Whether or not something is a legitimate military target does not change whether or not the rules of war apply. Destroying Alderaan was genocide. There is no splitting hairs about it. It was a war crime.<p>Just because genocide saves more of your guy&#x27;s lives than a protracted ground war doesn&#x27;t make genocide any more just. The danger to yourself of an invasion is supposed to be a deterrent. You&#x27;re supposed to weigh whether or not your cause is worth having a lot of your own people die before you commit to using violent power.<p>I also wouldn&#x27;t call the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki &quot;not genocide&quot; and I certainly wouldn&#x27;t say it was justified, regardless of whether or not it gains any future, official designation as genocide. It was mass-scale, indiscriminate killing. Is &quot;genocide&quot; the only unacceptable form of mass, indiscriminate killing? The implication was that it would continue until the Japanese surrendered or were wiped out.<p>His understanding of genocide seems to be limited only to race, but the real definition extends to culture and national units. Alderaan is certainly a nation--it has its own monarchy. While theoretically that doesn&#x27;t guarantee they are a distinct culture from other planets, practically speaking it is a guarantee. Alderaan being a planet--therefore comparable to our own planet--probably has several distinct cultures wholly contained within it.<p>Even by his own false, limited definition, there&#x27;s no reason to definitively state Alderaanians are not any less a distinct race of people than the Serbians are from Bosnians, or Hutus are from Tutsis. Interstellar travel is portrayed more akin to sailing between continents than flying between major international hubs, and even that level of mobility is still unable to prevent Earthlings from stratifying into distinct races.<p>Since the author is doing his own work to draw parallels to the Middle East and Daesh, the US didn&#x27;t just nuke Iraq in 2002 when the Minister of Information Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf kept lying about their capabilities. And we would not be justified in nuking Syria or Saudi Arabia today. There is no conceivable justification for wiping out an entire people.<p>What Mr. Bunch has really discovered is the Myth of the Supervillain. Every villain sees themselves as the hero. No villain identifies as evil. They all have a post-hoc rationalization for why their terrible, terrible actions were justified, because we can always rationalize anything by appropriately cherry-picking who we consider human and what laws do and do not apply to non-humans.