…and again, and again, and again…

@shasta technically speaking it’s organized violent persecution of an ethnic group. Historically has a more specific meaning as it originates in Russia.

When the Russian Empire expanded and in the 19th century began to colonize /occupy territory that contained significant ethnic Jewish populations, they undertook a lot of rioting to lynch/massacre/expell them. These were known as “pogroms”.

In modern English it means this kind of systematic attack against any ethnic group. It is also sometimes used informally/metaphorically for other things e.g. political or corporate “pogroms” against a particular group or class of people.

Essentially, (if my high school history had it correct) it’s an extreme form of violence designed to force a targeted people to leave the land they are living on. People used to use this term a lot more in older days (back in the 80s), but now we just use the term genocide since pogroms usually are an aspect of genocide - the Armenian Genocide, for instance, had a lot of pogroms going on. They are also a key aspect of settler-colonialism - which is how Palestinians ended up being one of the largest refugee populations in the world.