this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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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.
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?
Alright, that's fair.
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.