Ask Lemmygrad

What you call “intent” is what I would call the material basis

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".

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.