Nobody is "erasing" other experiences, they are just very uncommon.

When talking about how "people in a country" live, you look at the average person. You don't say "but the King and his ministers live differently, we shouldn't erase their experiences". The inner circle always lives differently from the masses, but by definition, they are very few. Look at the lives of the many, not the few.

And regarding Iraq: during Saddam's reign about a quarter of a million people were murdered or disappeared. There's a good chance that the majority of Iraqis did have someone in their family affected, though it might not have been their son, but a cousin or nephew.

With respect to Saddam's mass murder the uncommon experience for Iraqis is is having been personally affected. That doesn't mean it wasn't an atrocity, or rather a series. And no, most people are not likely to have had someone affected, as most of them were focused on certain groups and areas. If you belonged to those groups you'd be disproportionately affected. If you did not, you might have gone most of your life without being affected without being any part of the.inner circle.

This need to see suffering as universal to be valid is problematic, because very few atrocities affect a large portion of a population. That most don't does not jvalidate them.

The genocidal attacks on Kurds claimed somewhere between 50k - 180k. Kurds make up 20%-25% of the population, which would have been around 3-4 millions in 1988. If you kill 1-3% of a population, it's very likely that most families will be affected, especially in societies where families are large.

Another ~100k Kurds and Shiite Arabs were killed during the '91 uprisings. Together, they make up more than half of the population.

Unless Saddam was super surgical (#heWasnt), they were affected. Unless of course, by "personally affected", you mean they personally did die. But that would be a very strange idea.

Your own numbers don't support the claim that most would be affected.

I have no idea how you come to that conclusion. If you kill 4% of the population, you will have lots of people losing a relative. What's that moving of the goal post about?

When you kill a large portion of a specific ethnic group in specific geographic regions in a society that still had major tribal tension, most people outside of those groups and regions will not be affected.

In any case you're the one mong goalposts here - this started with simply making the point that it's unread jable to assume a single experience captures the experience of a people.

Nevertheless you've provided nothing to justify the idea that Saddam's purges affected anywhere close to a majority of the population, even if that is itself a distraction.