SLUH Junior Theology Course '07-'08
Faith and Morality...
By Kevin Casey
The Term "Genocide" and its Creator
From "A Problem From Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
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In 1920 Raphael Lemkin, a twenty-one-year-old Polish Jew studying linguistics at the University of Lvov, first became exposed to the concept of what would later be termed genocide. He had come across a newspaper article on Soghomon Tehlirian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide who later assassinated Mehmed Talat, one of the main leaders of the huge massacre. Lemkin was puzzled: "It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?" (page 17) he asked one of his professors. He was shocked that the concept of state sovereignty, or a country's ability to be self-governing, could serve as a shield for men like Talat that attempted to wipe out an entire minority through the killing of millions.
By 1933 Lemkin had become a lawyer and made plans to speak before an international criminal law conference in Madrid on his proposal of an international law draft, specifically touching on the Ottomans' slaughter of Armenians under Talat and Adolf Hitler's ascent to power in Germany. "If it happened once, the young lawyer urged, it would happen again. If it happened there, he argued, it could happen here" (page 19). Lemkin therefore proposed that the international community unite in a campaign to ban the practice of mass slaughter under a law that would prohibit the destruction of nations, races, and religious groups. The law what be based on what is called universal jurisdiction, which states: "The instigators and perpetrators of such acts should be punished wherever they were caught, regardless on where the crime was committed, or the criminals' nationality or official status. Lemkin argued that internationally banning the attempt to wipe out whole groups of people would, as it had with piracy and slavery, help to end the evil practice.
Such a law would center on two practices- that of barbarity (Lemkin defined this as the "premeditated destruction of national, racial, religious, and social collectivities" (page 21)) and vandalism (Lemkin defined this as "the destruction of works of art and culture, being the expression of the particular genius of these collectivities" (page 21)). Unfortunately Lemkin wasn't allowed to attend the Madrid conference and make the proposal himself, and few people stood behind him with his proposal. Back in Poland he was fired from his job as deputy public prosecutor for his criticisms of Hitler. Six years later he found himself fleeing his home after the Nazis invaded Poland; his family refused to leave. He eventually made it to Sweden in 1940. One year later he landed a job at Duke University teaching international law.
Raphael Lemkin
In June of that year the Nazis declared war on the Soviet Union, and Lemkin lost contact with him family. Throughout the next two year he went to officials in various departments all throught Washington, D.C., but all either refused to believe or didn't care about his accusations that Hitler was systematically killing the Jews. During his lobbying he was struck with something Winston Churchill had said in August 1941: "The whole of Europe has been wrecked and trampled down by the mechanical weapons and barbaric fury of the Nazis...As his armies advance, whole districts are exterminated. We are in the presence of a crime without a name" (page 29). Lemkin then decided that if he combined his interest in languages (he fluently spoke nine), his knowledge or international law, and his goal of preventing atrocities to create a new word that distinguished mass-killings from other wartime violence- to give a name to what was happening- people might work harder to stop it.
In November of 1944 Lemkin's book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was published. The book was 712-pages long and consisted of rule and decrees imposed by the Axis powers in Nazi-occupied countries and territories. A main reason for the book's publication was to convince nonbelievers of what Hitler was really doing, and introduce a term "that would describe assults on all aspects of nationhood- physical, biological, political, social, cultural, economic, and religious. He wanted to connote not only full-scale extermination but also Hitler's other means of destruction" (page 40), such as mass deportation and the separation of men from women to lower the birthrate.
Lemkin brainstormed several ideas for such a term, such as "mass murder," "denationalization," "Germanization," and "Magyarization," but disapproved all of them for various reasons. He wanted something short and to the point that could not be used in any other context. He also wanted it to chill its readers and arouse immediate hatred; it had to contain within itself a moral judgement. Finally he settled on his own creation of a hybrid of two derivatives. He combined the Greek geno, meaning "race" or "tribe," with the Latin cide, meaning "killing," to form "genocide." It was short, easy to pronounce, universal, and would be forever associated with the horrible crimes of Hitler.
In Axis Rule Lemkin wrote that genocide meant "a coordinated plan of different actionas aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves" (page 43). He continued:
"Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor's own nationals" (page 43).
Raphael Lemkin
Perpetrators of genocide destroyed political and social institutions, culture, language, religion, and economic existence of certain groups. Genocide did not necessarily mean the extermination of a group physically, either. The word was greeted with mixed results. Many were happy that such a word had finally been made. They recognized that with this word, outsiders would in the future be encouraged to prevent such heinous acts before they escalated to the point of Hitler's. Critics claimed that although it was a good idea, simply labeling the crime of genocide wouldn't stop its instigation. The word was first defined in the Webster's New International Dictionary, and other dictionaries followed suit. Lemkin saw the word's spread of fame as a sign that the major powers were ready to both apply it and oppose the deeds behind it.
The word was first officially made international when the third count of the October 1945 Nuremberg indictment accused all twenty-four defendants with genocide. Yet it wasn't until December 11, 1946, that the United Nations General Assembly finally passed a resolution condemning genocide that tasked a committee to draft a full-fledged UN treaty banning the crime. It then only need to be passed by two-thirds of the committee to become international law. It wasn't until December 9, 1948, though, that the General Assembly unanimously passed a law banning genocide, which they defined as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life caluclated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" (page 57).
It was deemed as one set of individuals intending to destroy the members of a group not because of anything they did but because of who they were. The treaty applied in peacetime and in wartime, inside or outside of a country.
Yet it wouldn't be until October 1988 that the United States Congress would pass the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, making genocide punishable in the U.S. by life imprisonment and fines of up to $1 million. It couldn't have been done had not Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire taken up the cause of the genocide ban on January 11, 1967, giving a different speech each day on the subject, several years after Lemkin's death.
Senator William Proxmire (1915-2005)
By the time Proxmire took up Lemkin's torch, nearly seventy countries had ratified a law banning genocide. Lemkin died of a heart attack at the age of 59 in 1959, in despair that the world's most powerful nation would not ratify the law. Yet he had coined the word "genocide," helped develope a treaty designed to outlaw it, and seen the treaty approved internationally. He spent his life working to help outlaw the indescribable, horrible crime that had taken millions' lives. Seven people showed up to his funeral.
Information Source:
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Related Links
Samantha Power's Personal Website
Key Writings of Lemkin
Everything You Need to Know About Genocide
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
First-Ever Printed Mention of "Genocide" is The Axis by Lemkin
Example of One of Senator Proxmire's Speeches
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