The Limits of Linear Thinking: On the Denial of Genocide

Introduction

This piece addresses the narrow frameworks through which certain intellectual positions have rejected labeling the atrocities against the Amhara people as genocide. Building on the work of leading genocide scholars, it re-examines the question from multiple angles, restoring both the moral and legal essence of the term.

Reasoning devoid of context confines itself to a rigid, word-for-word reading of law, treating legal definitions as exhaustive. It fails to grasp the moral, sociological, and human dimensions the concept was meant to capture. Such reasoning is a logic that prefers the comfort of a checklist to the discomfort of seeking verity, a mindset that refuses to call the bear before it a bear because it did not roar as expected. The result is a form of intellectual paralysis: horror is measured by bureaucratic precision rather than human loss. The essential question remains simple: Are Amhara civilians deliberately killed because they are Amhara? If so, the intent is clear. Ethnic targeting establishes genocidal intent regardless of scale, political context, or reciprocity of violence.

The Legalist Approach

One common approach reduces genocide to a linguistic puzzle. 

“If the intent to destroy a group because of its characteristics is not present from the get-go, neither the growing intensity of the war nor the mounting number of civilian victims can turn it into a genocide.”

It demands explicit, visible proof of intent, as though genocides always announce themselves in manifestos. Yet history proves that intent is most often revealed through patterns, repetition, and the deliberate targeting of identity. When villages are burned and civilians are slaughtered for years simply because they belong to a group, intent is no longer speculative, it is evident. It becomes embodied in action.

Another approach denies genocide because violence does not reach a certain “level” mistakes intensity for intent.

“Crimes were and are being committed in the Amhara region, but they do not yet rise to the level of genocide.”
But genocide is not a matter of degree on a sliding scale; it either exists or it does not.
There is another argument which posits that genocide cannot occur where some members of a group cooperate with the state is equally flawed. 

“The term ‘genocide’ does not fit a situation where a part of the Amhara people cooperates with and fights for the government.”

History offers painful precedents that participation of a few never erases the persecution of the whole. Hitler employed some Jews to oppress other Jews, yet the involvement of a few did not change the genocidal nature of his campaign. Similarly, the presence of Amhara collaborators or regional soldiers does not erase the systematic, identity-based targeting of the broader Amhara population. Collaboration does not nullify extermination; it often deepens its tragedy.

This mode of thinking produces paralysis in place of moral responsibility. It mistakes academic caution for integrity and hides behind arithmetic when moral clarity is required. Intellectual honesty does not dwell in neutrality. It begins there, perhaps, but lives in the courage to name reality. By reducing genocide to an abstract definition detached from the cumulative human and moral realities on the ground, such reasoning misses the spirit of Raphael Lemkin’s concept itself. The concept was born to name the crime, not to measure it by legal convenience.

The Empirical Equivalence Fallacy

Another denial relies on a false symmetry, that everyone is both victim and victimizer. 

“If you look at international reports, no one is a victim here: Each is a victimizer and a victim.”

In the name of neutrality, it erases moral asymmetry and confuses war with extermination. The Tigray conflict, though immeasurably cruel, was directed primarily against an anti-Ethiopian militarized front, not a civilian population as such. Atrocities occurred on all sides, a shameful trend of recent decades, but their purpose was not the eradication of a people.

The Amhara case differs fundamentally: it is an identity-based campaign targeting civilians for extermination. To equate the two is false equivalence that erases meaning itself and turns moral clarity into a bureaucratic equation.

The insistence that “no credible report” confirms genocide is equally misplaced. 

“When it comes to genocide, no credible report has come claiming there is a genocide in Amhara or genocide in Tigray.” 

Reports from researchers, journalists, and survivor accounts is overwhelming, though the vocabulary of diplomacy hesitates before the word “genocide.” To ignore it is not objectivity; it is selective blindness. Genocide does not await certification by international bodies. To claim that atrocities cannot be called genocide because no international body has recognized them is fundamentally flawed; history, from the 1971 Bangladesh genocide and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where some 800,000 lives were lost before the international community reacted, shows that the sustained targeting of a people, the testimony of victims, and systematic violence speak for themselves. Since international institutions can look away out of diplomatic calculation or simple indifference, we should learn to trust our own people and their lived reality instead of deferring to external authorities or waiting for permission to think independently. 

The Struggle for Recognition and the Question of Justice

The path toward recognition of genocide is always uphill, tiresome, humiliating, and painfully slow. Every nation that has suffered mass extermination has faced the same struggle: the world hesitates to see what is before its eyes until the blood dries and the victims are silent.

The exaggerated focus on international recognition and the constant appeal to foreign courts reveal a misplaced faith in external judgment. Justice delivered in The Hague does not acquire greater truth because it is spoken in English. The same sentence, pronounced in Amharic by an honest national court, carries the same moral and legal weight, perhaps even more. It is not the language or the geography that matters, but the integrity behind it.

To expect salvation from international tribunals is to ignore the reality that such institutions act only when it serves their own purpose. They sentence when it reinforces their political narrative or moral image, not when justice itself demands it. The West will not gain anything by prosecuting a few dozen African perpetrators among the hundreds already buried in silence – particularly when Ethiopia itself has become a ticking bomb.

Justice without self-interest is rare in global affairs. Thus, the true moral reckoning must begin at home, when our own courts, one day freed from fear and deceit, dare to call the crime by its name and restore dignity to the victims.

The Line Between Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

The distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide lies in intent, a distinction not of scale but of purpose. Ethnic cleansing seeks removal, displacement; genocide seeks erasure. Intent is the hinge between the two, and in this case, it has been declared repeatedly, even boastfully. The perpetrators themselves have confessed through their own words, speeches, videos, songs, and state media saturated with dehumanization. These are not isolated aberrations but a coherent pattern of deliberate targeting, where the identity of the victim, not the act of war, determines death. The evidence is not hidden; it is broadcast.

Inferring Intent: Historical and Legal Precedent

The question of intent, the decisive element separating ethnic cleansing from genocide, has long been resolved in international law. Courts have repeatedly held that genocidal intent can be inferred from patterns of conduct, systematic targeting, and the wider context of atrocities. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in the Akayesu judgment (ICTR, 1998), established that ‘intent may be deduced from the general context,’ including the scale and selectivity of attacks. Similarly, in the Krstić case on Srebrenica (ICTY, 2001), the tribunal ruled that even without explicit orders, the coordinated and identity-based extermination of a community demonstrated clear genocidal intent. These precedents affirm that words, actions, and repetition reveal purpose: when killings consistently follow the line of ethnicity, the pattern itself becomes evidence of intent. In the case of the Amhara, the public declarations, propaganda, and targeted killings leave little doubt ,  the intent is not conjecture but manifest in the very structure of the violence.

References: International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu (ICTR-96-4-T), Judgment of 2 September 1998; International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić* (IT-98-33-T), Judgment of 2 August 2001.

Naimark’s Wider Lens

The historian Norman Naimark, an expert on genocide affairs, offers a more intelligent and morally awake interpretation of the concept of genocide, one that transcends technocratic translation. For Naimark, genocide is not confined to the strict letter of the 1948 Convention but understood in its wider historical and ethical sense: the systematic destruction of a human group by intent, whether through killing, forced displacement, or the annihilation of cultural and social existence. He reminds us that genocide is a process, not a single event, it begins with language, exclusion, and humiliation long before it culminates in mass killing.

This broader and more humane understanding stands in sharp contrast to the linear, paragraph-bound readings that treat genocide as a mechanical category rather than a living moral reality. Naimark’s insight restores the concept to its original purpose: not to define evil neatly, but to recognize it in time. His interpretation demands imagination, empathy, and moral foresight, precisely what linear minds fail to exercise when confronted with the systematic destruction of a people.

The New Challenge of Knowledge in an Age of Excess

In earlier generations, information was scarce and difficult to access. The problem was how to find it, where to read, who to ask, how to reach the sources. Today, the paradigm has shifted entirely. Information is everywhere: vast, instantaneous, and often overwhelming, the mind grows lazy, and abundance breeds complacency. The question is no longer how to acquire knowledge, but how to discern wisdom within abundance, the art of connecting and synthesizing across fields.

Law, too, is not immune to this shift. The interpretation of concepts such as genocide cannot remain confined to narrow, literal, or bureaucratic readings. In an era of overwhelming data, true understanding depends on the capacity to see patterns, to link evidence, intent, and consequence across history, psychology, and morality. It is this synthesis, not technical precision alone, that transforms legal definition into moral recognition.

Beyond Linear Logic

These tendencies reveal a broader flaw, rigidity of thought and the absence of moral imagination. When the moment calls for synthesis and empathy, linear reasoning collapses. Genocide is not static; it grows through tolerated atrocities and delayed recognition. By the time institutions admit it, destruction is often complete.

The Amhara genocide, therefore, is not only a legal issue but a matter of conscience. Victims are targeted for who they are, not what they have done. Hesitation in naming this truth becomes participation in denial. Real responsibility refuses to sacrifice truth for comfort or prestige. History honors those who, like Voltaire defending Calas, risk reputation for justice.

Conclusion

In this post-truth era, the tendency to substitute word games for wisdom is the intellectual disease of our time. Analysis replaces witness; definition replaces moral outcry. Words, once tools of truth, have become instruments of treachery, twisted to mean whatever power requires, polished into euphemisms of evil and disguises of complicity. This hesitation is not carefulness; it is a fear that leads them to echo the arguments of the perpetrators and to cast themselves, inadvertently, into the very den of those committing the crimes. 

Calling an intentional ethnic eradication genocide is essential for both truth and justice. It brings moral clarity, separating deliberate destruction from ordinary conflict. Legally, it demands accountability under international and, more importantly, domestic law, for the sake of historical truth. Above all, it affirms victims’ suffering as a matter of justice, not denial, and preserves truth against forgetting and distortion.

Genocide is not proven by paperwork; it reveals itself through patterns, repeated killings for identity alone. Are the Amhara killed because they are Amhara? Yes. Nothing else explains it, and nothing justifies silence. Recognition need not await Western sanction. It begins when those who suffer name their own truth and confront it with courage. If the law must err, let it err in favor of the victims, not their neglect, especially for those of us who bear the cost of its silence.

Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com  

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