Quote Originally Posted by Marshal Murat
So war is genocide, so war is bad.
Not necessarily.

Slyspy (and others) sums it up pretty well: war is not necessarily genocide. A genocide requires an intention to exterminate for the sake of extermination. There is nothing less than that and that's why it's a pretty chilling thing. You die because you are Tutsi and Tutsis are to die; not because I want to subjugate you, rob you of money, rape your wife and enslave your children for power and profit. I just want you dead no matter what.

The Romans are different. They want the slaves and the gold. They are just a little too willing to slaughter entire cities for it. Mind you, the slaughter on Carthage could be argued as a proper case of genocide, if there is enough evidence that the Romans pretty much carried out the task because they want no Carthaginians left in the world to oppose them.

That the public imagination of genocide is focused on the Holocaust does not bother me except in cases where people ignore other genocides in favor of this one, which I tend to blame on the average audience's ignorance rather than the Jewish filmmaker's choice of subject anyway. People who blame Spielberg for filming Schinder's List and not Hotel Rwanda tends to be a little...ah...anti-semitic. A little.