[11] This is supported by political scientist Kurt Mundorff who highlights how to the general public genocide is "simply mass murder carried out on a grand scale".
[14] Genocide is a crime of special intent (dolus specialis); it is carried out deliberately, with victims targeted based on real or perceived membership in a protected group.
[17] The colloquial understanding of genocide is heavily influenced by the Holocaust as its archetype and is conceived as innocent victims targeted for their ethnic identity rather than for any political reason.
Genocide is often considered the apex of criminality, worse than other atrocities that lead to an equal amount of civilian death and destruction.
The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion.
His history of the Holocaust, The Extermination of the European Jews, does not use the term,[60] and in a 2023 interview with the World Socialist Web Site he called genocide "an analytically worthless concept made for political purposes" and "an instrument of liberal imperialism".
[61] In literature, some scholars have popularly emphasized the role that the Soviet Union played in excluding political groups from the international definition of genocide, which is contained in the Genocide Convention of 1948,[62] and in particular they have written that Joseph Stalin may have feared greater international scrutiny of the political killings that occurred in the country, such as the Great Purge;[63] however, this claim is not supported by evidence.
As the Cold War began, this change was the result of Lemkin's turn to anti-communism in an attempt to convince the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention.