Raphael Lemkin: The Original Anti-Genocide Activist (Part I)

by Michelle

Published October 04, 2008 @ 03:35AM PT

Raphael Lemkin's creation and development of the term "genocide" represents a mere mid-point in a life dedicated to the pursuit of protection and justice for marginalized groups. Before the rest of the world woke up to it, Lemkin recognized the particular horrors of mass human extermination.

Details about his early life remain unclear, but memoirs reveal early knowledge of the history of the massacre of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, as well as exposure to anti-Semitic pogroms while growing up in a Jewish family in Poland. Lemkin studied philosophy and law, and worked as an attorney in Warsaw until the German invasion of Poland led him to flee Europe and eventually settle in the United States. His writings give the best picture of his development of the term "genocide," and the particular characteristics that separate the crime from other types of war and mass violence.

1933

Lemkin's first attempt to codify international protection for crimes against minority  groups came several years before Hitler's plan to exterminate European Jews fully developed, in 1933 with a presentation to a conference of the Legal Council of the League of Nations in Madrid. Believed to be motivated in part by the Simele massacre of Assyrian Christians in Iraq in August of the same year, Lemkin argued that the physical and cultural destruction of targeted groups amounted to a "transnational crime," the consequences of which threaten international interests, and thus fall under the jurisdiction of international law.

Lemkin thus proposed to expand the list of "offenses to the law of nations" to include, most notably, "acts of barbarity" and "acts of vandalism."

• Acts of Barbarity include "acts of extermination directed against the ethnic, religious or social collectivities whatever the motive (political, religious, etc.); for example massacres, pogroms, actions undertaken to ruin the economic existence of the members of a collectivity," as well as acts of degradation committed as part of such a campaign. Lemkin identifies "acts of barbarity" as "attacks carried out against an individual as a member of a collectivity," with the intention of harming not only an individual, but an entire collectivity. "Offenses of this type," Lemkin argued, "bring harm not only to human rights, but also and most especially they undermine the fundamental basis of the social order."

• Lemkin also included the destruction of a group's culture as an offense, referring to acts of vandalism as the "systematic and organized destruction of the art and cultural heritage." The destruction of artifacts of culture, Lemkin argued, does not just amount to the loss of property, but rather "the contribution of any particular collectivity to world culture as a whole, forms the wealth of all of humanity." The loss of such wealth is thus a loss of all humanity.

The crucial, defining characteristic of both acts of barbarity and vandalism is the intent of the perpetrator-the total destruction of a collectivity and/or its culture. Although Lemkin's efforts to add the offenses to international legal code failed, the 1933 paper represents the first clearly articulated definition of act that would, ten years later, become known as "genocide."

1944

Lemkin first coined the term "genocide" in 1943, as a continuation of his failed Madrid proposal, and first used the term in print with the 1944 publication of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, a 670 page analysis of Nazi policies in Europe.

In Chapter IX, Lemkin offers "genocide" as a new word for an old practice, writing that it represents a "coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves." Distinct from other crimes against individuals, "genocide is directed against the national group as an entity," whose members are targeted "not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group."

As in 1933, the distinction of the act lays in the intent of the perpetrator-that is, to physically destroy a targeted collectivity based on its identity as such. Genocide is further distinguished from the modern doctrine of war, in which states and armed forces clash with one another, as genocide finds civilian populations under attack by the state.

Even more, Lemkin writes that, based on an ideology that gives precedence to the nation over the state, the Nazi war of aggression amounted to a "total war" not against states and armed forces, but against entire peoples. "In this German conception," Lemkin argues, "the nation provides the biological element for the state." For Hitler, genocide was based on biological patterns rather than culture, and was thus a "means of changing the biological interrelations in Europe in favor of Germany." Genocide, according to Lemkin, was not just a Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews, but served as the basis for Hitler's plans for world domination.

The importance of the conception of nations as biological cannot be understated: the division of groups between the innately superior and innately inferior, often presented in terms of race and biology, is a central element of genocidal ideologies, and is used by genocide participants to justify their actions.