Thoughts on Thesis statement.

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Been working on one for university, and I think I have it saying what I want it to say, but I just wanted some outside opinions. Without further ado:

The international legal definition of Genocide are described in Articles 2 and 3 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Article 2 includes two elements of the crime of genocide, a mental element of intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such, and a physical element further defined in Article 3, of actually attempting to do so. The physical element includes killing members of the group causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

While this definition was created in 1948, with the horrors of the Second World War and accompanying atrocities fresh in the minds of its legislators, it is easy enough to look back and retroactively apply these definitions to other historical actions, such as the Armenian genocide, and to see whether or not they would fit modern sensibilities as such. However, doing so invites many spurious comparisons. Many large scale massacres, while tragic to be sure, are not genocides, and labeling them as such would be inaccurate. These wild comparisons are especially thrown about in the Colombian exchange, and while there probably were genocides contained in them, such as of the Taino people, not all ethnic groups wiped out during said exchange would fall under the category of genocide, for lacking some or all of the mental elements.
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