(RoyalPatriot.com )- Recently, President Biden was cornered by a reporter and forced to concede that Russian President Vladimir Putin is committing “genocide” in Ukraine. And in a recent column at Breitbart, law professor Alan Dershowitz explains why Biden was wrong to throw the word “genocide” around regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In his column, Dershowitz distinguishes between crimes committed during a war and the crime of genocide and warns that the two should not be conflated.
Dershowitz argues that “genocide” has a very specific meaning, namely “the systemic attempt to exterminate” people with a specific genetic makeup. Citing the Holocaust as an example of genocide, Dershowitz explains that the Nazis wanted to kill every last Jew, regardless of nationality, politics, occupation, or religious observance. Hitler’s goal was to eradicate Jews from the planet.
Dershowitz explains that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, however criminal the tactics, is not being waged to wipe every last Ukrainian off the planet. Instead, Putin’s primary goals are to replace the Ukrainian government with a pro-Russia regime and to annex portions of eastern and southern Ukraine into Russia.
Dershowitz argues that while some of Russia’s tactics in achieving those goals do constitute war crimes, they don’t constitute genocide because genocide “requires a plan to exterminate” an entire genetic group.
Both Ukrainians and Russians are Slavic people, Dershowitz explains. Their languages are similar and they share a common culture and heritage. “Whatever else you can say about Putin’s war crimes,” Dershowitz writes, “they simply do not come within the definition of genocide.”
If this was a genocide, Dershowitz argues, Russia would never have permitted four million Ukrainians to escape the country. Russia wouldn’t be engaging in prisoner exchanges. What’s more, he explains, the millions of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine would have been spared in this war instead of suffering alongside Ukrainians.
Dershowitz concludes that it is important to separate genocide from “the serious crimes of waging aggressive war,” arguing that true genocides that occurred during the 20th century should not be “diluted by describing other serious crimes as ‘genocide.’”
