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.
First, it is a very broad umbrella. Currently, in scholarly and international-legal language, it is genocide to try to force a people to speak a new language and adopt new customs of food and dress (to encourage them eventually not to think of themselves as a people) or to force “population transfers” across a border 50 miles away. This sort of attack on cultural heritage or moving people by force from their traditional homeland is world-historically an evil crime, but it perhaps deserves to be treated to a separate word than death marches to a gas chamber, which is currently also called genocide and what we ordinary users of English think of first. All are ways to try to stop a people from surviving as a people, sure. But it’s different what happened to the Circassians and Armenians and Jews (eliminationist mass slaughter) and to any number of peoples who have been driven from their homes or forcibly assimilated. I’d rather be a converso than a Holocaust victim, wouldn’t you? A single term can only bear so much indistinction.
Second, if you want to prohibit genocide in any war in the future, you don’t call a lawyer — you call the commander of a tank division or a carrier battlegroup. It was armed men, not learned men, who stopped the killing at Treblinka and Auschwitz, and it is the same who either will or will not stop the killing in Ukraine. Murder is illegal in Chicago, just as genocide is illegal on Earth, but the fact that the Chicago Police Department “clears” fewer than half of all homicide cases raises serious questions about whether murder is really illegal — or just illegal on paper. And this is the problem with trying to stop evil with definitions and conceptions and prohibitions. Law is, after all, in the enforcement. Raphael Lemkin, for all his brilliant and heroic efforts to set up prohibitions against evil, didn’t prohibit anything.
