Letter: Not a response to others' slogans

Martin Thomas’s letter in Solidarity 699 purports to be a response to my article about the charge of genocide in Gaza in 698. In fact, it mostly responds to things I did not say and arguments I did not make.

Martin dismisses my references to Chinese and Russian states’ attacks on the Uyghur and Ukrainian nations as irrelevant, on the basis that Israel’s assault on Gaza is not an attempt at forced assimilation.

He then goes on to assume that I “must” therefore mean a definition of genocide which he gives.
But my article was very clear about what definition I was using – the definition in the Genocide Convention Article II, which I named, linked, explained and applied. As I wrote, the relevance of the Uyghur example is that in that case, we in Workers’ Liberty accepted and used that definition, yet the editorial on Gaza dismissed it (and did so on the basis of a partial quote and a weak argument). That is the only connection I made between these examples.

Martin also asks why I think the terms “catastrophe”, “massacre”, “slaughter” are “too weak”. Yet I made no such complaint. In fact, I wrote: “this is not to suggest some sort of formal semantic policy would be useful or necessary. Disagreements over this language can be reasonable and do not alter the basic moral horror of the racist slaughter, nor the urgency of the political tasks.” My own use of the designation was actually quite cautious – again, please read the article.

The question is not the strength of the terms. As Martin seems to recognise elsewhere, genocidality is not just about the scale of slaughter. Again, the actual question was whether we accept the Convention, or use some other approach (I wrote, “reasonable counter-arguments are possible … to the [Convention] definition”) – and either way, that we be consistent about it.

Martin then chides: “it is not true here that a bit of emotive imprecision does no harm. Not true that the cost of imprecision can be outweighed by the benefit of being with the flow of the sloganising about ‘genocide’ on those protests.” I don’t believe I am the one here dispensing with precision, nor determining my arguments based on how I want to relate and respond to slogans raised by other political currents.