Genocide vs. Ethnocide — What's the Difference?

Genocide is the intentional action to destroy a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. A term coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the hybrid word geno-cide is a combination of the Greek word γένος (genos, "race, people") and the Latin suffix -caedo ("act of killing").The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such" including the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to "bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part", preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group.

Ethnocide is the extermination of cultures.Reviewing the legal and the academic history of the usage of the terms genocide and ethnocide, Bartolomé Clavero differentiates them by stating that "Genocide kills people while ethnocide kills social cultures through the killing of individual souls". Ethnocide or cultural genocide is possible without a genocide.Because concepts such as cultural genocide and ethnocide have been used in different contexts, the anthropology of genocide examines their inclusion and exclusion in law and policies.An example of ethnocide is what the Yugoslav regime did to the people of Yugoslav Macedonia from 1945 to 1991, starting with Bloody Christmas.

The systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group.

The deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic group, accomplished either by destroying the members of the group (genocide) or by destroying its cultural identity (culturicide).

The systematic killing of substantial numbers of people on the basis of their ethnicity, religion, or nationality.

(by extension) The systematic killing of substantial numbers of people on other grounds.

(by extension) The systematic suppression of ideas or practices on the basis of cultural or ethnic origin; culturicide.

The elimination of an entire class of monsters by the player.

(transitive) To commit genocide (against); to eliminate (a group of people) completely.

The systematic killing of a racial or cultural group; as, the Nazi genocide of Jews left few in Germany or Poland after World War II.

Systematic killing of a racial or cultural group