It seems you’re comparing literal genocides with metaphorical genocides. All group extinctions are not genocides. And more obviously, the metaphorical ‘death’ of ideologies is not the same as a real death, and the extinction of those ideologies is not the same as the extinction of the descendants of those who held them, let alone of an intentional genocide of anyone. Ironically, the way you’re describing in literal language someone watching “everything they love slowly die out and get destroyed around them” when what you’re really talking about is “indoctrination” and ideological pressure, is strikingly similar to the stereotyped liberal use of “violence” to include language and ideas that make someone uncomfortable.
For literal genocides, in which a group of people is literally removed from the gene pool, we can make moral distinctions, on at least the dimensions of directness and intent:
- intentional direct genocide, where people are murdered in order to kill the group.
- intentional indirect genocides, where people are excluded, isolated, starved in order to kill the group
- unintentional direct genocide, where people are murdered with the side affect that the group is killed
- unintentional indirect genocide, where people are excluded, isolated, or starved with the side affect that the group is killed
There does seem to be a moral difference here, with the badness decreasing in the order I’ve presented them. There are probably other dimensions of moral consequence on which we could divide genocides, but these are the two most salient.
I think you could make a case that certain forms of metaphorical genocide are worse than some forms of literal genocide as I’ve defined it, but it’s a hard one. Effectively all forms of literal genocide will be perceived as worse by the people affected by them than any metaphorical genocide that could befall them. We could posit a moral system in which the extinction of ones memes is a greater loss then the extinction of ones genes; there’s a lot of territory to explore in that, and I don’t have solid intuitions about how it might work.