Word With a Past: Genocide
Genocide as an activity is probably as old as the concepts of “us” and “them”.
Genocide as a word is relatively new, coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, several years before the world knew about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps
As a result of studying the history of anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia, the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915-16 (now considered genocide by most scholars), and other examples of violence directed at specific groups, Lemkin made the introduction of international legal safeguards for minority religious and ethnic groups his life’s work. He first proposed such legislation at an international legal conference in 1933.*
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin tried to persuade his family to seek asylum outside of German-occupied territories, with no success. (Forty-nine members of his family, including his parents, were imprisoned by the Nazis and later gassed in Treblinka.) Lemkin himself escaped through unoccupied Lithuania and Latvia to Stockholm.
In Stockholm, Lemkin studied Nazi actions through the lens of jurisprudence, using information regarding Nazi laws, regulations and proclamations provided by Swedish diplomats in Nazi occupied territories. In 1944, now an analyst with the United States’ War Department, he published his monumental study of patterns of destruction in Nazi-held territories, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he introduced the term genocide to describe “the crime without a name”:
“By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote the old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)….It is intended 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. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.
After the war, Lemkin worked as a prosecutor at the Nurenberg trials. He was able to get the word “genocide” included in the indictments, but genocide was not yet recognized as a legal crime and was not reflected in the final verdicts.
When Lemkin returned from Europe, he took on the task of pushing the Genocide Convention through the newly formed United Nations. The recognition of genocide as an international crime became an all encompassing crusade for Lemkin. He gave up adjunct teaching positions at Yale and New York University in order to give all his time to the task. Impoverished and sometimes homeless, he relentlessly lobbied national delegations and influential leaders for their support. The UN passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide on December 9, 1948–in large part due to Lemkin’s efforts. The United States finally signed the Genocide Convention forty years later,.
Genocide: the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group
* Several months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.
And we have a winner! (Two, actually)
Thanks to all of you who took the time to throw your names in to the medium size mixing bowl to win a copy of Chris West’s A History of America in 36 Postage Stamps or his earlier foray into history through philately.
As always when I do a give-away, I learn something from your comments. Several of you shared childhood stamp collecting memories. Friend and regular reader Karen Holden mentioned the difficultly the US Postal Service had in creating stamp glue that could be licked by vegetarians and other groups who avoid specific foods. She suggested this might be the origin of stamps that don’t have to be licked.* I love the way the Marginites think.
Yeah, yeah, you say. But who won? Patience, my dears. A little conversation is required. A drumroll. A little fanfare. Are you ready? The winners are: Nancy Friesen and Nancy Saunders. Congratulations!
*For me this idea raised echoes of the British troubles in India in 1857, when troops mutinied over the rumors that gun cartridges (which were opened by biting them) had been greased with a combination of pork and beef fat–making them anathema to Muslim and Hindu troops alike. But I digress.
Medieval People
In Medieval People: Vivid Lives in a Distant Landscape, historian Michael Prestwich [author of Knight: The Medieval Warrior’s (Unofficial) Manual] challenges generalities about the Middle Ages* by looking at the specific: biographies of 69 people who lived between 800 and 1500, a period that stretches from Charlemagne’s empire to the early Renaissance.
Prestwich’s choice of title invites inevitable comparison with Eileen Power’s classic Medieval People (1924). Like Power, Prestwich is interested in giving history what Power called the “personal treatment”: making the past accessible for the general reader by putting a face on it. Many of his essays deal with the usual suspects (kings, popes, emperors). But Prestwich moves beyond the expected. He recognizes the importance Muslim scholars and the Central Asian conquerors Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane** played in shaping medieval Europe. He includes biographies of illustrious women, noting that their contributions were more remarkable than those of their male counterparts because of the difficulties they faced in making their voices heard. To the extent that quality sources are available, he includes individuals from the middle classes or lower: merchants, mathematicians, artists, a leper and a French peasant leader, Guillaume Cale. (There are inherent limitations on writing about individuals on the fringes of power. As Prestwich points out, it is impossible to consider the career of a specific hermit unless his contemporaries wrote about him at some length.)
Written with authority and occasional humor, illustrated with both contemporary artwork and modern photographs of key historical sites, Prestwich’s Medieval People brings the Middle Ages to life in all its complexity and diversity. Eileen Power would have approved.
*As I’ve mentioned before, the terms Middle Ages and medieval are culturally charged. Prestwich is explicit about the pitfalls and uses both terms with awareness.
**Or more accurately Chinggis Khan and Timur.
Much of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers