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This reasoning would be okay if treating the enemy as animals applied only to this specific enemy and didn't normalize that behavior under any other circumstances, such against Russians in other time periods, innocent people associated with Russians (see also: Japanese-American internment), or other ethnicities, or against cultural elements (such as destroying the statue of Catherine the Great). Needless to say, humans don't behave like that.
It also reduces your credibility. If all your enemies are called monsters, you won't recognize actual monsters. Believing in the Holocaust was harder than it should have been because fake reports of German atrocities during World War I were on people's minds.
I think not. The "drawbacks" that Halla identifies, "both for the mental health of the Ukrainian soldiers and the Westerners who help them, and for the reconstruction of the normal society after the war" are SUPPOSED to impede your ability to wage war effectively. Because doing co-operate/co-operate on other-side humanisation is better than doing defect/defect on other-side humanisation. If Ukraine (and it's allies) defects and goes hell-for-leather dehumanisation, Russia is encouraged to do the same, which will lead to MORE damage to Ukrainian lives (via mistreatment of POWs, occupied civilians, etc) than if Ukraine hadn't started the dehumanisation spiral.
Indeed, "more dehumanisation please" is an ESPECIALLY dumb argument to make when it's Russia occupying Ukrainian land and not the other way around, lol. This is surely the time to ask for more clemency, not less?
This presumes the Russians are willing to provide clemency if plead to, and is countered by point that Russia invaded Ukraine with the premeditated intention to set up filtration camps and start kidnapping, killing, and otherwise abusing pro-Western Ukrainians as a matter of policy and part of a broader cultural genocide effort in a war to destroy the Ukrainian nation.
To appeal for Russian clemency is to appeal for the Russians to reverse the policy objective which was a goal of the invasion itself.
Well, (a) this isn't very charitable, given that Russia's stated aim is denazification and prevention of crimes against humanity against Russo-Ukrainians, and (b) even if all Ukrainian-US propaganda is true and Russia really is capping any Ukrainian who ever looked fondly at an EU / NATO flag... there is always more brutality to be had. Daring Russia to sink even lower by engaging in anti-Russian dehumanisation will not, I think, have the long-term salutary effect Halla thinks it will: any Ukrainian lives saved from acceleration in victory are likely to be more than counterbalanced by Ukrainian lives lost from the incrementally more brutal Russian counterreaction.
Russia's stated aim is irrelevant to charity. Russia's revealed aim and policies have included multiple crimes against humanity that do amount to international standards of genocide, and in line with Russian narratives justifying such on the rejection of the legitimacy of Ukrainian nationhood.
The Russians will be brutal regardless, and will continue to be brutal over any Ukrainian territory they control both now and potentially in the future.
That's an interesting claim, considering Russia retains maximalist war goals that are not limited to 'just' the 4 claimed sub-regions, let alone the occupied areas.
I don't think it's intellectually fair to use the word "genocide" (which most people associate with the physical extermination of people) in relation to a situation where children from an orphanage in Mariupol are sent to an orphanage in Russia.
Do you consider restrictions on the study of the Russian language in eastern Ukraine a genocide?
Probably the exact opposite is true. Russians will not be cruel to the local population no matter what, because they consider the local population to be Russian.
If you don't think it's fair to apply the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a convention of over 70 years of establishment international law, which even Russia is a a party to, for international standards of genocide, I question your standards of intellectual fairness.
No, nor do they meet the international standard of it. Per Article II of the convention-
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Black Comedy can be found in thinking the Russian state wouldn't be cruel to Russians. Evidence of Russian cruelty to Ukrainians under Russian occupation can be found from Bucha to Kherson.
Get rid of bureaucratic nonsense. I think that this word in everyday use has a completely different meaning.
Both Russians and Ukrainians constantly claim that they find torture chambers in the occupied territories, this is probably just information garbage.
If we talk about Bucha, then we are talking about the alleged incident with the execution of men mistaken for artillery spotters, a guy on a bicycle who unsuccessfully rode onto a convoy preparing for battle and many civilians killed by Ukrainian artillery.
No, I decline to defer to your appeal for definition gerrymandering.
Many people use words wrong, but this is one whose context was specified, and whose definition for the scope of genocide has been an established part of international law longer than you've been alive.
And, you know, was refered to via the reference of international standards, to prevent confusion.
Well, that's one way to describe inconvenient UN investigations.
https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N22/637/72/PDF/N2263772.pdf?OpenElement
No, we're talking about the one involving torture and summary executions of civilians, as well as bodies being left in the streets for over a week as identified by commercial imagery despite Russian claims that the bodies were staged by Ukrainian forces as part of false allegations.
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