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Day 1 - We Charged Genocide, They Ignored Us
Content warning for discussion of genocide.
Welcome to the first spisode of Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard. This episode will discuss the early days of the field of genocide, the process by which it became a crime undernational law, the life of Raphael Lemkin, in brief, and the first time a country was charged with this crime above all crimes
Intro and outro music linked here: https://uppbeat.io/track/paulo-kalazzi/heros-time
Episode Transcript to Follow:
Hey, Hi, Hello. This is The History Wizard and thank you for joining me for the flagship episode of “Have a Day w/ The History Wizard”. As we embark on this journey together we’re going to be talking about History, Politics, Economics, Cartoons, Video Games, Comics, and the points at which all of these topics intersect.
Anyone who has been following me one Tiktok or Instagram, @thehistorywizard on Tiktok and @the_history_wizard on Instagram, for any length of time. Literally any length of time at all, will probably be familiar with some, if not all, of the information we’re going to learn today. However, I hope that you’ll bear with me as it is important to, before we dive into the meat of the matter, make sure we’ve got some bones to wrap it around… Yes, that is the metaphor I’m going to go with. I wrote it down in my script, read it, decided I liked it, and now you all have to listen to it.
For our first episode we are going to be diving into one of my favorite parts of my field of expertise, meta knowledge concerning the field of genocide studies itself. Yes, that’s right. We’re going to start with the definition of genocide.
The United Nations established the legal definition of genocide in the Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, which was unanimously adopted by the 51 founding members of the UN in the third meeting of the General Assemble and came into full legal force in 1951 after the 20th nation ratified it. This, by the way, is why none of the Nazis in the Nuremberg Trial were charged with the crime of genocide. The crime didn’t exist when they were on trial. But, to return to the matter at hand, the definition of genocide can be found in Article 2 of the Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide and reads as follows:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
It is important to note that definition of genocide that the UN adopted is not exactly the same as the definition that Lemkin first proposed to the UN. His definition included economic classes, as well as political parties. There was, significant, pushback against the inclusion of those two categories from the US and the USSR as both nations feared that their many of their own actions could be considered genocide. Lemkin didn’t fight too hard for those categories to stay in the definition, he was more concerned with ethnicity, nationality, race, and religion for, what he called, their cultural carrying capacity.
Now, despite Lemkin’s concern over the destruction of cultures, there is no strict legal definition of cultural genocide. The inclusion of Article 2, subsection E: Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, could be seen as a nod to this idea, but it’s not nearly enough. There was some effort to rectify this oversight in 2007 with the passage of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that indigenous peoples have a right against forcible assimilation. But even that is barely a step in the right direction as the UN DRIP is a legally non binding resolution making it little better than a suggestion.
Now, where did the word genocide come from? Who made it and why? The term genocide was the brain child of a Polish-Jewish lawyer and Holocaust survivor named Raphael Lemkin. Now, despite Lemkin being a Holocaust survivor and term not gaining legal recognition until 1948, Lemkin actually based his work on the Armenian Genocide, what he originally called The Crime of Barbarity. Fun fact about Lemkin, he spoke 9 languages and could read 14.
Anyway, after reading about the assassination of Talat Pasha in 1921. Talat was assassinated by Soghomon Telhirian as part of Operation Nemesis (he was put on trial for the assassination and was acquitted) After reading about the assassination Lemkin asked one of his professors at Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv) why Talat was unable to be tried for his crimes before a court of law. The professor replied thusly: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them, and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." Lemkin replied, "But the Armenians are not chickens". His eventual conclusion was that "Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people"
In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. This is where the world would first encounter the word “genocide” a word that Lemkin had created by combining the Greek root ‘genos’ meaning race or tribe, with the Latin root ‘cide’ meaning killing.
Lemkin was as a private solicitor in Warsaw in 1939 and fled as soon as he could. He managed to escape through Lithuania to Sweden where he taught at the University of Stockholm until he was, with the help of a friend, a Duke University law professor named Malcolm McDermott Lemkin was able to flee to the US. Unfortunately for Lemkin he lost 49 member of his family to the Holocaust. The only family that survived was his brother, Elias and his wife who had both been sent to a Soviet forced labor camp. Lemkin was able to help them both relocate to Montreal in 1948.
After publishing his iconic book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” with the help of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Lemkin became an advisor for chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, Robert H. Jackson. It was during these trials that he became convinced, more than ever before, that this crime above all crimes needed a name and laws to prevent and punish it.
Even after the passage of the Convention for the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Lemkin didn’t consider his work to be over. The UN was brand new and had little in the way of real authority (something that hasn’t changed over the past 70 years). So Lemkin traveled around to world trying to get national governments to adopt genocide laws into their own body of laws. He worked with a team of lawyers from Arabic delegations to try and get France tried for genocide for their conduct in Algeria and wrote an article in 1953 on the “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine” what we know as the Holodomor, though Lemkin never used that term in his article.
Lemkin lived the last years of his life in poverty in New York city. He died in 1959 of a heart attack, and his funeral, which occurred at Riverside Church in Manhattan, was attended by only a small number of his close friends. Lemkin is buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens.
The last thing I want to discuss in our first episode is the first country to be charged with the crime of genocide before the United Nations. As we have already established, despite the Holocaust being the western world’s premiere example of genocide, no one at the Nuremberg Trials was tried for the crime of genocide. So who, I can hear you asking from the future, who was the first country charged with genocide?
Why, dear listener, it was none other than the U S of A in a 1951 paper titled “We Charge Genocide, which was presented before the United Nations in Paris in 1951.
The document pointed out that the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide defined genocide as any acts committed with "intent to destroy" a group, "in whole or in part." To build its case for black genocide, the document cited many instances of lynching in the United States, as well as legal discrimination, disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, a series of incidents of police brutality dating to the present, and systematic inequalities in health and quality of life. The central argument: The U.S. government is both complicit with and responsible for a genocidal situation based on the UN's own definition of genocide.
The paper was supported by the American Communist Party and was signed by many famous personages such as:
W. E. B. Du Bois, George W. Crockett, Jr., Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Ferdinand Smith, Oakley C. Johnson, Aubrey Grossman, Claudia Jones, Rosalie McGee, Josephine Grayson, Amy and Doris Mallard, Paul Washington, Wesley R. Wells, Horace Wilson, James Thorpe, Collis English, Ralph Cooper, Leon Josephson, and William Patterson. It was Patterson who presented the paper and the signatures before the UN in 1951. The UN largely ignored Patterson and never deigned to hear his case against the US government. And upon his return journey Patterson was detained while passing through Britain and had his passport seized once he returned to the US. He was forbade to ever travel out of the country again.
The history of the field of genocide studies is long, unfortunately, far longer than the existence of a word with a legal definition and laws to back it up. We’ll be going through the history of genocide in future episode, interspersed with other historical events or pressing issues of great import as we take this educational journey together. I’m going to try and put an episode together once a week, and if that needs to change for any reason I will let you know. Next week, on March 26th, we’ll be learning about the Gazan genocide and the vast amount of historical context that goes into this, currently occurring, genocide.
I’ve been the History Wizard. You can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard. You can find me on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Have a Day w/ The History Wizard can be found anywhere pods are cast. If you cannot find it on your podcatcher or choice, let me know and I will try and do something about it. Tune in next week for more depressing, but very necessary information and remember… Have a Day!
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By The History Wizard
4.7
3535 ratings
Content warning for discussion of genocide.
Welcome to the first spisode of Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard. This episode will discuss the early days of the field of genocide, the process by which it became a crime undernational law, the life of Raphael Lemkin, in brief, and the first time a country was charged with this crime above all crimes
Intro and outro music linked here: https://uppbeat.io/track/paulo-kalazzi/heros-time
Episode Transcript to Follow:
Hey, Hi, Hello. This is The History Wizard and thank you for joining me for the flagship episode of “Have a Day w/ The History Wizard”. As we embark on this journey together we’re going to be talking about History, Politics, Economics, Cartoons, Video Games, Comics, and the points at which all of these topics intersect.
Anyone who has been following me one Tiktok or Instagram, @thehistorywizard on Tiktok and @the_history_wizard on Instagram, for any length of time. Literally any length of time at all, will probably be familiar with some, if not all, of the information we’re going to learn today. However, I hope that you’ll bear with me as it is important to, before we dive into the meat of the matter, make sure we’ve got some bones to wrap it around… Yes, that is the metaphor I’m going to go with. I wrote it down in my script, read it, decided I liked it, and now you all have to listen to it.
For our first episode we are going to be diving into one of my favorite parts of my field of expertise, meta knowledge concerning the field of genocide studies itself. Yes, that’s right. We’re going to start with the definition of genocide.
The United Nations established the legal definition of genocide in the Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, which was unanimously adopted by the 51 founding members of the UN in the third meeting of the General Assemble and came into full legal force in 1951 after the 20th nation ratified it. This, by the way, is why none of the Nazis in the Nuremberg Trial were charged with the crime of genocide. The crime didn’t exist when they were on trial. But, to return to the matter at hand, the definition of genocide can be found in Article 2 of the Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide and reads as follows:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
It is important to note that definition of genocide that the UN adopted is not exactly the same as the definition that Lemkin first proposed to the UN. His definition included economic classes, as well as political parties. There was, significant, pushback against the inclusion of those two categories from the US and the USSR as both nations feared that their many of their own actions could be considered genocide. Lemkin didn’t fight too hard for those categories to stay in the definition, he was more concerned with ethnicity, nationality, race, and religion for, what he called, their cultural carrying capacity.
Now, despite Lemkin’s concern over the destruction of cultures, there is no strict legal definition of cultural genocide. The inclusion of Article 2, subsection E: Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, could be seen as a nod to this idea, but it’s not nearly enough. There was some effort to rectify this oversight in 2007 with the passage of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that indigenous peoples have a right against forcible assimilation. But even that is barely a step in the right direction as the UN DRIP is a legally non binding resolution making it little better than a suggestion.
Now, where did the word genocide come from? Who made it and why? The term genocide was the brain child of a Polish-Jewish lawyer and Holocaust survivor named Raphael Lemkin. Now, despite Lemkin being a Holocaust survivor and term not gaining legal recognition until 1948, Lemkin actually based his work on the Armenian Genocide, what he originally called The Crime of Barbarity. Fun fact about Lemkin, he spoke 9 languages and could read 14.
Anyway, after reading about the assassination of Talat Pasha in 1921. Talat was assassinated by Soghomon Telhirian as part of Operation Nemesis (he was put on trial for the assassination and was acquitted) After reading about the assassination Lemkin asked one of his professors at Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv) why Talat was unable to be tried for his crimes before a court of law. The professor replied thusly: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them, and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." Lemkin replied, "But the Armenians are not chickens". His eventual conclusion was that "Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people"
In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. This is where the world would first encounter the word “genocide” a word that Lemkin had created by combining the Greek root ‘genos’ meaning race or tribe, with the Latin root ‘cide’ meaning killing.
Lemkin was as a private solicitor in Warsaw in 1939 and fled as soon as he could. He managed to escape through Lithuania to Sweden where he taught at the University of Stockholm until he was, with the help of a friend, a Duke University law professor named Malcolm McDermott Lemkin was able to flee to the US. Unfortunately for Lemkin he lost 49 member of his family to the Holocaust. The only family that survived was his brother, Elias and his wife who had both been sent to a Soviet forced labor camp. Lemkin was able to help them both relocate to Montreal in 1948.
After publishing his iconic book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” with the help of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Lemkin became an advisor for chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, Robert H. Jackson. It was during these trials that he became convinced, more than ever before, that this crime above all crimes needed a name and laws to prevent and punish it.
Even after the passage of the Convention for the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Lemkin didn’t consider his work to be over. The UN was brand new and had little in the way of real authority (something that hasn’t changed over the past 70 years). So Lemkin traveled around to world trying to get national governments to adopt genocide laws into their own body of laws. He worked with a team of lawyers from Arabic delegations to try and get France tried for genocide for their conduct in Algeria and wrote an article in 1953 on the “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine” what we know as the Holodomor, though Lemkin never used that term in his article.
Lemkin lived the last years of his life in poverty in New York city. He died in 1959 of a heart attack, and his funeral, which occurred at Riverside Church in Manhattan, was attended by only a small number of his close friends. Lemkin is buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens.
The last thing I want to discuss in our first episode is the first country to be charged with the crime of genocide before the United Nations. As we have already established, despite the Holocaust being the western world’s premiere example of genocide, no one at the Nuremberg Trials was tried for the crime of genocide. So who, I can hear you asking from the future, who was the first country charged with genocide?
Why, dear listener, it was none other than the U S of A in a 1951 paper titled “We Charge Genocide, which was presented before the United Nations in Paris in 1951.
The document pointed out that the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide defined genocide as any acts committed with "intent to destroy" a group, "in whole or in part." To build its case for black genocide, the document cited many instances of lynching in the United States, as well as legal discrimination, disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, a series of incidents of police brutality dating to the present, and systematic inequalities in health and quality of life. The central argument: The U.S. government is both complicit with and responsible for a genocidal situation based on the UN's own definition of genocide.
The paper was supported by the American Communist Party and was signed by many famous personages such as:
W. E. B. Du Bois, George W. Crockett, Jr., Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Ferdinand Smith, Oakley C. Johnson, Aubrey Grossman, Claudia Jones, Rosalie McGee, Josephine Grayson, Amy and Doris Mallard, Paul Washington, Wesley R. Wells, Horace Wilson, James Thorpe, Collis English, Ralph Cooper, Leon Josephson, and William Patterson. It was Patterson who presented the paper and the signatures before the UN in 1951. The UN largely ignored Patterson and never deigned to hear his case against the US government. And upon his return journey Patterson was detained while passing through Britain and had his passport seized once he returned to the US. He was forbade to ever travel out of the country again.
The history of the field of genocide studies is long, unfortunately, far longer than the existence of a word with a legal definition and laws to back it up. We’ll be going through the history of genocide in future episode, interspersed with other historical events or pressing issues of great import as we take this educational journey together. I’m going to try and put an episode together once a week, and if that needs to change for any reason I will let you know. Next week, on March 26th, we’ll be learning about the Gazan genocide and the vast amount of historical context that goes into this, currently occurring, genocide.
I’ve been the History Wizard. You can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard. You can find me on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Have a Day w/ The History Wizard can be found anywhere pods are cast. If you cannot find it on your podcatcher or choice, let me know and I will try and do something about it. Tune in next week for more depressing, but very necessary information and remember… Have a Day!