How to Steal the Meaning of Genocide: A Guide
Wear down a word, turn it inside out, and let institutions give the corpse a certificate of authenticity. Then, you can accuse anyone of anything, and the accusation itself becomes its own proof.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Paul Friesen who writes the newsletter, “Minority of One”.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I was working on a small study of linguistic decay — a piece about how fascism had been flogged into meaninglessness — when a video from Geneva forced a rewrite.
Natasha Hausdorff was at the United Nations Human Rights Council, doing what lawyers rarely attempt there: speaking in plain English. She had barely reached the point where she accused the Council of serving as a laundromat for dictatorships when her microphone was cut. The chair, in a tone usually reserved for customs officers and minor clergy, reminded her that her language must be “commensurate with the dignity of the session.”
The dignity in question, one assumes, belonged to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and the other regulars who come to that hall to accuse Israel of famine, ethnic cleansing, or genocide — while committing most of those crimes at home.
It was the perfect specimen of a habit I’d been writing about: semanticide, the killing of meaning by overuse, inversion, or intent. I’d been tracing it through the word fascism; Natasha had stumbled into it live on camera.
What happened in that chamber wasn’t simple hypocrisy. Hypocrisy at least pays a compliment to the truth. This was projection raised to the level of ritual. Murderers calling themselves victims; despots declaring themselves humanitarians. The words genocide, apartheid, colonialism were flung like confetti, not to describe reality but to bury it.
When Natasha described this process, the keepers of “dignity” pulled the plug. A small but fitting gesture: Semanticide can’t survive in open air.
Semanticide isn’t lying. Lying still assumes that words mean something, even if you twist them. Semanticide starts one step earlier: It murders the meaning first. Once the word is dead, you can dress the corpse however you like.
It usually begins with fatigue. A term is overused, pressed into every argument until its edges wear off. Fascism was the early victim. Everyone from environmentalists to tax reformers had their personal fascist to denounce. Soon, the word no longer pointed to Mussolini or totalitarianism but to anything mildly bossy or distasteful. Once it lost precision, it lost force.
The second stage is inversion. After exhaustion comes appropriation. A word once describing evil gets recycled as moral currency. “Resistance,” “liberation,” “justice” — all fine terms until used to excuse the opposite. A movement calling for the extermination of Jews can now brand itself as “pro-justice,” and no one in the room laughs.
Then comes institutionalization. Bureaucracies, NGOs, and courts adopt the corrupted vocabulary because it’s convenient. Their reports repeat the new usage, journalists quote the reports, and the feedback loop closes. A false meaning, once ratified by a few logos and letterheads, becomes untouchable.
What makes semanticide so effective is that it looks respectable. No books are burned; no laws forbid speech. The dictionary simply erodes quietly underfoot. Arguments still sound moral, but their language has been hollowed out.
At that point, discussion stops being possible. Words that once carried moral weight — genocide, occupation, rights — turn into noise. When every action is “genocidal” and every disagreement “hate,” nothing means anything, and the worst crimes become rhetorical décor.
That’s the anatomy of it: Wear down a word, turn it inside out, and let institutions give the corpse a certificate of authenticity. From there, you can accuse anyone of anything, and the accusation itself becomes its own proof.
The Geneva session looked less like a council of nations than a hall of mirrors. Every speaker condemned Israel for crimes he practises at home. The charge sheet read like autobiography recited as accusation.
Saudi Arabia spoke of famine and forced displacement while its war in Yemen was still starving children by the tens of thousands. The delegate delivered the line without blinking, as if the hunger his air force had created somehow qualified him to lecture others on humanitarian duty. Venezuela, having driven more than seven million people into exile, warned of colonial aggression. The irony of a government that survives on Cuban security advisers accusing anyone of colonialism was too dense even for irony itself to penetrate.
Bangladesh, a state that has imprisoned editors and brutalized the Rohingya, scolded Israel for “flagrant human-rights violations.” Iran, sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah — both devoted in their charters to the eradication of Jews — declared Israel genocidal. In any sane forum, that would end the discussion; at the UN, it begins one.
And then came the choir of “independent commissions” and self-anointed human-rights custodians, reciting the same charges with academic solemnity. They quote reports that quote other reports, all of them tracing back to the same source: the propaganda offices of Hamas. By the time these circular citations reach the microphones in Geneva, they have acquired the fragrance of legitimacy.
This is projection as diplomacy. The guilty invert the mirror, and the institution obliges them. Accusation replaces confession; repetition replaces proof. Words like genocide, apartheid, occupation lose all proportion through constant misuse, until they describe everything and therefore nothing. The method works because the audience mistakes moral vocabulary for moral fact.
What begins as rhetoric becomes record. The Human Rights Council transcript enters the archives, journalists cite it, students footnote it, and the lie hardens into “consensus.” That is how semanticide earns its living: not by burning books, but by printing them.
In that room, Israel wasn’t merely being slandered; language itself was being dismembered. And as always, the butchers called it justice.
If fascism died of overuse, genocide is dying of theft. The crime it once named was so vast that language almost cracked trying to contain it. Lawyers and survivors spent years chiselling its meaning into law: the deliberate destruction of a people. It was meant to resist inflation, to stay anchored in fact.
Now the word drifts through diplomatic air like a loose balloon. In Geneva it no longer refers to gas chambers or machete-filled churches; it refers to inconvenience, to war, to whatever accusation serves a political purpose. The term that once named the worst of humanity has become a prop in the minor theatre of outrage.
The irony is blunt. The world’s only Jewish state, created from the ashes of genocide, is accused of committing it. The charge is not just false; it feeds on the memory of real victims to give itself weight. When the descendants of the murdered are branded as the murderers, language doesn’t bend; it breaks.
This collapse is more than rhetorical. Genocide is one of the gravest crimes recognized in modern international law, defined narrowly for a reason. Dilute that definition and the hierarchy that distinguishes atrocities by scale and intent starts to buckle. A concept meant to isolate the absolute evil is stretched to cover every conflict. Once everything is genocide, nothing is. And when nothing is, the next real one will go unnoticed because we will have run out of words for horror.
False accusation also corrodes memory. It turns commemoration into parody, compassion into posture. A term that once carried the silence of mass graves now echoes with slogans. The result is not justice but noise — moral inflation at its most destructive.
Those who wield the word this way are not naïve. They rely on the guilt reflex of democracies and on institutions that prefer the drama of denunciation to the labour of verification. Shout genocide often enough and you can drown out the evidence that contradicts you.
In Geneva, the routine was practiced to perfection. Regimes funding militias with exterminationist creeds accused Israel of their own ambitions. The claim was copied into press briefings, repeated by committees, and will, in time, find its way into textbooks. Thus the lie hardens into record — not through violence, but through paperwork.
The killing of people begins with the killing of meaning. The term genocide was supposed to stop both. In the wrong hands, it now prepares the ground for each.
Every propaganda system needs a washer and a dryer. Lies alone are crude; they leave stains. To last, they must be laundered — passed through institutions that can bleach the fingerprints and return them as respectable opinion.
At the United Nations, this laundering has become routine. The process usually begins with a claim made by a group operating under the flattering label of “human rights organization.” The claim is quickly dressed in the language of research — field reports, data sets, testimonies, maps — though most of it originates from one-sided sources or local proxies.
Once published, the report becomes raw material for a UN commission or rapporteur, which cites it as “evidence.” When the commission’s findings appear, the same NGOs quote them back as confirmation. By the end of this neat circle, propaganda has acquired an academic accent and a UN watermark.
Journalists pick up the report, headlines follow, and the fiction is now a “UN-backed” finding. No one remembers where it began, only that it carries the scent of authority. The laundering is complete.
This technique doesn’t depend on conspiracy, only on repetition and convenience. Bureaucracies prefer pre-written conclusions; media outlets prefer ready-made outrage. The result is a self-sustaining ecosystem of moral citation, where each actor validates the next without ever touching reality. It’s the bureaucratic version of a perpetual motion machine — fuelled not by truth, but by paperwork.
The UN Human Rights Council sits at the centre of this network, recycling accusations from groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, whose record on Israel could fill a small library of selective indignation. These organizations long ago traded in the discipline of fact-checking for the glamour of indictment. Their statements are not evidence but incantations — moral spells repeated until they sound like law.
The danger is not simply that falsehoods spread; it’s that they acquire credentials. A forged report attached to a blue logo becomes, in practice, indistinguishable from justice. Once that happens, even honest investigators are trapped inside a contaminated archive. To question the record is to risk being accused of denying it.
Semanticide thrives in this environment because it wears a suit and carries a badge. Its agents speak in acronyms and clauses, not slogans. The vocabulary of rights and humanitarian law becomes its camouflage, concealing a process that slowly empties both of content.
By the time Natasha Hausdorff spoke in Geneva, this machine had already done its work. Every accusation she refuted had been printed, cited, and archived as fact. Her brief interruption of the cycle was enough to expose the trick — which is precisely why the microphone had to be cut.
Censorship today rarely arrives wearing a uniform. It comes dressed in procedure, speaking the language of manners.
At the Human Rights Council, the president didn’t forbid Natasha Hausdorff to speak. She simply decided that her words lacked “dignity.” The vocabulary of courtesy did what bans once did. When an argument can’t be refuted, it’s declared improper.
This method is spreading quietly through international institutions. Dissent is tolerated until it draws too direct a line between fact and hypocrisy. Then it’s softened, redirected, or cut short for “tone.” The rules of decorum become a filter through which truth must squeeze, often losing its shape in the process.
It’s an effective strategy because it flatters everyone involved. No one feels like a censor; everyone feels like a professional. Politeness becomes a moral alibi. The result isn’t absolute silence; it’s a narrowing of what can be said without consequence.
The pattern isn’t unique to Geneva. Across similar forums, the same instinct applies: Manage conflict linguistically, avoid embarrassment institutionally, and maintain the appearance of consensus. In that atmosphere, statements that challenge the script are treated as disruptions to order, not contributions to debate.
Semanticide depends on exactly this kind of moderation. Once the meaning of words is hollowed out, the next step is to police how they’re used. The guardians of “civility” become, intentionally or not, the enforcers of ambiguity.
The techniques are subtle. A microphone faded out. A speaker replaced. A paragraph redacted before publication. No punishments, just quiet edits. Over time, people internalize the limits. They learn what not to say if they wish to stay invited.
This is how suppression now works in democratic settings: not through fear, but through fatigue. It teaches people to value smoothness over substance. At the Human Rights Council, that instinct produced a silence more telling than any speech — a silence in which the accusation was allowed to echo, and the answer was not.
History doesn’t usually die from erasure; it decays from misquotation.
Once a false version of events enters circulation, it begins to harden through citation. Each repetition grants it a layer of legitimacy until fiction acquires the texture of record. A single speech in Geneva, repeated through reports, headlines, and academic footnotes, can within a decade become an accepted “fact.” The slow march from press release to archive requires no conspiracy, only indifference.
This is the most durable effect of the UN’s theatre of accusation. The vocabulary of atrocity — genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing — is injected into the historical bloodstream without evidence, and time does the rest. A claim uttered often enough becomes part of the background noise of public memory, and background noise, eventually, sounds like history.
The cost is precision. Real genocides (Rwanda, Bosnia, the Yazidis, the Uyghurs) lose their contours when the same word is casually pinned to every conflict. Distinction fades; moral scale flattens. The very terms that once preserved memory begin to corrode it.
Israel provides the case study, not the exception. Years of repetition have produced an archive where assertion outweighs documentation. The same statistics, photographs, and adjectives circulate until they seem immovable. The context that would give them meaning (terror attacks, rockets, hostages) drifts out of view. What remains is a collage of accusation that future readers will mistake for evidence.
This corrosion spreads quietly. Scholars will cite earlier papers, journalists will quote experts quoting one another, and each layer will appear to confirm the last. In the end, the record will seem too settled to reopen. Falsehood gains the stability of sediment: compacted, dense, and difficult to dislodge.
That is how semantic decay turns into historical amnesia — not through censorship or malice, but through repetition without verification. Words survive; meaning doesn’t. The archive fills up, yet understanding empties out.
Democracy is a creature of language. It breathes through words like debate, law, truth, and evidence. Once those words lose definition, democracy starts gasping without realising it.
Semantic corruption doesn’t arrive with marching boots; it seeps in through slogans. When every opponent is a “fascist,” every war a “genocide,” and every policy “oppression,” politics becomes a masquerade of superlatives. Citizens no longer argue about facts but trade moral certificates. Discussion collapses into ritual denunciation, and the side with the louder adjectives wins.
This is how free societies lose their bearings: not by force, but by metaphor. The currency of speech inflates until meaning is worthless, and everyone is left rich in rhetoric but bankrupt in thought.
The United Nation’s example is only the global version of a local problem. The same infection runs through Western discourse, where virtue has become a substitute for verification. Once a claim is pronounced “moral,” it is treated as self-evident. Doubt is heresy; scrutiny, cruelty. The result is a politics of emotion disguised as ethics.
Democracy can survive hostility, but not confusion. It depends on citizens who can still tell the difference between accusation and evidence, sentiment and argument. When that line blurs, populists and demagogues inherit the stage. They thrive in linguistic fog because clarity is their only natural predator.
The real danger of semanticide, then, isn’t that it distorts the record of one nation. It is that it makes honesty impossible everywhere. A society that cannot name things accurately cannot govern itself intelligently. It will legislate by feeling, judge by headline, and elect whoever flatters its moral vocabulary most fluently.
Every age rewrites its language, but ours is the first to do so with a sense of virtue. We congratulate ourselves for destroying precision as if it were an act of compassion. The crime of semanticide is committed not by tyrants alone, but by citizens who find it easier to chant than to think.
Democracy’s obituary, if it comes, will not begin with a coup. It will begin with a standing ovation — for someone who said nothing true, but said it beautifully.
The moment Natasha Hausdorff’s microphone went silent, the Human Rights Council’s president thanked her for her “contribution” and moved briskly to the next speaker. The ritual resumed, undisturbed. The lie had survived another day, wrapped in protocol and stamped with legitimacy.
But something in that short exchange revealed more than the hours of speeches before it. It showed that truth, even briefly spoken, still registers like a voltage spike through bureaucracy. You could see the reflex: Contain it, smooth it, return to business. That, in miniature, is the story of semanticide: the quiet elimination of meaning in the name of order.
The word deserves recognition as more than a metaphor. It names a process that corrodes everything built on honest speech: history, law, democracy, and memory. It doesn’t destroy language; it occupies it. And once the occupation is complete, every argument becomes theatre, every record a script.
The antidote is not outrage but precision. To defend truth, one must defend vocabulary: to insist that genocide means genocide, that law means law, and that human rights are not whatever the majority of abusers decide to vote through in Geneva.
The microphone was switched off, but not before Hausdorff named what most in that room already knew and few dare to say: that an institution founded to prevent lies from becoming history has become the instrument by which they do.
The rest of us can still choose whether to join the ritual or to interrupt it. The difference begins with calling things by their proper names — and refusing to let those names be murdered twice.
 | A guest post by
|
If we are going to obliterate the distinction between war crimes and genocide, then we will need yet another third term to describe Germany’s actions during WWII, which were so manifestly aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people, NO MATTER what country we lived in. In fact, they rounded us up in Germany and every country they occupied—way before the Nazis conceived of a more efficient way of doing away with us—and murdered and raped us JUST BECAUSE WE WERE JEWS. Beyond the communists, Germany did not have political targets of their hatred—this was a RACIAL war, imagined from the beginning as aimed at racial purification. (And even the evil of communism was attributed to the dominance of Jews within the ranks of “Bolsheviks”)
Have any Israeli soldiers invaded nearby countries, looking for Arabs to gather up and rape and murder? Have they ever lined up Palestinian women and children in Gaza, shot them and thrown them into mass graves? Have they ever celebrated the deaths of the civilians who were killed in the bombings of buildings built over Hamas’s network of tunnels, where the terrorists cowered, allowing their own people to be collateral of THEIR war against Jews?
Hamas’s stated (often, proudly stated) aim IS genocidal. Yet somehow, the so-called “pro-Palestine” groups in this country and others have ignored that, while seeing the Israelis who have been terrorized, raped, and murdered by Hamas as the unfortunate by-product an act of “resistance.”
As the UN is a worthless organization the solution is to remove them from the US and have them meet in Iran, Saudia Arabia, or Bangladesh. Turn the Turtle Bay building into housing in a city which sorely needs it and just to be provocative here the US and Israel should leave this corrupt body. Since the US alone pays about 25% of the cost of this clown show let the anti-semites around the world pay for their forum elsewhere.