Genocide is defined as: acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The principal example of genocide and the one which, in fact, led to the term being coined is that of the Jewish Holocaust during the period of the second world war. Looking around the modern world there are also numerous other examples of genocide as suppressed national people-groups seek to re-establish themselves within their historic territories or where dominant regimes exert the ultimate power of influence over minority dissident and/or innocent people-groups within the state. The recently obvious ones being Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. It is not intended here to analyse a particular situation, people or territory but to look at what is meant by genocide and to relate this to what is happening to Cornwall and the Cornish people.
All commonly perceived examples of genocide, or its modern euphemism 'ethnic cleansing', have one thing in common and that being the immediacy of the deed over a relatively short time scale and involving the destruction of human life within the targeted people-group. Some dictionary definitions, consequently, are:
"The policy of deliberately killing a nationality or ethnic group" {Collins}"The systematic extermination of racial and national groups" {Funk & Wagnall's}
"Deliberate extermination of a race or people" {Chambers}
It is a certainty that some will view with incredulous horror, and understandable anger, the audacity of anyone daring to equate their perception of the Cornish situation with the atrocities inflicted upon the Jewish people and others in more recent events. I would ask that you keep an open mind and consider, for a moment, that such acts of atrocity may be explained by another definition in that genocide may be achieved by 'the destruction of the people-territory relationship' and that the full context of what is being shown will be acknowledged as a valid argument. I do not, for one moment, equate what is happening to the Cornish people with such 'physical' atrocities but only the probability that genocide is achievable by many methods and not always the most obvious.
The term 'genocide' came into being as a consequence of the horrors inflicted upon the Jewish people and in 1947 the United Nations formulated its policy on 'genocide'. Even at that time there were those who took a broader view of the act of genocide and sought, unsuccessfully, to have the concept of 'cultural genocide' included within the policy. Visit this link 
to follow up on this failure of the Imperial States. Is there, in fact, a point when the act of genocide is no longer considered to be genocide? If that is so: under what conditions would such a policy of non-genocide exist? Perhaps it is also possible that genocide may be committed without being so immediately obvious? It is necessary to indulge in an examination of synonyms of the verbs 'to kill' and 'to exterminate' in order to give a broader understanding of a range of ways in which such a policy may be implemented without resorting to the extremes of physical violence and bearing in mind the definition of destroying the people-territory relationship.
| SYNONYMS | Kill | Exterminate |
| Collins(1987) | annihilate; assassinate; destroy; do away with; eradicate; execute; exterminate; extirpate; neutralise; cancel; extinguish; suppress; veto | to destroy living things completely; annihilate; eliminate {Collins} |
| Chambers(1961) | to put to death; to slay; to deprive of life; to destroy; to nullify or neutralise; to render inactive; to weaken or dilute; to reject; discard; to fascinate; overcome | to drive out; to destroy utterly; to put an end to; to root out; |
| Funk andWagnall's InternationalEdition 1967 | simply to destroy life whether human, animal, or vegetable, with no suggestion of how or why. | annihilate; banish; demolish; destroy; eradicate; expel; extirpate; overthrow; remove; uproot. |
We should, I feel, be applying a much broader analysis to determine more fully how anything can be caused to cease to exist in so far as in may take on a different state as a consequence of a particular methodology and hence establishing a period of contradictory truths - the Paradox! I would argue that the key factor which segregates the Cornish from the more obvious victims of genocide is 'time'. If you apply the same logic to, say, administering discipline, or making decisions, then the time factor would significantly influence the way that such an action was applied. Time, therefore, is a link which inversely relates the method to a common outcome and we may say that Time x Method = Same End Result (a Constant = Genocide). In the extreme case the final solution is to destroy the body whereas, I submit, that in the more subtle case the body is left intact but the same final solution is achieved by destroying the consciousness. Because the body still exists and retains all its mental and physical faculties then the only way to destroy one consciousness is to pursue policies to replace it with another consciousness.
If we consider another analogy with a time relationship such as that which pertains to the action of two dissimilar liquids upon an object. In one case we have the extreme, and immediate, action which we find if the liquid is an acid whilst at the other end of the scale we have water which is described as the universal solvent and which over time will certainly have a modifying effect upon the object and may even have a totally destructive effect. If, therefore, it is wrong to destroy the object using the extreme method (acid) then it must equally be wrong to modify or destroy the same object by using the, apparently, innocuous process of water application. A longer, even infinite, time-period does not lessen the evil but only serves to make the evil less obvious to identify.
The component of 'time' when analysed implies the degree of sophistication, or subtlety, in the implementation of the policies. Conversely, given time it would be possible to restore a truly unambiguous Cornish Dimension within the Duchy but the so-called democratic processes, being ostensibly for the English by the English, does not, currently, favour Cornish aspirations. During which time the process of genocide may be shown to be accelerating.
If we put the whole debate inside a 'triangular box' as a genocide model, we could legitimately label an entity entering the process as 'A' and representing an original state (in our case 'Cornish') but emerging as 'B' from the opposite side and representing a modified lower order state. The top of the box we could label as 'time-scale'. The time taken for 'A', which we may term a Cornish consciousness, to be modified to 'B' would be, as stated above, dependent upon the methodology applied.
The more extreme the methodology the shorter the time-scale and hence the more obvious the modified state
('B' = No Cornish consciousness = Death).
Conversely, the longer the time-scale the more sophisticated and subtle the methodology would be and the modified state perceived, as a consequence, less obvious
('B' = No Cornish consciousness = A new consciousness).
The common outcome is that the Cornish cease to exist in their original consciousness. It is this latter methodology which facilitates considering a broader and more subtle selection of the synonyms or definitions for 'kill' and 'exterminate' as highlighted above in bold text. The apparent absence of attrition does not mean that it does not exist but, in my view, the existence of the Paradox clearly reaffirms that it does.
