A Waiter Double-Charged Me For My Entrée. Is That Genocide?
Maybe it's time to learn what that word means.
Last Friday, I was at Silver Diner. I had the Hawaiian luau burger, and my wife had the crab cakes. We split some onion rings and each had a Coke. And then the bill came: $78.20 after tax. What in the chain restaurant hell was going on?
I quickly found the error: The waiter had rung up the burger twice. “Excuse me,” I said, calling him over. “What’s this?”
He looked at the tab and reacted with surprise. “Oh!” He exclaimed. “I’m so sorry! Let me run that again. I apologize.”
Now: I like Silver Diner. My wife and I go there about once a month. But I couldn’t take this affront to my dignity lying down. So, I looked the waiter straight in the eye and said: “You genocided me.”
The freckle-faced 20 year-old looked dumbfounded. So, I repeated myself: “You genocided me. You rang up the entrée twice.”
“I don’t think I did,” he said. I was incredulous: “So you’re saying you didn’t ring up the entrée twice?” “No, I did that,” he admitted. “But, I think maybe you don’t know what the word ‘genocide’ means.”
At then I realized: Maybe I don’t know what “genocide” means. Does anybody? Can anybody these days, when people throw around the word “genocide” like a DJ tossing beads off a Mardi Gras float? Every action by either side in the Israel/Hamas war is denounced as “genocide” by a chorus of Twitter idiots. Activists of an especially nutty piquant have stretched the term to cover basically any bad thing. “Genocide” is now literally the most overused word in the world, surpassing the word “literally”, a word that literally nobody knows how to use.
But “genocide” actually has a meaning. It doesn’t mean “any bad thing done by someone I don’t like.” People have worked to define the term. In 1948, the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which speaks of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” That’s not the whole definition, and people debate the word's parameters, but most people agree on two components: 1) An intent to exterminate a group, and 2) Large-scale action to realize that intent.
Sometimes, the word “genocide” has legal weight. The International Criminal Court can prosecute people for genocide, and once in a blue moon, they actually do. Many countries have made genocide part of domestic law. In the US, some policy makers feel that a finding of genocide requires the government to take certain actions. This belief has influenced American thinking on events like the The Rwandan Kerfuffle, The Armenian Brouhaha, and The Great Cambodian Whoopsie.
But not all bad things are genocide. Crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing are all very bad, but they’re conceptually distinct from genocide. The Nazis who were prosecuted after World War II were not tried for genocide; they were tried for crimes against humanity. Of course, the absence of a genocide charge didn’t do much to preserve their reputations. They’re still Nazis convicted of crimes against humanity; in most social circles, that’s a major smudge on your reputation. If you knew someone who was a Nazi convicted of crimes against humanity, you probably wouldn’t think “yeah but not genocide" and then set them up with one of your single friends.
Some people are clearly determined to call everything genocide. This may stem from the habit of some left-wing activists to act as though a clear and robust regime of international law exists, even though it doesn’t. Or maybe it’s just maximalism: If you’re trying to win an argument, you might as well accuse your opponent of the worst crime you can think of. This tactic is tempting because if you accuse someone of something, and they deny it, then many people will assume that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. So, if you baselessly call your enemy a rapist, the charge might not stick, but a lot of people will assume that he must be some sort of medium-grade pervert. When it comes to accusations, there’s an incentive to go big.
In hindsight, my waiter was probably not guilty of genocide. I should have tipped him. Also, few if any of the claims of genocide that I’ve made against my barber, paperboy, and mother in-law were sound. I regret accusing them, and I regret referring them to the International Criminal Court. I just didn’t know what “genocide” meant. I’ll be more careful using the word in the future, and I think that other people should do the same.
I'm not sure which is more shocking: your use of the term "paperboy" which is contributing to the genocide of LGBTQIA+ pyple; or, the fact that you still have a paperboy.
Ooh. Here’s a list of other terms worth doing:
-colonialism
-racism
-fascism
-science
-dog whistle
-gaslighting
Most of which have somehow become synonyms.