Not sure from your comment if you understood that policide is like homicide or infanticide, not suicide. It's a wonk term about destroying a political party or system.

Politicide is like genocide, except you target only members of a specific party, like how the Trotskyists were killed by Stalin, or what Pinochet did to Allende's party in Chile. I haven't read this anywhere, but I assume that one usually follows the other.

I may have actually mixed them up in my original comment now that I look at it. Serves me right for spending too much time on Wikipedia.

I understood it as self-inflicted, self-attacking policide, i.e. the (beginning of the) end of the conservative party in the US? If so, yay! .. well, yay-ish, cos what comes after? A party less inclined to be the "party of no"? A party less inclined to be the poster child of "the cruelty is the point"?

No, my point is that the rhetoric from Republican office holders and candidates such as calling Democrats "pedophiles", "groomers", "satanists", "animals", etc. are a form of dehumanization in preparation for suppressing and then killing Democrats in large numbers. For real. They've even posted anime videos of killing other members of Congress [1]. This is common in all authoritarian takeovers.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/us/politics/gosar-violent...

Oh, Yes. That. Let's NOT go there.

> Not sure from your comment if you understood that policide is like homicide or infanticide, not suicide. It’s a wonk term about destroying a political party or system.

“Policide” (and, confusingly for the distinction you are drawing, with near-equal frequency “politicide”) is used to refer to the analogy of “genocide” as understood in internation law where the target, rather than a people as a people is a political entity (almost exclusively in the examples I can find a polity, whether a sovereign state or some less polity, not a political faction or party.)

> Politicide is like genocide, except you target only members of a specific party

This is confusing (even leaving aside the problem that “politicide” is also a synonym for “policide” and is also used as a portmanteau of “political suicide”, giving it three distinct definitions in the same general domain) because you are using “genocide” in the sense of the frequently encountered mistakenly-narrow definition, and not the sense in which it is used in international law, to wit, to mean extermination of the members of a people rather than attempts to destroy the people as a people. But, yes, politicide has this sense with regard to extermination of members of a political faction, but it is not particular analogous to genocide.

> I haven’t read this anywhere, but I assume that one usually follows the other.

“Policide” doesn’t seem to generally be used when the target is a political faction, but if it were, politicide (in the relevant sense) would be an extreme method of policide, not something that follows it (a successful policide would make politicide superfluous, as there would be no one to target, the group no longer existing as a group and thus not having members to exterminate.)

One would imagine that the usual course would be escalation to politicide when other means of policide failed, though there are certainly instances where its pretty much zero to politicide.

(As far as the GOP goes, I think policide/politicide of a particular opposing faction isn’t necessarily wrong as a description of part of what they are headed toward, but misses the point. What I think they are headed for, unless saner heads within the party or defeat and replacement of it as a major party change the course, is an Christian Right American quasi-capitalist corporatist version of the Cultural Revolution, suppressing, violently where necessary, anything seen as ideological dissent from a particular authoritarian ideological vision.)

You're right, it's confusing. I think I probably shouldn't have used either word, as it's sort of besides the point. I think we can both agree that killing people because of their politics is a bad thing.