There are words that carry more weight than ordinary discourse can hold. Some sit close to the limits of what we can bear to say.
Genocide is one of them.
In recent months, especially in the context of the conflict in Gaza, I’ve watched the term circulate with rising urgency — in politics, in public discussion, and even in my own professional spaces of psychotherapy where one might hope for steadier ground.
The word is being used to express grief, outrage, fear and identity. It is also being used to make claims, set positions and define sides. That is understandable in the face of enormous suffering. But when a word this heavy becomes a tool of alignment rather than a description of events, it risks losing its meaning.
Learning to appreciate this Substack space after a lifetime’s struggle with words and the expression of ideas (yes, strange to hear that from a journalist, I know), I’d like to reflect on what the word genocide now holds, and why it matters to keep its power intact.
I remember its use well from the former Yugoslavia, and well before Gaza I was hearing it from hardline commentators in Moscow characterising the experience of Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine.
It’s not for me to adjudicate present conflicts. But having spent that same long lifetime at the edges of political upheaval and, more recently, at the centre of work with trauma and attachment, similar human dynamics run through both.
Two Lives of the Word
Genocide, with or without qualifying speech marks, lives two parallel lives.
The first is historical and legal.
As I understand international law, for an atrocity to meet the formal definition of genocide there must be clear and demonstrable intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such — not because they are an opposing force in a war, and not because they pose an existential threat, but simply because of who they are (UN definition).
That standard is intentionally high, and the international community has always struggled to apply it.
I recall the initial anxiety in Western capitals and the UN over naming what was happening in Rwanda in 1994 for what it was.
President Clinton’s administration — internationally minded, legally literate, and painfully aware of the obligations that would follow — hesitated for weeks. Senior officials wrestled with the fact that once the word genocide was used, the United States would be expected to act, and they feared being drawn into another Somalia (background).
The result was a paralysis of language haunted by the possibility of responsibility, directly informing the initial ambivalence of international response to Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, and the killing of 8000 men and boys in Srebrenica which in 1995 finally triggered NATO’s intervention to stop that war.
In Kosovo in 1999, NATO again moved in to prevent what the West feared could indeed be a genocidal assault on the then-province’s ethnic Albanian population, all the while the Serbian side of the conflict was accusing the Albanians of the same.
All of this reinforces the point. Genocide is not a term that states, journalists or courts reach for casually. It carries specific legal thresholds, and when those thresholds are not met — however horrific the suffering — the word belongs elsewhere.
This is why events such as the Holocaust, the destruction of Native American peoples, and the killing of Armenians in the Turkey of 1915 attract broad consensus (overview), and why other conflicts — including, I would submit, Gaza, Kosovo, and the Donbas (analysis) — sit in a different category.
To stay with the Caucasus for a moment, the Armenian case shows how a genocide can be both historically established and politically denied (scholarly affirmation).
For Armenians, the events of 1915–17 are the foundational trauma of their modern identity, the defining wound through which later threats and conflicts are interpreted.
For Turkey, accepting the word genocide carries unbearable implications for national story and legitimacy.
The Armenian experience sits precisely at the seam between genocide’s legal meaning and its political life in the world. Diametrically different interpretations, and the silencing pressures that accompany them, illustrate how powerful the word remains more than a century later.
How Language Hardens Under Pressure
Genocide’s second life is rhetorical.
Here, it reflects not only suffering but the way groups understand that suffering. The word becomes a marker of moral standing, a claim to innocence, a way of making sense of threats that feel overwhelming. The term is often invoked in this second sense long before evidence could support it, and sometimes without evidence at all.
Both lives of the word speak to deep human pain. But when the rhetorical use becomes dominant, the word loses its grounding. It stops helping us understand. It becomes a declaration rather than a description.
And this is where the difficulty truly begins.
Once a term carries that much moral weight, its presence in the public space starts to reshape the very conflicts it is meant to describe. Communities reach for it not only to account for suffering, but to anchor identity, to mobilise solidarity and to defend against shame.
The word becomes part of the conflict’s emotional machinery. In some places it inflames fear; in others it reassures. In every case it does more than describe. It participates.
Two Professional Tracks
My personal understanding of all this also now rests on two tracks which reflect two professional lives.
The first was in journalism, where in the 1970s and 80s I covered the Communist world for Reuters and later the BBC. Yugoslavia was on my patch as after the death of Josip Tito the country slid towards disintegration and civil-then-interstate war.
Through its final decade, in Serbia, Kosovo and Croatia, I watched language shift there from expressions of grievance to something more frighteningly absolute.
By January 1990, when the Croats and Slovenes walked out of the final conference in Belgrade of the ruling League of Communists, the emotional framing was firmly in place.
Ethnic Serbs in Kosovo, in Bosnia-and-Hercegovina and in Croatia were subject to or threatened by genocide, as in the eyes of Serbian nationalism they had been also under the regimes of World War Two. As Slobodan Milosevic and his ideologues framed it, war again was the only protective option.
Again, words had prepared the ground for actual outcomes which to those of us who had known the complex but largely tolerant multi-ethnicity of post-second-world-war Yugoslavia were unimaginable.
In Beijing in May 1989 I had seen something related, though different in form. As the demonstrations of that year moved towards the tragedy of Tiananmen Square, I was myself late to realise how dramatically politics were shifting after the declaration of martial law, and how Deng Xiaoping and the hardliners around Premier Li Peng were preparing to use force.
The clues however were, again, in the words: 动乱 — turmoil. 反革命暴乱 — counter-revolutionary rebellion. 企图推翻社会主义制度的阴谋 — a plot to overthrow the socialist system. 敌对势力 — hostile forces.
The language, by contrast, we western journalists were using — especially those of us also at the time covering the collapse of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe — was of course very different, celebrating a popular uprising for democracy and freedom.
Competing truths harden faster than the events themselves. Of course, in China not genocide — nothing of the kind — but the same pattern of language tightening as pressure rose (historical background).
Much earlier, in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 80s where I studied and later reported, identity wasn’t an abstract political theme. It was the political weather.
Daily life was pillared with restraining, claustrophobic narrative — much of it in today’s Russia crowding in even more intensely than it did then. The Great Patriotic War (to us, World War Two) was, and is now even more so, Russia’s ultimate moral charter, with the self-image of a people singled out by history to save civilisation from fascism.
In those days, the forward march toward communism was the unambiguous destination of history. The mystical Russian soul — its Dusha, its душá — has long been proof of cultural exceptionalism. And for a century and more, always that sense of encirclement, predatory European and then capitalist powers surrounding a peace-loving Russian orthodox and then socialist world.
Politics, Trauma and Language
To return to the analogy of the two tracks, my
To return to the analogy of the two tracks, my second professional life has been in psychotherapy.
Working with trauma and the foundational experiences that make us who we are teaches one to recognise how human beings protect themselves when reality becomes too painful to hold.
Rather than acceptance of painful uncertainty and dysfunctional memory, shame is pushed outward, and identity becomes rigid. The challenge of complexity gives way to easy simplicity, with the (ultimately fragile) relief that comes with emotional avoidance.
It’s a pattern that belongs not just to individuals. Groups, professions (even therapists), and nations do the same. When collective fear rises, defensive patterns scale up. Nuance collapses, old wounds take precedence over present facts.
In the discourse of a Putin or a Milosevic, language becomes the place where entire histories are fought out. Words harden because people harden. Identities tighten because the alternative feels too unsafe. In that atmosphere, the heaviest terms become the easiest to reach for.
Gaza is intensely complex and painful. The toll on Palestinians is devastating. The trauma of Israelis following the Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023 is extreme. The word genocide now circulates in ways that reflect the depth of suffering and fear on both sides.
For some, the term expresses a genuine perception of existential threat to entire peoples, their statehood (real or potential) and their personal identity. Others do not see a genocide in its formal sense, but the tragic and violent outworking of history’s unfinished geopolitical business.
Whatever one’s own take, it’s essential that as therapists or journalists we understand a pattern that repeats itself across different places and moments. When reality itself feels too heavy to hold, we must guard against “genocide” in its late 20th-century and early 21st-century use becoming a way of managing difficult emotional and political reality.
Why Therapists Should Recognise This
As therapists, we work daily with projections, dissociation, attachment wounds and the collapse under threat of the capacity for self-reflection — of dual awareness, as we call it in EMDR.
Emotions cloud reasoning, and in simple terms the frontal cortex goes offline — or as Iain McGilchrist puts it in his magisterial portrayal of how the human brain works, the Emissary (left brain) takes over from the Master (the right brain), convinced that its understanding and terminology is Right with a capital R (McGilchrist).
When geopolitical events touch on personal or historical pain, even experienced clinicians can find themselves pulled into absolutist language, certainty, or accusation. This is not because anyone lacks skill or goodwill. It is because human beings, under pressure, fall back on the psychological tools burned into us through evolution: the need for clarity when none is available, the urge to define oneself through moral certainty, the defensive rigidity that emerges when identity feels under threat.
I should add, quietly, that none of these reflections come for me personally from a place of certainty. They come from years of trying to understand my own history, my own projections, my own confusions in relationships that mattered most. It has taken me most of a lifetime to recognise how easily I have slipped into the same patterns I now describe — the need for clarity when I felt threatened, the pull toward fixed stories, the difficulty of seeing the other when old fears were stirred.
Much of my later life, personally and professionally, has been an attempt to repair what could be repaired and come to terms with what could not. These lessons have not arrived cleanly. They have been lived, often clumsily, and are still being learned.
The Difficulty of Naming
During my years in journalism, I learned that naming carries consequences. Too soft a word disguises suffering. Too strong a word distorts the reality and can inflame division. The balance was often uncomfortable.
In therapy the challenge is similar. Clients reach for words that express the truth of their experience, and sometimes those words do not quite fit the facts of what happened. But the feeling behind them is real and must be understood with care.
The same applies to public discourse about atrocity.
Genocide has a specific meaning. It was coined to capture acts that aimed at the destruction of a people. If the word expands to cover every form of mass suffering, its usefulness is lost, and with it the ability to distinguish between different kinds of catastrophe. Preserving the meaning does not minimise other suffering. It simply honours the need for clarity.
Holding Complexity When It Feels Hard
The challenge — for citizens, for journalists, for therapists, for anyone involved in public discussion — is to hold the full weight of this word without letting it become a stand-in for outrage or allegiance.
This means slowing down when the emotional pressure rises. It means recognising when language is carrying more than it can hold. It means remembering that behind the arguments lie human fears: fear of erasure, fear of loss, fear of shame, fear of being alone with one’s history.
Those fears need space and acknowledgment. But they do not justify losing sight of the meaning of a word designed to name the worst acts humans have committed against one another.
Genocide is a word that must keep its full weight. If it becomes a tool of identity, or a way to silence doubt, we lose the ability to speak clearly about the suffering it was meant to describe.
Holding complexity is hard. But if we let the word fracture, our understanding fractures with it — and that helps no one.