Every Conquest Is Called Genocide Now

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Conquering is now always called genocide, and the renaming is sloppy, because all war is genocide in its effects on a people while not all genocides are war. War does to a people the thing genocide does. A state can also do that thing to a people it already rules, in peacetime, with no war anywhere in sight. The two words overlap. They refuse to merge. I hold the position for the least fashionable reason on earth: I am against war itself, all of it. I am anti-war, I am anti-intervention, I am an isolationist, and my only globalism is trade. A country trained to call every conquest a genocide will eventually be talked into stopping one by force, and the stopping is a war, with another people underneath it. A word that means everything stops nothing.

My actual politics, since we are here

I am anti-war. I am anti-intervention. I am an isolationist, and my only globalism is trade: ships full of goods crossing every ocean, and no ships full of soldiers crossing any of them on errands of improvement. Other peoples’ cultures are their own human experience. They are not our ward, our project, our responsibility, or our raw material. Every one of those sentences predates the thread by decades. The Catholic schoolboy in the JROTC uniform held them. The reporter held them. The man in the thread holds them.

This is not a position I arrived at this week. I was writing it on February 14, 2005, in an essay that sided with Buchanan against Sharansky’s Case for Democracy, and I have returned to it since: in America’s Perpetual Hunt for Monsters in June 2025, and again in America Goes Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy in March 2026. Twenty-one years of the same sentence, and the sentence is John Quincy Adams’: America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

This is why the vocabulary fight matters to me, and it matters in a direction the passionate rarely expect. A country trained to call every conquest a genocide will eventually be talked into stopping one by force, and the stopping is a war, with another people underneath it, whose men die and whose women scatter and whose cities empty, all of it filed under rescue. The renaming does not abolish the thing. The renaming recruits for the next round of the thing. Count everything. Name things by what they do. Keep our own body out of other people’s geometry entirely, and trade with the whole world like a nation of shopkeepers who learned, at last, to mind their own store.

What I actually said

Strip my claim of everything decorative and it stands in three sentences. Being conquered looks almost exactly like a genocide to the people being conquered. The conqueror has never in recorded history filed himself under genocider; he files himself under victor, founder, liberator, or unifier. And nobody, anywhere, in any century, has enjoyed being conquered. These are observations about vocabulary and vanity. They accuse nobody. They excuse nobody. They describe the naming problem that sits on top of every war ever fought.

The ancients kept the receipt. Thucydides wrote down what Athens did to Melos in 416 BC: the men of military age killed, the women and children sold, five hundred Athenian colonists planted on the emptied island. Athens called it policy. History calls it conquest. A modern headline writer, handed the same facts this morning, would call it genocide before lunch, and half the argument in my thread was really an argument about whether that headline is honest. My answer: the headline describes the effect and skips the definition, and the effect is real. From underneath, conquest and genocide are the same weather. The men are dead either way. The women and children are gone either way. The strangers living in your houses do not care which word you chose for the paperwork.

So I will state my sentence and defend it: all war is genocide in its effects on a people. An army that invades, besieges, bombards, occupies, and annexes does to the people underneath it the things that define the experience of being destroyed as a people. Scale it up or dress it in law, the delivered product is corpses, captives, exiles, and colonists. But the converse fails, and the failure matters: not all genocides are war. A government that already rules a people can set out to destroy them in peacetime, by decree, by camp, by administration, with no enemy army in the field and no battle ever fought. Cambodia’s rulers killed their named enemies inside their own borders. The destroyer and the destroyed held the same passport. War is one delivery system for the destruction of a people. It has never been the only one.

The zealot and the tax collector

Her instrument was passion and mine was observation, and I have come to believe passion is the poison in these arguments. Passion feels like evidence to the person carrying it. It arrives with heat, and heat reads as importance, and importance reads as truth. The tradition I was raised in kept a warning about this filed inside a name. Simon is remembered with his label permanently attached: Simon the Zealot. A zealot was a member of a party of resistance, a man whose defining trait was the total heat of his commitment, and the label was a description before it was anything else. It was never a compliment. The same table seated Matthew the tax collector—a man whose trade was ledgers, assessments, and the patient counting of other people’s obligations. The tradition put the zealot and the accountant in the same small company and let them eat together for years. Only one of them got his temperament canonized as a warning label.

I am built as the accountant. That is formation, temperament, and trade at once: the school, the drill field, and forty years of reporting work, where the job is to look at the event and file what it is, in words a stranger can check. She experienced my observation as coldness. Coldness is the tax a ledger pays for accuracy. The passionate account of Melos and the observed account of Melos contain the same dead men. One account needs you to feel correctly about them before it proceeds. The other asks what they died of, who profited, whose colonists moved in, and what the event should honestly be called. I will take the second account every time, and I will accept that taking it costs me the occasional friendship built on photographs and a film.

Through your own body

Here is the geometry test I apply to every claim of defense. A threat stands behind you. The only line to it runs through your own body. If you fire anyway, accepting the cost in your own flesh first, the act is defense in the oldest sense the word has: the shooter pays the opening toll himself. The cost lands on the person who decided, before it lands anywhere else, and that ordering is what makes the word defense mean something.

Empire keeps the geometry and swaps the body. The shot still gets fired. The threat still gets named. The body in the middle belongs to somebody else—a conscript from a province, a city under the flight path, a foreign people whose fields absorb the campaign. At home the word defense is spoken over the whole arrangement, unexamined, because the arrangement’s defining feature is that the toll is collected abroad. Apply the test anywhere: whose body is in the middle of this shot? When the answer, year after year, is never ours, the vocabulary is doing public relations for a toll booth. A republic that will only fight through other people’s bodies has renamed conquest as security and pays strangers to staff the difference.

Conquest ended; management doesn’t

Old conquest had one virtue the modern practice refuses to copy: it ended. The city fell, the treaty was signed, the colonists arrived, the garrison went up, and everyone alive knew the thing was finished and could plan a life around the finished fact. Cruel, absolute, and over. The modern strategic vocabulary contains a term for the deliberate opposite: mowing the grass. It is a real phrase in the doctrine business, and it means exactly what it says—periodic trimming of a problem that nobody intends to solve, force applied on a schedule, forever, with no end state anyone is willing to name. Conquest at least admitted its object and reached it. Management admits nothing and reaches nothing, and bills the difference to generation after generation of the managed. Given a choice between the honest old word and the euphemism with a lawn schedule, I take the honest word. The grass, meanwhile, is people.

Conquest by paperwork

The cleanest conquest of my lifetime fired no shot at all. Hong Kong was collected at a lease’s expiry in 1997: a deadline printed in an old treaty arrived, flags changed on schedule, and a city of millions transferred sovereignty by paperwork while the world watched a ceremony. Whatever anyone thinks of the result, the mechanism is the lesson. Conquest is a transfer of who rules a people. War is one delivery mechanism for that transfer. A calendar is another.

China understands this in its bones. The China I watch is insidious and patient rather than adventurous: it builds, it lends, it trades, it buys the port and the railroad and the patience of its neighbors, and it waits for adversaries to rot from the inside, because internal collapse is cheaper than invasion and arrives with the paperwork pre-signed. Taiwan is the test case everyone watches, and the porcupine strategy is the answer everyone funds: cover the island in quills, missiles on every ridge, until the bite costs too much. Quills raise the price of the bite. They have never once made a bite impossible, and a besieger with a calendar instead of a deadline can decline the bite entirely and choose the slow capture—blockade, quarantine, inspection regimes, a siege run by customs officers. The porcupine deters the invasion it can see. The paperwork proceeds at the speed of rot.

The friendship was real, and it was shallow

We met over photography, which is a fine way to meet. Photographers talk about light and gear and the shot that got away, and none of it costs anybody anything. We shared a favorite film, the kind of film two people can quote at each other for years and feel known. Feeling known is the counterfeit currency of these friendships. You can spend a decade exchanging it and never learn a single load-bearing fact about the other person.

We had exactly one deep conversation, in person, a couple of years ago. It wandered somewhere neither of us expected and we discovered, to our mutual delight, a shared skepticism about an official story—one of those moments when two people find out they doubt the same furniture. I filed it as proof the friendship had a basement. It had a basement. What it never had was a second visit to the basement.

This week the second visit happened by accident, in a thread, in public, about conquest and genocide and what the words mean. She brought passion. I brought observation. Her verdict arrived in the form of a question—where is the Chris I thought I knew—and my answer was the plainest sentence I own: he was never here. I was never a bleeding heart. I was formed by a Catholic boys’ school in Honolulu, by JROTC, by the Ranger Club, by drill and doctrine and the catechism, and the man that formation produced has held roughly the same cold views for forty years. She was not arguing with a changed man. She was meeting the actual one for the first time, and the meeting exhausted her. It exhausted me too. Mutual exhaustion is the honest result when a surface friendship finally touches the load-bearing wall and finds out the wall was never decorative.

So the friendship keeps its photographs and its film, and loses an illusion it was carrying. She thought she knew a gentler man. The man she knows was formed by priests and drill sergeants, counts Melos and Hong Kong in the same ledger, believes all war delivers genocide’s effects to the people underneath it, believes some genocides arrive by administration with no war at all, and believes the honest answer to the whole bloody catalogue is refusal—no conquests of ours, no wards of ours, no mowing of anyone else’s grass. Conquer nobody. Trade with everybody. Let other peoples live their own human experience in their own countries, and let the words keep their edges, because a word that means everything has never once stopped anything.

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