the reason liberals call the ukraine was a genocide is because war is so normalized to them that calling it a regular war isnt enough for them, they have to call it genocide to convince themselves this is different than what libs themselves want to do
I agree, but it also serves a few other purposes.
First, it makes the concept of peace negotiations impossible to libs. Peace is completely unacceptable if the Russians are going to execute everyone in occupied territory, so the only possible conclusion is that the war must continue until, at minimum, Ukraine has taken back all territory they've lost, including Crimea and the DPR/LPR.
Second, it allows libs to draw a comparison between the current war and WWII, which is universally regarded as a "just war" (nevermind that the allies couldn't have given less of a shit about the jews, roma, disabled, LGBT, etc who were actually genocided).
Third, which builds off of the first two, is that if things get bad enough, it allows them to encourage direct NATO intervention to stop the "genocide". Look at how much propaganda of the US invasion of Afghanistan was centered around being liberators stopping the big bad evil taliban.
Libs frame all their political enemies as genocidal. It's the only move they have and it generates more sympathy than normal war, because they can't pretend to care about every war on Earth. They certainly didn't care about Yemen.
Also it helps draw attention away from why wars happen. Liberals believe the world moves on personal animosity and beliefs. Putin isn't retaliating against NATO or securing sea ports or energy resources. It's not actions that can be put in a material framework. No. He's personally, individually bad and hates Ukrainians as an ethnic group and so any action against Russia is justified.
It also helps to counter their nagging thoughts of “why am I siding with Nazis again?” or “why am I freezing this winter for some place called Ukraine?”
Well if I’m preventing a genocide by the fascist russians, anything and everything is worth it as a valid strategy.
I love how the site accidentally realized why Chomsky "denied" the genocide in Bosnia.
