Use of the word Genocide in s1 finale

Wow, yes, I completely agree about the foolish assumption about how the rest of the Klingon empire would have responded to the destruction of Qo'Nos. Even the initial plan of destroying the military targets on Qo'Nos didn't seem likely to have any immediate impact on the war. But I often find this is the case with television, and indeed the last time I did a full Deep Space Nine rewatch, I was really soured on the logistics of the Dominion War.

Thanks both to Kev and BionicDave for sharing. I'm at a point with my day job right now where I'm likely to be teaching Modern World History every semester for quite some time. There's a lot of centuries crammed in there and it's a big world, so I organize this around examining the way that centuries of war have shaped the world we all live in today. Based on what has happened in the second half of Discovery, I've decided to change the way that I handle the development of the political ideologies that framed these twentieth-century horrors, and am going to have the students engage with significant texts so that they'll be able to better understand the sorts of ideologies we heard from T'Kuvma and the Terran Empire. I mean, they aren't going to like doing the reading, but it will good be for them.

Kev, I'm so glad you brought up the Geneva Conventions. The question of how to wage a war against a force that doesn't abide by faces us every day now, and we still don't have a good answer. This was something the show brought up when Cornwell and L'Rell spoke in the brig, and I had meant for Valerie and I to try to unpack that a little bit more than we wound up doing. At the time, it wasn't clear what the writers were going to do to answer their own question or how they were going to bring the war to a close. I was surprised (initially, at least) that Burnham's solution was to install a strong dictator who would keep anti-Federation forces within her society in check. This was essentially US policy in the Middle East during the Cold War, and I'm very interested to see if we'll get any more about what happens in L'Rell's new unified Klingon Empire.

Wow, thank you as well, @kev may, for sharing your own military background's perspective here. It really helps the rest of us to grasp and appreciate what this Star Trek "war" series is saying with your and Glenn's unique input.

As a former military person I have had plenty of time and opportunity to witness and think about the violence that man can do to man. I could have long and detailed discussion on the Geneva Conventions and their applicability to unconventional and asymmetric warfare. The moral quandaries of combating a non uniformed enemy who do not themselves abide by the conventions.

The press tends to hype every event no matter how small to the proportions of a global catastrophe and this is very dangerous. It makes these events seem less impactful and tragic and raises our levels of tolerance for such situations. Every death is a tragedy to someone and the senseless death of someone should be a source of outrage. The whole point of terrorism is to wear down the will of their enemies by causing shock, fear and despair and we have to be careful to not give in to this whilst still maintaining out disgust and righteous indignation towards those who kill indiscriminately for a cause they often do not fully believe in.

I also believe that had Qo'nos been destroyed the retaliation of the Klingon fleet would have been terrible and immediate.

It's strange - in listening to this week's podcast, I agreed that "genocide" was not the proper term Burnham should've used (is there such a term as "globocide?" or "planetary biocide?"), but her use of it didn't pull me out of the scene while watching the episode, and I'm a Jew whose family was ravaged by Nazi Germany. Then again, I've never seen genocide in action, as it sounds like Glenn unfortunately has. Thank you, Glenn, for sharing your perspective with us. I can only imagine how our culture's casual and/or errant use of that term must give you pause, to say the least.

Also strange - while I grew up around people like my great-aunt and great-uncle who were concentration camp survivors, my real introduction to the word "genocide" actually came from 1978's Superman: The Movie, when Jor-El warns the Kryptonian high council about staying on that doomed planet: "It's suicide! No, it's worse... it's genocide." (I specifically remember looking up the word in my dictionary because of that movie.) That use seems more proper than Burnham's; there were no Kryptonians living off-world, save for those trapped in the Phantom Zone, so the planet's explosion would have annihilated the entire homo-counterpart genus of Kryptonian people (had Jor-El and Lara not gone through with their secret plan to thwart that :).

So yeah, as kev may suggested above, Burnham should have accused the Federation of planning/condoning "an atrocity" of global proportion, instead.

What DID pull me out of a scene later in the episode, though, was when I thought about this Federation-destroy-Qo'noS plot, and then thought... so if you blow up Qo'noS, wouldn't those Klingon warships closing in on Earth then have even more reason to barbeque our planet?? Do I really need to quote Khan quoting the old Klingon proverb about a certain dish which is best served cold?! LOL

This is a great conversation, guys. This topic has been much on mind as I've been preparing to interview for a job teaching a course called "Regulating War," in which we would look at these terms and the rules about them, and ask what (if anything) qualifies as a just war and which behaviors (if any) are too brutal to be permitted even in war. If I get the job, we'll definitely be watching some Star Trek in class.

But, Daniel, I think you make a great point about using a term like "genocide" to shock an audience into paying attention. While the word "genocide" gets diluted when we use it this way, we also go the other way when we intentionally sanitize the language that we use to describe military violence with phrases such as "collateral damage." For me, I want us always to be clear about what we are talking about doing so that we can make just decisions about employing military violence, and I suppose that with that in mind I'd rather overstate the case than obfuscate it.

Kev, I love the precise use of decimate there! This week in my late antiquity class we talked about ancient warfare and the Roman army, and that was one of the highlights.

Those are great points

The problem is that what they were planning was not Genocide, not the wiping out of a whole group as there would still be many Klingons on other planets and ships within their empire.

What they were planning was an Atrocity.

The purpose of Atrocity in wars is to persuade the enemy that the cost of continuing is too great to bear.

Glenn was correct when he equated it to the dropping of the atomic weapons on Japan, that was an Atrocity which persuaded the Japanese that the cost of continuing the war was too high to bear.

Starfleet did not want to wipe out the Klingons to the last person, just present them with such a huge loss that they would loose the will to continue.

The fact is that our enlightened and moral compass indicates to us that it is wrong to commit atrocities. Our value that we place on life, any life, is such that the deliberate killing of those not directly engaged in combat with us is abhorrent to us.

This has not always been true in our past.

The effect of this plan would have been to decimate the klingons and demoralize them, not eradicate them.

Glenn will like Decimate it's Roman, originally a punishment for insurrection in the legions where one in every ten of a mutinous legion would be put to death.

In some cases Genocide is used correctly, in Kosovo it was the intent of the ethnic serbs to completely wipe out the ethnic albanians to the last man, woman and child. Rwanda was also like that but on tribal grounds.

Not every war is genocide, not many actually are and you are right our press should be careful of the language they use, but the rush to air brought on by 24 hour news tends to give little time for the news outlets to pause and question their terminology. Pretty much the only press which has the time and will to do so are the respected print newspapers (not the tabloids who would do anything to make you buy their rags).