Derb is going to get me in trouble with my fellow Armenians, in the item in his November diary on “Armenicide” (or Armenocide). This is the term some historians use for the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks during WWI. The problem is that labeling it this way is an attempt to make it a crime that is morally different from other examples of murder – in fact, I have a problem with the whole idea of genocide as being morally different from ordinary mass murder. Genocide is certainly meaningful in a descriptive sense – the Turks really did intend to exterminate Armenians as a people, something the Nazis eagerly picked up on – but whether there is a moral difference between killing a man for his money and killing him as part of an attempt to wipe out his tribe, is a different matter. The whole concept of “hate crimes” grows out of this, and I have to say that it seems to me that every crime is a hate crime.

In any case, while I haven’t found any instances of “Hibernicide,” there are plenty of other examples of groups essentially claiming that killing one of their members is qualitatively different from ordinary homicide: Femicide, Negrocide, Judeocide, Arabicide, Islamocide, Japanocide, Anglocide, Tibetocide, Hispanocide, and Christianocide. I also found Gallocide, but that means killing chickens, not Frenchmen.