Buckle up.

I grew up in the 1970s. I remember going to the Simon Wiesenthal Center as a child, meeting Holocaust survivors, hearing the stories, seeing the tattoos, watching videos of camps being liberated, looking at pictures of dead, emaciated human beings stacked like cordwood. Adults in those days didn’t shrink from talking about the Holocaust – it was just part of a normal 1970s Jewish education, whether at home or at shul, just part of the air we breathed.

And back in those days, we learned a simple rule. It was – and is – an absolute. There are no caveats, curlicues, or asterisks. There are no exceptions, no escape clauses. Here it is:

Genocide is wrong.

That’s it. This isn’t a political statement, and this isn’t controversial. It’s not up for debate. There are no special cases. No one gets special dispensation.

To be extra clear, because I know that people will always look for loopholes, I’d like to answer the most common replies up front:

But—

No buts – genocide is always wrong.

You don’t understand the special situation—

It doesn’t matter what the situation is – genocide is always wrong.

Akshually, this doesn’t really count as genocide—

Seriously? That’s your argument? Let me be extremely clear – genocide is wrong.

You should be using your platform to speak out against a different issue.

You’re making a bad faith argument. Even if you think that I don’t have the right to tell you this, or that I’m a hypocrite, or that I should be talking about some other issue, or that I’m a bad person for any reason at all, guess what! No matter what you think about me, genocide is still wrong.

There are many, many ways in which people can hurt other people, and genocide is at the absolute top of that list. It is the worst thing that humans can do to other humans. Genocide is always wrong. There is no situation in which it is not wrong.

If the above extraordinarily generic statements make you angry because you think I’m singling out a specific group, ask yourself why you pattern-matched on that specific group. Do you think what I’ve written above is wrong? Which of the above statements do you disagree with? Are there any you don’t passionately agree with?

This is a blog site about software engineering. And you might think that this is a weird departure, or perhaps that I should stay in my lane. My response is that there’s no lane that doesn’t include the fact that genocide is wrong.

Now’s the “so what?” part of the blog. The part where I tie it up for you in a bow and tell you what it all means. The part where I give you food for thought, or advice, and maybe you walk away and think some thoughts that you wouldn’t otherwise have thought.

I’m not going to do that here. Everything I have to say is in the above lines. It’s important for us to say it out loud. And maybe if enough of us say it, the world will start to believe it again.