Dan Koenig writes:

>Tresy, I know from past posts that you have considerable empathy for US
>militarism.
Ahhh! Love the reflexive resort to the ad hominem. It's that blithe
indifference to fact and reason that makes this list such a flattering
reflection on the man it's named for. For the record, I have not uttered
one syllable about the NATO attacks, so how you extrapolate my position
from a logically unrelated issue is beyond me--unless anyone who
contradicts you is a love slave of "US militarism."

> I am sorry that you don't accept a difference between the
>literal
>linguistic meaning of a word and what a hegemonic group can misstate the
>word to
>mean.
The UN Convention on Genocide is a "hegemonic" document, but the UN
Charter isn't? In other words, international law is what you say it is,
nothing more, nothing less? If so, I have a book by Lewis Carrol you
might enjoy reading.

But let's not let the legal meaning of a word spoil the fun. I wouldn't
lean too heavily on the popular definitions either. Note the last example
given below, and the background to the convention:

genocide, (jèn1e-sìd´) systematic destruction by a government of a
racial, religious, or ethnic group. The term was coined in 1944, with
particular reference to the attempt of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s
to destroy European Jewry (see Holocaust; National socialism). Other
instances of genocide exist, however, such as the massacre of Armenians
in Ottoman Turkey (1894-96). A 1949 UN convention defines the crime of
genocide and provides for prosecution by national or international
courts; one such tribunal charged Serbs with the genocide of Muslims in
Bosnia in 1995. Charging that the provision for international tribunals
and the principle of personal liability for national actions violated the
concept of sovereignty [note], the U.S. did not ratify the convention
until 1986.

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