Raphael Lemkin was a great man, a hero, a genius, and a fool. The Polish-Jewish jurist dedicated much of his life to building a consensus around enshrining in international law a ban on “genocide,” a concept he sketched originally in the ‘30s and coined as a word in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In it, he described Nazi crimes that, he would find out at Nuremberg, Germany, killed some 49 members of his own family. Never again must this sort of thing be allowed, he determined, himself already a student of the Ottoman genocide of Armenians during World War I and many others. In Chapter 9 of the book, he lays out “a new term and new conception for destruction of nations.” What proceeds is a lawyer’s idea of what stops actions, namely definitions and regulations: “New conceptions require new terms. By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc. Generally speaking, genocide … is intended rather to signify 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.” (“Genos” actually just means origin, as in Genesis, but never mind.)

Later, Lemkin writes that “we must see to it that the Hague Regulations are amended so as to expressly prohibit genocide in any war which may occur in the future.” The thing is, though, there are problems with this definition and problems with using it to try to “prohibit” anything.