edit: radicalism is a real thing
As an honest question: why “of course it doesn’t”?
Do you think that maybe human extinction is part of the goal?
And yet somehow we've reached the point where if you acknowledge human sexual dimorphism, you're a fascist.
It's a damned weird ideology, and if it doesn't go away it should at least be acknowledged as a religion.
People like you want to impose an external concept of gender onto trans people that doesn't comport with their self image. You want to forgo the medical science and drive trans people into depression and suicide because the idea of it makes you feel yucky.
There is some percentage of “feminists” who don’t love women but simply hate men.
"280 character soundbite" social media isn't helping either here, nor is "zomg person X said something ridiculous"-type "journalism".
Wait, which law is that?
No, generally a slave caste are not all murdered. My grandmother's second husband who had a number tattooed on his arm and spent years hiding in a forest, that was an attempt to kill all the X people.
Prior to my transition, I was an outspoken radical feminist. I spoke up often, loudly and with confidence. I was encouraged to speak up. I was given awards for my efforts, literally — it was like, “Oh, yeah, speak up, speak out.” When I speak up now, I am often given the direct or indirect message that I am “mansplaining,” “taking up too much space” or “asserting my white male heterosexual privilege.” Never mind that I am a first-generation Mexican American, a transsexual man, and married to the same woman I was with prior to my transition.
I find the assertion that I am now unable to speak out on issues I find important offensive and I refuse to allow anyone to silence me. My ability to empathize has grown exponentially, because I now factor men into my thinking and feeling about situations. Prior to my transition, I rarely considered how men experienced life or what they thought, wanted or liked about their lives. I have learned so much about the lives of men through my friendships with men
What continues to strike me is the significant reduction in friendliness and kindness now extended to me in public spaces. It now feels as though I am on my own: No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being.
I can recall a moment where this difference hit home. A couple of years into my medical gender transition, I was traveling on a public bus early one weekend morning. There were six people on the bus, including me. One was a woman. She was talking on a mobile phone very loudly and remarked that “men are such a–holes.” I immediately looked up at her and then around at the other men. Not one had lifted his head to look at the woman or anyone else. The woman saw me look at her and then commented to the person she was speaking with about “some a–hole on the bus right now looking at me.” I was stunned, because I recall being in similar situations, but in the reverse, many times: A man would say or do something deemed obnoxious or offensive, and I would find solidarity with the women around me as we made eye contact, rolled our eyes and maybe even commented out loud on the situation. I’m not sure I understand why the men did not respond, but it made a lasting impression on me.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feat...
Because male intra-gender solidarity is viewed as the first step to neo-Nazism, so we grin and bear it in mixed company.
The mental strain of maintaining a false identity during the making of Self-Made Man ultimately caused a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility
Robert Sapolsky studies baboons, and I heard him describe this same behavior.
Males would were in constant competition, and if one tripped up in any way, the others jumped him.
Females would protect each other, form a group to help each other. If one tripped up, the others would come to their aid.
Claiming those feminists aren't feminists does nothing to stop them from calling themselves feminists.
If the story is accurate as conveyed and the separate graffiti instances really were written by the same person (not a given, a lot of stories like this aren't true on the internet, although I think this one probably is), I have a decent idea of the sort of person that would write it - I have known a couple that could have written this while they were teenagers. Someone from the postmodern left or intersectional queer theory milieux, certainly young, not a cisgender man, who is frustrated with the ability of powerful men to continuously escape accountability for the violence they enact against women and queer people. They view "kill all men" as a non-literal rallying cry to demonstrate their seriousness and willingness to fight against the injustices they recognise in the world (and are/were likely subject to in their own lives). I am extremely certain they have never killed a man, and just as certain that if given the choice they would not actually kill all men (or any appreciable quantity thereof). They would probably kill a lot of rapists, if given omniscience and omnipotence. I'm giving all of this characterisation because I think it's very unlikely that most people on HN would have met or known well the sort of people that say these sort of things genuinely, and because most of what I see here on these topics is either genuine confusion or literally misguided anger that doesn't understand the people they are angry at.
For context, I agree with "Trans rights are human rights" as a slogan and disagree with "Kill all men" as a slogan.
Granted. However, even though we can never fully understand another person, we can still demand that nobody in the room calls for the elimination of another group of people, even as a "joke" or "expression of anger" or similar. That's basic defense of human rights, the acknowledgement that nobody deserves to be targeted for things they can't control. Because jokes are used by extremists to gauge the tone of the rest of the group, and, if the group is conducive, they magically aren't jokes anymore.
> For context, I agree with "Trans rights are human rights" as a slogan and disagree with "Kill all men" as a slogan.
Yes, I fully agree with this.
To clarify, I was explaining what the type of person who would write that believes and why they would write it, because that question was asked in the thread. I don't agree with the slogan, I am just able to explain the thought processes and background of those who do.
>Because jokes are used by extremists to gauge the tone of the rest of the group, and, if the group is conducive, they magically aren't jokes anymore.
I'm familiar with the concept you're discussing but I don't think it applies here. For one, it's not a joke - it's insincere, but not humorous. For another, I have known neo-Nazis (I have worked in deradicalisation, specifically exit programs for young men in neo-Nazi groups) who would do the whole "day of the rope" thing and claim they were joking but were actually chomping at the bit to enact it, and I would consider myself well-equipped to judge whether these "kill all men" people were "secretly serious" like those neo-Nazis are. Genuinely, they really weren't.
Or, to put it another way, out of the people I knew who would be willing to say or agree with the slogan "kill all men", if they were in a social situation where they had the opportunity to contribute to the slaughter of a group of men in a socially supported way, they would not contribute and would almost certainly actively resist if they weren't having some sort of nervous breakdown at being in such an unusual situation. The same is not true for neo-Nazis or theocratic Islamists or some other groups that I have interacted with who are calling for the death of people with contingent insincerity - outside of a few of the younger members of those groups, given a social situation which allowed them to act out said social murder they would do it, and they all know it, as does anyone who interacts with them for any length of time. That's why I don't think the analogy is valuable, because in a practical sense these people aren't actually engaging in domestic terrorism and don't have any power to enforce their beliefs even if they were sincere, and also because I am familiar with the dynamics of the phrase and the sort of people that say it and they would not actually support mass murder even in an imaginary social context which was specifically supportive of that.
I know you have said you don't agree with it, so please don't take the following as me accusing you of excusing the slogan or agreeing with it, I'm trying to further conversation and am interested in your thoughts and really don't want to come off as accusatory.
Even if it is 100% definitely, totally, absolutely, meant as a joke should we be making allowances for that? Lately we have culturally been moving away from jokes that are about genders/races/identities being considered acceptable... or at least we have been for all identities other than "white" and "men", such as in this case where this whole group of people will listen to someone saying "kill all men" and just understand it is a joke and let it go by.
I actually do understand why someone who feels frustrated by certain things might make a joke like that, and I have nuance enough to understand that context and audience matters, and that often things said in jest are a way to emotionally deal with something without any desire to cause any sort of hurt (emotionally or physically) to the people being joked about.
For me at least though that sort of joke is frustrating and hurtful when I have had to listen to years to (an often overlapping set of) people talking about how men have a responsibility to speak up when their male friends make those sorts of jokes and tell them to stop. "Silence is Violence" and all that sort of thing.
I guess what I'm getting at is you may say that people upset about people saying it don't understand the people saying it, but I do. I do hang around these sorts of people, some of my good friends belong to the local socialist party and their social circles include these sorts of people. And it still does upset me, not so much because of what they are saying - although it isn't a great thing to say - it's the hypocrisy of it that upsets me. I have legitimately heard the exact same person have a little rant about how misogynistic the phrase "bi--- be crazy" and also make jokes about how "the straights aren't ok", etc.
I think people in general, and myself especially, would be a lot more receptive to "oh it's just a joke" if those people hadn't spent a bunch of time policing what was said as part of comedy shows and stuff because as of right now it feels like a lot of people have decided that certain groups I am in are the only acceptable targets for this sort of thing, which is just... incredibly frustrating.
No problems, thank you for clarifying.
>Even if it is 100% definitely, totally, absolutely, meant as a joke should we be making allowances for that?
It is not a joke, I think you may have missed me saying that earlier. It is insincere, but not a joke. I think maybe you're conceiving of every statement that someone doesn't literally mean as being only okay if it's a joke (assuming it's a harmful thing to say in the first place, like "kill all men"). Have you ever talked with a co-worker and said (or heard them say) something like "I wish I could punt my boss into the sun"? It's not a joke, the person expressing it really does hate their boss and it's not intended to get a laugh, but it is insincere. By "insincere", I mean that the person does not have any intent to follow through with the literal specific thing they actually said. People just don't always talk literally, without there being a requirement that it's for humourous purposes. People can say these things as jokes and expect a laugh, but that isn't most of the use. It is definitely not the use when it's being graffitied onto a wall.
>such as in this case where this whole group of people will listen to someone saying "kill all men" and just understand it is a joke and let it go by.
I don't think that's true unless you're in a very strong filter bubble. In population-representative company "kill all men" will always get pushback, it's never going to be just accepted. I mean, just think about it being said in a group that's half men, it would be incredibly uncommon and would definitely receive pushback if someone did say it. It's not like society has agreed that "kill all men" is a cool thing to say, that just hasn't happened. It's also worth noting that "kill all men" is way, way, way less common than either "kill your local rapist" or "all men are bad" or "men suck", all much less controversial and much more common. "Kill all men" is a super fringe thing. My professional experience is in Australia and maybe it's different where you are, I can't comment on that. But I am familiar with the phrase and know where it comes from, and that it's not some common thing that goes unremarked in company.
>For me at least though that sort of joke is frustrating and hurtful when I have had to listen to years to (an often overlapping set of) people talking about how men have a responsibility to speak up when their male friends make those sorts of jokes and tell them to stop. "Silence is Violence" and all that sort of thing.
Yeah I'm very familiar with those campaigns, and I understand the facial similarity you're drawing. Those campaigns exist because domestic violence against women exists with a social and cultural support structure that normalises that violence, and the theory behind the campaigns is that intercepting the support structure earlier might stop some amount of domestic violence against women before it ever happens, by stopping its justification in culture.
It's not the same thing as the "kill all men" example because while some women definitely have killed some men, broadly speaking almost no men are being killed by women, and the number isn't spiking or any other observation that should make us concerned that that may change.
The reason those domestic violence campaigns got approved isn't because governments decided that the hurt feelings of women were worth spending a lot of money to prevent - it wasn't about the jokes and frankly at the time basically no government would have cared about that. They got approved because firstly, domestic violence by men against women is very common and most people want it to stop, and because it has a significant cost to the government in terms of healthcare, funerals, legal processing, various support services that need funding for the victims, children need to go into the foster system, etc. And secondly, there were credible theories that predicted the levels of violence should decrease if men are joking about violence against women less.
>I do hang around these sorts of people, some of my good friends belong to the local socialist party and their social circles include these sorts of people.
If they are socialists and you want them to stop saying things like "kill all men", I think your best bet is going to be an argument along the lines of "Communism is about the interests of the broad masses, and half of the masses are men - it doesn't help the revolutionary cause to alienate oppressed men who can and should be on our side. No program to end chauvinism against women can succeed without broad support from all proletarians, including men. Trying to fix chauvinism against women doesn't separate the class, but the slogan 'kill all men' does." If they respond with "it's just a joke bro don't be so emotional" or some variant, note that communists have an obligation to be truthful, and that includes being precise in your language when there's a misunderstanding. I have used those arguments successfully to convince people of this and similar issues. If you've made that point in a reasonable way without being overly aggressive or dismissive towards the oppression of women (for example by not indicating that you understand that women are oppressed more deeply and in different specific ways than men) and they still aren't interested in stopping it long term., you should probably find other friends if it (understandably) really bothers you, or ignore it and move on if that isn't worth it to you. Even if the conversation doesn't end with "Wow I didn't think about it like that, you're very right" (almost no disagreements end like that after one conversation), if you stick with it there is a good chance that they do at least change their behaviour and maybe come around to understanding why it's not a good idea. I would strongly advise you to avoid any and all variants of "This is hypocritical", because they're not going to be persuasive as arguments. Hypocrisy is treating the same fundamental situation differently based on factors that are superficial, and it's very easy to note that violence against women by men and violence against men by women are not the same fundamental situation, so hypocrisy doesn't apply.
This message was too long, so I'll reply to this with the second half.
Yes I'm aware of the motivation, I am skeptical of the efficacy personally and I say that as someone who grew up a victim of domestic violence. In Australia in particular we also invest no resources in domestic violence against men, which has women perpetrators more than most people expect, but also doesn't help victims of DV who are in MLM relationships.
> It's not the same thing as the "kill all men" example because while some women definitely have killed some men, broadly speaking almost no men are being killed by women, and the number isn't spiking or any other observation that should make us concerned that that may change.
Look, "bit-- be crazy" is definitely not a call to violence. It's a form of commiseration and some venting. This is actually the hypocrisy - the assumption that everything said is coded hatred when said by or about certain people but not others. I'm not and never have claimed that the people saying "kill all men" meant it literally.
I'm really sorry to hear you're a victim of domestic violence, and I appreciate you sharing that, I know that is an extremely difficult thing to do. It's actually not just Australia (I am also in Australia), in basically every country on Earth there is an absurdly small amount of resources dedicated to helping male victims of domestic violence, including both male victims of domestic violence by women and by men, when compared to the prevalence of that violence. Domestic violence against men, depending on the specific statistics used, is around half to a third as common as domestic violence against women - meanwhile, resources for male victims of domestic violence are more like 1/20th or less of the resources spent addressing domestic violence in general (which also need to be increased for women, as they're currently inadequate). It's a very important issue that does not receive enough attention, and unfortunately gets marred by associated with men who never mention it or care about the issue unless it's deployed in an argument to detract from the concerns of women. For what it's worth, I am a woman and care deeply about the issue, and have personally advocated to get DV support resources opened up to men as well, as well as including men on some of the poster campaigns we've done around domestic violence. It's an issue I find deeply frustrating to deal with because I generally encounter apathy from people in power.
I'm not sure how I feel about the efficacy of the specific campaigns around reducing "jokes". I certainly often feel like rates of domestic violence have not decreased, but there's obviously been a decrease in the "jokes" which is a self-evident good. I believe there is some research on this, but I'm not sure if there have been follow-up or efficacy studies since the campaigns. I'd be interested to know those results.
>Look, "bit-- be crazy" is definitely not a call to violence. It's a form of commiseration and some venting.
That's not true, it is misogyny. It's a reframing of a very old and violent trope that women are basically mentally unsound and don't need to be listened to. This attitude is the reason why many women suffered and suffer abuse in psychiatric care facilities, why fake medical conditions like hysteria were invented to pathologise normal reactions to oppressive conditions (and class as mental illnesses many physical illnesses which men refused to recognise). It is used that way today - "b*tches be crazy" as a saying means "Don't worry man, women are just like that [crazy]. Don't let it bother you." That is misogynistic.
>This is actually the hypocrisy - the assumption that everything said is coded hatred when said by or about certain people but not others. I'm not and never have claimed that the people saying "kill all men" meant it literally.
Someone who says "kill all men" definitely hates men. I've never claimed otherwise, and neither would the person saying "kill all men". There's no hypocrisy there - the issue people have with men saying misogynistic things isn't just that they hate women, many women hate men right back and are very capable of articulating what that means. The issue is that men have oppressed women and still do, and the misogynistic ideas they use to convey their positive feelings about that are important and valuable for the purpose of organising and normalising that oppression. Ideas are an important part of any group who believes anything, and men who believe in the inferiority of women and have harmed us throughout history and today use ideas to organise and support that activity.
>make jokes about how "the straights aren't ok", etc.
I think you may be misunderstanding what that means, although in this case you have correctly identified that this is a joke. It doesn't mean "not okay" as in they're not acceptable or they're bad, it means they're "not okay" in the same way you might say to someone "The situation in Russia is not okay" or "Thank you for your concern, I'm not okay at the moment". It's an expression that someone needs to check in on them, not that they're bad. You'll find it said when straight people are doing something really weird for frivolous reasons related to their sexuality, like starting wildfires using a gender reveal party. It's sort of like concern trolling (not really, but explaining actual jokes is not my strong suit), in that it's a ~false expression of concern. If it bothers you a lot, I'd advise you to laugh at it and do some thorough research to learn what sort of weird things queer people are doing (as in actually doing, not the fake nonsense propaganda like grooming children or whatever - go to queer sources and find what they're complaining about queer people doing). I guess something like "At least straight people aren't declaring a national crisis over the top shortage when they could go outside and find one by literally just talking" or "I think the degree of drama involved in your average lesbian break-up definitely means they need a check-in". Just make sure you're always approaching the topic with the understanding that the people you're talking to and joking about are currently having their children taken away from them in America or being beaten up by fascists around the world or being mass murdered in Chechnya etc for being queer, and for that reason it would once again be a very bad idea to use the hypocrisy argument, because it's very easy for them to dismiss it (and you) by pointing out that these situations are not actually the same and therefore there's no obligation to talk about or treat them the same way.
>if those people hadn't spent a bunch of time policing what was said as part of comedy shows and stuff because as of right now it feels like a lot of people have decided that certain groups I am in are the only acceptable targets for this sort of thing, which is just... incredibly frustrating.
Just because of statistics, I know there's at least one group of acceptable targets for comedy that you're not in, which is the capitalist class. You can make jokes about Beyonce running sweatshops or Barack Obama drone striking weddings and the people you're talking about aren't going to have an issue with it unless they're the sort of identity opportunists/morefemalecampguards people I don't have any time for (and I don't think anyone should have any time for).
More generally, good comedy is about punching up. It might make you laugh (I don't know you) to hear that really funny one about how feeding disabled homeless women into a wood chipper is cool, but most sane people are going to view it as mean-spirited. It's a lord having a big old laugh about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine - true, and very funny for the court, but unlikely to get a laugh from the peasants for really obvious reasons. You still have things in common with the people making jokes that punch up though, and there are people above both of you that you can both joke about. If it's too personally distressing to deal with jokes about you being white or straight or a man or cisgender or abled, you almost always have the option not to listen to them. Even if you're a diehard comedy fan, the vast majority of standup comics are not making jokes about how "straight cisgender white abled men suck amiright?" Guarantee it.
Trust me, in context it was an implication they are bad. I understand that it isn't always used that way, but in this case it definitely was an implication they are bad.
> it means they're "not okay" in the same way you might say to someone "The situation in Russia is not okay" or "Thank you for your concern, I'm not okay at the moment". It's an expression that someone needs to check in on them
I understand it is often used this way, but trust me in the group of people I know in real life it isn't always. Plus frankly even that usage could be seen as kind of patronizing, though again I want to stress that I am not personally offended by the joke itself
> If it's too personally distressing to deal with jokes about you being white or straight or a man or cisgender or abled, you almost always have the option not to listen to them. Even if you're a diehard comedy fan, the vast majority of standup comics are not making jokes about how "straight cisgender white abled men suck amiright?" Guarantee it.
I feel like you've really missed my point. I don't mind the jokes, they are (mostly) not a reflection of any genuine ill will, many of them are funny to me, etc. What is frustrating is how quickly people will assume ill will when jokes are made about certain groups of people and not others. The jokes themselves are fine.
As you noted, we're both in Australia, so there's no language or cultural differences here, so I know you're incorrect. The "not okay" in that phrase is the version of "not okay" in "I just got admitted to the psych ward, I'm not okay", it is not the version of "not okay" in "Terrorism is not okay". They are two different meanings, only one of them is the correct one for that saying.
>I understand it is often used this way, but trust me in the group of people I know in real life it isn't always. Plus frankly even that usage could be seen as kind of patronizing, though again I want to stress that I am not personally offended by the joke itself
It is insulting, patronising is exactly the right word. It's intended meaning is something like "There's something so wrong in straight culture, they need an intervention, look at this example" - it's faux concern. I wasn't explaining why it wasn't insulting, I was explaining why the meaning you were ascribing to it wasn't grammatically correct.
>I feel like you've really missed my point. I don't mind the jokes, they are (mostly) not a reflection of any genuine ill will, many of them are funny to me, etc. What is frustrating is how quickly people will assume ill will when jokes are made about certain groups of people and not others. The jokes themselves are fine.
Okay, so if I'm understanding you correctly the jokes don't cause any harm to you, but similar jokes do cause harm to marginalised people. Your contention is because the grammatical format of the joke is the same and you're not offended by it when you're the object of it, marginalised people should not be offended when they are the object of it. I don't agree with that contention, it's a false equivalency (grammatical equality does not equal semantic equality), but I think I would just like to understand how you're thinking of it. You remember the lord joking about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine, and how that is an objectively true observation that the lord and the court find funny but the peasants don't find funny? Do you understand why even though it's true and clearly funny to the lord and his coterie, the peasants wouldn't find it funny? If the peasants joked about the lord looking like a tomato, would you consider that to be hypocritical?
So two things. One "not okay" as in psych ward can still imply negative things, but secondly I am aware of the useage of it as a saying, I am referring to jokes people have made using the saying in such a way as to imply the other meaning of not OK, which in part are funny precisely because of the typical saying. I am getting very frustrated you refuse to believe that anyone may play on the standard meaning and that I must be mistaken.
> Your contention is because the grammatical format of the joke is the same and you're not offended by it when you're the object of it, marginalised people should not be offended when they are the object of it.
No that isn't my contention. My contention is that offense doesn't equate to harm. I find some of the jokes I am talking about offensive, but I also am capable of understanding the context in which many of them are said and that the people saying them aren't actually terrible prejudiced people. Some of them absolutely are, I've met some people who are definitely actively prejudiced but they are a minority.
> You remember the lord joking about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine, and how that is an objectively true observation that the lord and the court find funny but the peasants don't find funny? Do you understand why even though it's true and clearly funny to the lord and his coterie, the peasants wouldn't find it funny? If the peasants joked about the lord looking like a tomato, would you consider that to be hypocritical?
I feel like this is a false equivalency. The lord and his court are why the peasants look like scarecrows in the first place, because they will have taxed them and taken a large part of their crops and left them with little to eat. This is laughing at the misfortune of people while being the cause of the misfortune.
I also think there is a big difference between making a joke about the suffering that people actively are going through than there is about say, making a joke that references the stereotype that lesbian couples move in together quickly.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, indoctrinates and neuters children, and then advocates exterminating men (if not "cis" people in general), it's a very misanthropic duck.
When people are claiming that men can give birth, and publishing the claim in books for children, that is absolutely intended to indoctrinate.
And it isn't hate speech to state the fact.
The increasing politicisation of the flag button, and its pernicious use as a surrogate for strong disagreement is a disturbing trend.
And you still have not come even remotely close to justifying the assertion that I'm engaging in hate speech - and the reason for that is not your unwillingness to engage, it's that there exists no argument in support of your case.
Doesn’t seem ok now does it? Because no matter what it’s not ok to call for the death of any group. JFC why is this is hard?
The Massacre of the Bani Qurayza (627 AD): According to Islamic sources, during the siege of Medina in the aftermath of the Battle of the Trench, the Jewish tribe of Bani Qurayza was accused of conspiring with the attacking Meccans against the Muslim community. After the Meccans retreated, Prophet Muhammad's followers turned against the Bani Qurayza. The men were executed en masse, while the women and children were enslaved.
The Sack of Isfahan (1387): Timur, the Turko-Mongol conqueror, laid siege to the city of Isfahan, which was then part of the Jalayirid Sultanate. When the city finally fell, Timur reportedly ordered that every soldier in his army should return with at least two severed human heads. The total number of people killed is estimated to have been about 200,000. Women and children were often spared to be taken as slaves.
The Massacre of Nanking (1937): Also known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking, this atrocity was committed during the Sino-Japanese War when the Imperial Japanese Army captured the city of Nanking. Over a period of six weeks, mass killings, rapes, and looting were perpetrated against the city's residents. While not every man was killed, the death toll was incredibly high, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Many women were raped, and some were killed or taken away.
Srebrenica Massacre (1995): This was the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II, perpetrated during the Bosnian War. Over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically executed by units of the Bosnian Serb Army. Women, children, and some elderly men were forcibly transferred and deported, making it an example of ethnic cleansing.
The Assyrian Empire: The Assyrians, who built a powerful empire in ancient Mesopotamia, were notorious for their brutal military tactics. Their treatment of conquered peoples often included mass killings, forced deportations, and enslavement. However, it's important to note that not every city they conquered was subjected to this treatment; it was often employed as a form of psychological warfare, to intimidate other cities into surrendering without a fight.
The Mongol Empire: While not exactly "ancient" by some definitions, the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors in the 13th and 14th centuries were known for their ruthless conquests. Cities that resisted Mongol rule could expect no mercy; the men would often be killed and the women taken as slaves or wives. This strategy was also a form of psychological warfare, encouraging other cities to surrender without a fight to avoid a similar fate.
The Roman Empire: The Romans are known for their tactic of "decimation", which involved killing one in every ten men in a unit as punishment for serious infractions, like desertion or cowardice. But when it came to conquered peoples, the Romans were sometimes ruthlessly thorough. For example, after the Third Punic War, the Romans reportedly killed or enslaved the entire population of Carthage.I trust you can appreciate the distinction, if you think this through a little.
> They were killed for being men from the opposing side (perhaps killing women and children was considered too barbaric, or women were considered useful for some reason).
Or because they were men and thus seen as being future potential combatants where women and children were not. Men were seen as potentially future detriments and thus were killed.
The distinction is thin to the point of being indistinguishable.
Under that logic, eugenics isn't genocide either. The intent isn't to eliminate a specific group, it's to get rid of some trait they attribute to that group.
I'm not aware of any instances where Jewish people were rounded up purely for being Jewish. There was always some misguided and wrong justification, like a belief that the plague was caused by Jewish people poisoning wells, or that their numbers were enough to threaten the Christian institutions, or that they sabotaged the war effort. In other words, they were perceived as "the opposing side" in one misguided way or another.
I can't recall any sort of -cide where the cause is purely because of membership in some group. In purely practical terms, it's too expensive and too large an undertaking to randomly decide to do. There's always some kind of twisted logic underneath it.
At that point though, those Jewish people were in fact persecuted and murdered purely because of their ethnicity. It matters not that the persecution was justified with stories of poisoned wells. What matters is that those stories pertained directly to a specific ethnical group, and that group was subsequently hunted.
Flimsy excuses either matter or they don't, and the application is universal.
Your comment broadly argues that killing of one group by another is never done with purity of intention. I submit almost nothing people do is for its own sake, but rather woven within individual and collective stories. To think otherwise is to deny the role narrative plays in human consciousness.
A cursory glance through a list like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom shows numerous examples of massacres of Jews (and others, but mostly Jews). The attackers always claim justifications--again, no group attacks any other group without somehow justifying it to itself, either initially or post-hoc.
1. What about the many massacres of the Jews for rejecting Christianity? Surely those are examples of being rounded up for the sake of being Jewish, since the Jewish religion is incompatible with, for example, the concept of the divinity of Jesus. A key point here is that Judaism is a tribal and not universal religion. Thus, it is hard to divorce attacks on the Jewish religion from attacks on the Jewish people.
2. What about the massacres justified by absurd pretenses, such as (As you mentioned) poisoning wells, corrupting the host (Communion), or the blood libel (That Jews kill Christian children and use their blood to bake Matzo). These justifications, which do not hold up to scrutiny, only work for a population that wants to believe them in the first place. The sheer number of nonsensical justifications points to the underlying fact--there is no justification at all.
3. Need I mention the Holocaust, in which the stated aim of the Nazis was to eliminate the Jewish race? Even those with Jewish ancestry but with no religious practices (and who were not considered Jews by themselves or other Jews) were nonetheless sent to the death camps.
By the way, I have focused on historical violence from the Christian world, but this is not to the exclusion of violence from the Islamic world, of which there has been much as well.
In sum, if there was ever an example of a group persecuted for purely "being themselves", it is the Jews.
My point was primarily that in a world view where flimsy excuses like the side of a combatant makes something not a gendered massacre, those same flimsy excuses would also apply to other instances of mass killings. I'm essentially arguing that if a mass killing predominantly or solely impacts a certain group of people, then it counts as a targeted killing of that group. The justification is largely irrelevant.
Given the 2 responses, I apparently did a poor job of conveying that and should have been more clear.
Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all. And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism. But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers? And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
> Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all.
Certainly, but I don't think those actions are the troubling part. The troubling parts come before and after. The decision to only conscript men (that part'll be below), and the decisions to conduct massacres after combat had ceased. It wasn't uncommon to massacre the male civilian population once a city had been seized or an army subdued. The strongest counter argument there to me is that women weren't killed, but rape may have been prevalent. I don't know what the occurrence would have been in those situations, and I don't want to hazard an uneducated guess.
> And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism.
To some degree. The minimum age for Roman conscription was 16, and I think that gap is a lot closer when you're comparing fully grown women against boys. In other words, if conscription was gated by some kind of "minimum strength requirement" where the lower bound was set by 16 year old boys, I think the sexual dimorphism claim loses some weight.
Even then, some of these events happened after the invention of the firearm where raw strength became almost entirely removed from the "who wins a fight" question.
> But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers?
Sure, but they weren't. To turn it around a little bit, would it not seem problematic to forcibly place solely a particular group of people into an incredibly dangerous job? If only Native Americans were eligible for conscription, I don't think "but other races would be killed too, they just aren't soldiers" would be an acceptable excuse.
> And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
The likeness, to me, is that they have the same end result, but with different mechanisms. A mass killing is hunting down people with the intent to kill them. Conscription is hunting down people with the intent of repeatedly exposing them to events with a high probability of killing them.
I do think the moral valences are divergent. Genocides seem to be an act of outright hate to me, where conscription largely strikes me as the result of indifference. They both end with a lot of deaths of a somewhat homogenous group of people, though.
As for the whole whether "Kill all <historically persecuted/minority group>" should be considered equivalent to "Kill all men", I suppose one way to justify treating them differently is the likelihood of anyone actually taking such a suggestion seriously. We know there's been at least one massive-scale attempt to kill (virtually) all Jews, and we know there are still people around today who admire the ideology behind that and could potentially develop the capability to carry out such an attempt - I don't think, despite the list of examples just given, you could seriously suggest there's a group of people with sufficient admiration of an ideology that says "all men should die" and a capability to attempt carrying it out.
They were murdered because they were Jews. In your examples the men were murdered for being on the opposing side, and so a possible threat (unlike the women and children).
nope
In terms of technical, legal citizenship, that (presumably) became available to Jews in Germany upon their emancipation in 1871. This opportunity was revoked a mere 64 years later in 1935 with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. Citizenship in this sense is a modern invention.
What I meant above was citizenship in the sense of belonging to a particular group. A person could be a German in a legal or social sense, and I meant it in a social sense. The Jews were never seen as being "authentically" German. They were seen as a foreign people living on German land. This certainly contributed to the ease at which their legal status was stripped.
By the way, this attitude wasn't particular to Germany, but all over Europe, from Russia to France.
(Before anyone takes it seriously: this is a parody of how stupid the parent sounds.)
So violence is fine because it's not as bad as some other horrific events in the past? The barometer shouldn't be the frequency of violence reaching a certain threshold. It's should be zero for everyone.
You should genuinely be embarrassed at this remarkably stupid and pathetic distinction.
Surely you can see the distinction between a real and possible threat, that might genuinely put fear into the object class, and words that can never be actioned? "Kill all men" might as well say "beware of the vicious rabbit"
Not sure how any of that substantiates whatever point it is you are trying to make. Unless making allegations of violence is now considered violence itself?
"Trans rights are human rights!"
Okay, fair enough. The a few metres later, in the same colour and obviously by the same person:
"Kill all men!"
People will say "yes, but it doesn't mean literally kill all men", and of course it doesn't. But it's not exactly positive, is it?