What is meant by “genocide”?

Genocide: The Origins of a Word Rafael Lemkin Rafael Lemkin ( ): coined the term “genocide” in 1943 from Greek genos (family, tribe, race) and Latin –cide (killing, murder) UN General Assembly ( ): Convention on the Prevention & Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as:Convention...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Nearly everyone who considers the definition finds it insufficient for one reason or another. It manages to be at one and the same time both too broad and too narrow. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race & Nation (2003)

Genocide: Establishing Terminology For genocide to occur, there needs to be demonstrable intent to destroy “in whole or in part” particular population groups. This is a central point that distinguishes genocides from the civilian casualties that may occur in wartime, from pogroms, from massacres, from forced deportations—even if the number of victims is massive, and although any one of these actions may subsequently evolve into a genocide. [9] A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race & Nation (2003) Points of Debate & Controversy 1) Who are the targeted groups? How are they defined? By whom? 2) How to establish intent? Implicit or explicit? 3) What is systematic destruction? Sustained or sporadic? “In whole or in part”?

Genocide: A Controversial Term 1) Genocide in the generic sense is the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defenseless and helplessness of the victims. Israel Charny 2) Genocide is defined through the intent and the will, whether implicit or explicit, to systematically destroy (a group of people). Jennifer Balint 3) [Genocide is] the deliberate destruction of physical life of individual human beings by their membership of any human collectivity as such. Pieter Drost 4) Genocide is distinguishable from all other crimes by the motivation behind it. Genocide is a crime on a different scale to all other crimes against humanity and implies an intention to completely exterminate the chosen group. Alain Destexhe 5) Those who should use the word genocide never let it slip their mouths. Those who unfortunately do use it, banalise it into a validation of every kind of victimhood. Michael Ignatieff

War & Genocide: How are they connected? 1)The changing nature of warfare, with a movement toward total warfare, and the technological means of the annihilation of large populations, creates a situation conducive to genocidal conflict. This potential was realized in the Second World War… Leo Kuper 2) Nobody has yet shown that our understanding is enriched by comparing such unlike phenomena as wartime casualties and genocides. The fact that both war and genocide produce massive casualties is a terrible commentary on man’s inhumanity to man, but it does not help to understand either phenomenon. Kurt Jonassohn La Guerre Totale (1918) by Leon Daudet  “total war” Les Guerres d’Enfer (1915) by Alphonse Seché  French Rev (1790s) & WWI Mass conscription introduced  large national army Extensive economic mobilization Distinction between combatants & non-combatants “outmoded” Growth of roles for science & industry

Stalinism & Nazism: Comparing Genocides Both Nazi and Marxist ideologies led to industrial-scale killing, their biological and psychological theories were opposites... Nazism and Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity. “The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary,” wrote Marx; “the will to create mankind anew” is the core of National Socialism, wrote Hitler. They also shared revolutionary idealism and a tyrannical certainty in pursuit of this dream… This alone was a recipe for disaster. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) 1) What are the similarities between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Third Reich? 2) How are these regimes different from each other? 3) Why did both ideologies, Communism & Nazism, contribute to the misery & death of millions of people? 4) How were both of these genocidal regimes influenced by specific historical circumstances?

Ideology & Genocide: How are they connected? 1)Nation & Race  purity or impurity of defined groups is fundamental (Nazism) 2) “Better World” or Utopian  ideal social-economic arrangements for all humanity (Communism) Germany under the Nazis was a “nation obsessed with tracking, diagnosing, registering, grading, and selecting.” The bureaucratic-scientific process of categorization rested on the principle of race and marked the first step in the policies of exclusion that entailed discrimination, internment, sterilization, deportation, and ultimately, killing. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race & Nation (2003) The future envisaged by the Soviet Union was radically different from the Nazi utopia. The Soviet utopia was to be egalitarian and inclusive. Yet population purges were a central feature of Soviet life until the mid-1950s. These purges were entwined with the obsessive drive to categorize every member of the population, to determine their class, national, and political affiliations. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race & Nation (2003)