This is dangerous thinking; people perceived to be blocking progress -
farmers, aristocrats, reactionaries - can be more forgivably slaughtered
than ethnic groups because they're allegedly part of the problem, not the
solution. After all, you've got to break some eggs to make an omelet.
For many, the Soviets and the Red Chinese elude the genocide charge because
Communists were omelet-makers. Ukrainian kulaks, or independent farmers,
opposed Stalin's plan for collectivization, so they were murdered for that
"greater good."
Today, Mao and Stalin aren't in Hitler's class of evil because Hitler wasn't
a "modernizer," he was a racist. Note how the Russians have no problem
copping to the charge of mass murder but recoil at suggestions it was
racially motivated.
It's a wrongheaded distinction. Murder is murder, whether the motive is
bigotry or the pursuit of allegedly enlightened social planning.
It's also a false distinction. Racial genocide is often rationalized as a
form of progress by those responsible. Under the Holodomor,
Ukrainian culture was systematically erased by the Russian
Soviets, who saw it as expendable. No doubt the Sudanese janjaweed in Darfur
and the Chinese People's Liberation Army in Tibet believe they are
"modernizers," too.
Or consider the ultimate racially motivated genocide, the Holocaust. Gotz
Aly and Susanne Heim demonstrate in their brilliant book, "Architects of
Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction," that the Final
Solution, particularly in Lemkin's own Poland, was perceived by the young
economists overseeing it as a "modernizing project that would transform
society."
In Germany, the effort to crush Jewry was intertwined with the effort to
nationalize the economy and eliminate small and independent businesses. For
German social engineers, the Jews were convenient guinea pigs for their
economic experiments. The first test cases were not the Jews but the
mentally ill, who were classified as an economic liability - "useless
bread-gobblers" - in Germany's 1936 Four-Year Plan of economic
modernization.
The climate of anti-Semitism made the Holocaust possible, but so did
Enlightenment bias, which holds that almost anything can be justified in the
name of progress.
I doubt such distinctions would have been of much comfort to Lemkin's 49
relatives.