Raphael Lemkin, a Polish jurist who lost forty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust, invented the word “genocide” in 1944 because he believed that, in the aftermath of the Turkish “race murder” of the Armenians and of Hitler’s extermination campaign against the Jews, the world’s “civilized” powers needed to band together to outlaw crimes that were said to “shock the conscience.” Prior to Lemkin’s coinage, the systematic targeting of national, ethnic, or religious groups was known as “barbarity,” a word that Lemkin believed failed to convey the unique horror of the crime. “Genocide,” he hoped, would send shudders down the spines of those who heard it and oblige them to prevent, punish, and even suppress the carnage.

An amateur historian of mass slaughter from medieval times to the twentieth century, Lemkin knew that genocide would continue to occur with “biological regularity.” Moreover, he knew from reviewing the recent past that if it were left to political leaders to de...

» Want to continue? Login below:

top  |  print  |  email