[usrusr]

The important word should be "was". If you try to remove it from the past, by arguing semantics or by any other means, you make it stick into the present. A past genocide would be much easier to live with than a permanently unsettled question of genocide or war event or war atrocity or paranoid fantasy of everybody else conspiring to sully a history they actually don't even care that much about as if they had nothing better to do.

The thing is, history is full of ugly things and arguing them creates a much stronger link between the uglyness and the one arguing than ancestry could ever do.