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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Hitler didn't deport "undesirables" he had them gassed and shot.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Yeah, that's completely fair, thank you for your insight.

Well said.

So, it's exactly what I called it, a shit-where-you-eat "free market of ideas" mix of lies and truths with no distinction whatsoever between which is which. Can we really not use quality-controlled sources? Do we really have to use sources that use Odysee for their video hosting, and tell you easily refuted nonsense within the first ten paragraphs, as SWPRS does? Whatever happened to using books as sources? Anna's Archive is still a thing, thank God. You can download an EPUB of Parenti's To Kill A Nation there. I just did right now (yes, at 5 AM). If Parenti really does engage in genocide denial in that book like his critics say he does, is for me to find out, but I can at least trust that Parenti won't waste my time more than I can trust whatever "wOoOobsites" CFgaussian is citing.

To begin with: Communist publications that acknowledge the Bosnian genocide include Tjen Folket^[A Maoist publication. https://tjen-folket.no/2022/03/25/jugoslavia-ikke-glem-den-forrige-storkrigen-i-europa/ — "En rekke ledere på alle sider av krigene er dømt for forbrytelser mot menneskeheten og folkemord."] and Communist Party Marxist – Kenya^[Apparently also a Maoist publication. https://www.cpmk.org/87-recent-news/338-challenging-us-imperialism-upholding-international-human-rights-and-humanitarian-law-amid-unsc-inaction-a-case-study-on-the-gaza-genocide — "This inaction follows a pattern observed in previous genocides since the Genocide Convention's ratification, including […] the Bosnian genocide (1992-1995), […] In all these instances, the world watched without intervening."] and I'm sure many others (I mentioned Prolewiki in a previous comment). Prominent leftists who deny the Bosnian genocide appear to largely come from Seppoland/USA and the UK, including Noam Chomsky, known friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Also, as the Grayzone article "US backed ethnic cleansing of Serbs, top diplomat secretly told Croat leader" does not mention the Bosnian genocide at all, it is largely irrelevant to the OP and I will skip over it. I have never questioned that Tuđman-era Croatia had genocidal intent towards its Serb population (and is today still a very fashy society).

SWPRS article "Propaganda in the War on Yugoslavia", section 1: The Serbian “Death Camp” (1992)

Note: SWPRS has promoted COVID-19 conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, such as use of ivermectin, claims that COVID-19 is significantly less deadly than it is, and that masks are ineffective or "germ carriers".

I notice in this section that many of the words highlighted with hyperlinks actually link to the same thing, namely Thomas Deichmann's "The picture that fooled the world" hosted as a PDF on SWPRS. I suspect this is to make the piece seem better-sourced than it really is. I was able to verify the quote from James Harff from the provided source, but not the quote from Alija Izetbegović: the link providing the source for that quote goes to balkan-conflicts-research.com, which itself sources MintPress News, which itself sources an unarchived web page which now leads to a 404. This does not definitively mean that Izetbegović didn't say what MintPress purports he says, but searching the quote online does not point to any good sources, only sources clearly copying from MintPress, Balkan Conflicts Research, or SWPRS.

The source for the inmates "emphasizing they were being treated well" does not in fact mention the inmates emphasizing they were being treated well. In fact, the footage SWPRS is apparently referring to (which you can watch in full on the official YouTube channel of the ICTY) is quite the contrary, with the inmates repeatedly asserting that they've had a "hard" or "difficult" time (you can open the transcript of the auto-generated subs to find these parts). Curious how that footage is nowhere to be found on SWPRS!

(Edit: I was going to mention but forgot: look at the how the footage of emaciated men is paired with a line mocking Ramadan in the music video for "Oj Alija Aljo" and tell me that doesn't cause you some concern.)

Trnopolje camp was not a death camp. This is already the ruling of the ICTY. Nevertheless, this section of the article engages in historical revisionism, and if providing a link to a website nobody's heard of without context is enough to qualify as a good source for a claim, I can just as easily drop this link I found refuting this section of the article: https://seecheck.org/index.php/2025/08/27/revisionism-journalists-did-not-fabricate-the-report-from-the-trnopolje-camp/ — if you would like to accuse this website I've linked to of being biased, badly sourced propaganda, all I can say is "tu quoque."

I'll be back in three hours to read the rest of the SWPRS article.

@znsh@lemmygrad.ml @Magnanimuzedong@lemmygrad.ml

Edit 2: It's three hours later, I spent some time with a friend, and you know what? Refuting this bullshit is kind of a waste of my time. Reading through and thoroughly debunking every single gish gallop ass source here, and their sources, and their sources' sources, would take days. I've already proved my point that just because the sources are numerous does not mean the sources are good, if even just the first chapter of the first article has such gross and easily refuted misrepresentations of the facts; and that CFgaussian here is apparently more willing to take the party line of petty bourgeois Anglo-Amerikan COVID conspiracy theorists and friends of Jeffrey Epstein than a major communist party in the Global South. CFgaussian really seems like the type of person who gets off on "knowing things other people don't" regardless of if those facts are actually true — a real "fart smeller" who does not care for any sort of historical rigor. For shame!

Yes, exactly as I said. And if I may expand on my point (again, before reading the articles themselves): A rule of politics that people really need to understand is that different lines of thinking (in this case different class interests) can still lead to the same conclusions. Such is very oftentimes the case with petty bourgeois and proletarian forces in politics, one example being pro-Russian stances — for the petty bourgeoisie because sanctions prevent business opportunities, for the proletariat because Atlanticism is a crucial part of the infrastructure of imperialism, right? And petty bourgeois forces are always trying to make use of this fact that their class interests oftentimes lead to the same politics on specific issues as the working class: Petty bourgeois forces will fly red flags, call themselves "socialists" and "anti-imperialists", and take the political truths you won't hear in haute bourgeois media and try to sneak in their own petty bourgeois ideology in with the truths, with the sweet words they know can lead proletarians astray. Insert Quran 2:11–2:14 here.

And proletarians, perhaps especially those who do not feel their exploitation very acutely and are materially incentivized at every turn not to be "serious" anti-imperialists, oftentimes do end up buying into these sorts of petty bourgeois lies spread by many an "alternate media" site. Put simply, just because something is not mainstream doesn't mean it must be proletarian, that it's not a psyop trying to trick you into believing things that go against your class interests. To be frank, I can very much see why denying a genocide perpetrated by ethnonationalist forces in the corpse of a socialist state would be in petty bourgeois interests (perhaps solidarity, perhaps business opportunities?), and I can also very much imagine the sort of rhetoric that the petty bourgeoisie would use to jingle keys and repackage genocide denial to a proletarian audience ("it was all made up by NATO — you people hate NATO, right?").

You can tell that I am not going to be reading these articles very neutrally. I'll get back to you when I have read them. It is a fact that even conspiracy sites can tell the truth sometimes — there was actually a good article on steigan.no about all the farmland being destroyed to make way for Norwegian military installations, and even Alex Jones was right about the frogs being "turned gay" — but they're boys crying wolf. You must read everything they say (again, just like haute bourgeois sources!) through the lens of what they're trying to get you to believe and why they want you to believe it. And if these same sources are telling me the COVID-19 pandemic isn't real, their motives certainly cannot be innocent.

Some of these sources are giving me steigan.no ass "petty bourgeois pseudo-leftist" vibes — I can confirm at the very least that one of the sources, Globalresearch.ca, also claims that there never was a COVID-19 pandemic. So, be cautious when reading through these sources, the same as any other source. I'm yet to read through them myself.

It's on Prolewiki's list of genocides if nothing else. "Israel"'s supreme court also in 2016 blocked the release of documents related to the apartheid state's involvement in providing weapons and training to Serb forces, specifically because doing so would "damage foreign relations". Was the Zionist entity sacrificing its PR just to prop up a fake genocide narrative in another country by making it seem like there's (actually non-existent) evidence being held back? Or was the Zionist entity protecting its PR in the face of a real genocide recognized by international tribunals^[Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that international courts and tribunals are impartial or anything other than tools of imperialism, but there's still a reason why when imperialists make fake genocide allegations (as in Tibet and Xinjiang) they don't pursue official recognition in court.] in a way that the fake genocides in Tibet and Xinjiang never have been? Who knows! Not me! https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20161209-israeli-court-rules-against-exposing-israels-role-in-bosnian-genocide/

I'll read the links provided by CFgaussian later, and maybe they'll convince me to the contrary, but I've been inclined to distrust when leftists say there was no Bosnian genocide, since it strikes me as a sort of "smolbeanification" of Serb ethnonationalists entirely on the basis of Serbia's geopolitical alignment.

Edit: Correction: Did not see that this news is from ten years ago! I just saw this in my news feed recently so I wrongly assumed it was recent news. Should've looked more closely at the publication date!