motivate a Zionist in the present day of saying there was no Bosnian genocide, and this is on top of the Christian neo-Nazis like the Christchurch mosque shooter who call the Serb forces "le epik based Orthodox chads who removed kebab" and are thus inclined to do the same sort of historical revisionism for the Serb forces as they do towards Nazi Germany itself. This is the sort of thing I'm thinking about, and why I think it's important to maintain that the Bosnian genocide did happen, even if it is "inconvenient" when Serbia and the Serb people have been aligned against imperialism.
You also rightly point out that the collapse of Yugoslavia was driven by reactionary bourgeois nationalism on all sides^[I also notice you use the term "ethnic cleansing" — isn't that just a euphemism for genocide?]; that the label of genocide has an idealistic binarizing effect and was used to drum up support for imperialist intervention in Yugoslavia; that international law is another arm of imperialist hegemony; and that in the case of the crime of genocide proper, the definition was intentionally designed in such a way as to be nearly impossible to actually prove in practice, because certain victim groups are excluded from the definition, you have to prove intent et cetera. This was done so that imperialists don't have to act when they're the ones doing genocide, which is of course most of the time. This to me makes it all the more significant that the Bosnian genocide did receive recognition in international law: as a rule, when fake genocide allegations are made by imperialists, these are not pursued in court. Once the imperialists have successfully manufactured the consent for whatever intervention they wanted to do, they'll just forget about their allegations and drop the whole act, right? Because they already got what they wanted.
I think that's about everything I wanted to say.
Genocide requires the intent to destroy a protected group, while ethnic cleansing aims to forcibly remove a group from an area.
Deporting all of a group from country a to country b would be ethnic cleansing. If instead you rounded them all up and shot them that would be genocide.
Even just having the police round up every member of a group to deport them is a violent act that will inevitably result in unnecessary deaths, divided families, and faltered cultural transmission, all on the basis of prejudice against that group to see them forcibly removed from the country. In short, ethnic cleansing necessarily involves intent to destroy the group in whole or in part. Genocide vs ethnic cleansing is not a useful distinction unless you want to sanitize the image of, say, the Armenian genocide, the Trail of Tears, the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, or any number of other death marches, or sanitize the image of Adolf Hitler because of things like the Madagascar Plan.
No.
And this is one of the big issues with genocide it's very rare that destruction of the group is the intent as opposed to a side effect of another horrid intent such as wishing to claim all the land a group owns, mass deportations etc. And even when destruction is the intent proving it is often a monumental task.
No. Genocide is a specific legal category that needs to be proven where as ethnic cleansing is a far broader and easier label to apply. That alone is a meaningful distinction. I also don't follow how pointing out some actions are ethnic cleansing while others constitutes genocide is sanitising any image. Hitler didn't deport "undesirables" he had them gassed and shot. The trail of tears was one event in a genocide where the goal of destroying the native population was clearly the goal as seen by killing the buffalo to starve them etc.
Are you able to read the minds of genociders? What you call "intent" is what I would call the material basis: their basis is e.g. wanting to claim all the land or property a group owns, which transforms into the intent to destroy the group. "Ethnic cleansers" are doing acts which will destroy the group in whole or in part and they know that their acts will do this. That means it's their intent. This is certainly not the definition of intent used by international courts — if it was, far more genocides would be officially recognized — but as I see it, the scope of "intent" should encompass whatever one knows will happen when doing an act.
The argument when sanitizing death marches is that these are "legitimate" deportations, and the people just happened to die in large numbers during them for reasons beyond the genocider's control or intent ("but also not as many people died as you were told"). You see this line of thinking especially in Armenian genocide denial.
The sanitization I'm referring to is that neo-Nazis will try to argue that Hitler "didn't want to killllll Jews, he just wanted to depooooort them," but because "circumstances wouldn't let him, God forced his hand." This is one of the entryist ways neo-Nazis will try to legitimize the Holocaust — I have personally been subjected to this line of thinking in real life by one of the worst people I had the displeasure of knowing.
So the next time there's a genocide, you're just going to call it ethnic cleansing until the ICJ may or may not call it a genocide years after the fact?
No. Intent is the goal when taking a certain action. The intent of sending people to gas chambers, killing all the buffalo, arming ethnic malitias in Rwanda was the destruction of "the other".
This is a non point. Ethnic cleansing is still a crime against humanity the fact morons try and rationalise death marches does not suddenly make all crimes against humanity genocide. If Quebec decided to criminalise speaking English that would be a form of Ethnic cleansing but it sure as shit isn't genocide. Equating these 2 things is simply a softer form of genocide trivialisation(denial) (like double genocide theory).
Another non point. Morons cherry picking history to try downplay one of the single most documented genocides in history does nothing to further your point that genocide and Ethnic cleansing are synonymous or should be.
I would wait on the analysis of legal experts in the field yes (not specifically the icj) as well as analyse the facts themselves against the requirements for genocide. Which is what everyone should do. Believing all accusations at face value is moronic.
Alright, that's fair.
Well anyways, now that you've pointed out the flaws in my thinking on this specific point, and the very troubling implications of these flaws, and I can now say that I more or less agree with you… wanna look at cat videos or something?
Interestingly, the term "ethnic cleansing" has its origins in the balkans: https://www.liquisearch.com/ethnic_cleansing/origins_of_the_term
In the 1980-1990s Serbian politicians used the term as a way to deny genocide because genocide has a legal basis where as "cleansing" does not. Of course they did not want to be found criminally responsible.