Genocide, the ‘Family of Mind’ and the Romantic Signature of Raphael Lemkin

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Genocide, the ‘family of mind’ andthe romantic signature of RaphaelLemkin

DOUGLAS IRVIN-ERICKSON

On 9 December 1948, the United Nations adopted the Convention for the Prevention andPunishment of the Crime of Genocide. The first humanitarian law of the UN, theConvention was singlehandedly pushed by the jurist Raphael Lemkin, who coined theword genocide in Axis rule in occupied Europe (1944). Using Lemkin’s unpublishedwritings, this essay seeks to correct several misunderstandings of Lemkin’s thinking ongenocide as the destruction of nations. Lemkin defined nations more broadly than simply agroup of people inhabiting a particular state. Instead, Lemkin used the work of an arthistorian to define nations as ‘families of minds’, arguing that the idea of a nation existswithin the minds of people. In doing so, Lemkin broke from the tradition that nations hadan objective organic existence defined by language, blood and territory. He took on anunderstanding of nations that sided with the political thought of Mazzini, who offered thedictum: ‘the Patria is the consciousness of the Patria’. The Genocide Convention, Lemkinwrote, protected the minds of people. Such human groups protected by the conventionunder the rubric of nations, he continued, could range from religious minorities tocriminals—any ‘family of mind’ who genocidists attempted to destroy. The articleanalyzes Lemkin’s ideas using his writings on the Soviet genocide in Ukraine and France’sgenocide in Algeria.

Introduction

Raphael Lemkin is well known as the jurist who coined the word genocide and ledthe effort to pass the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punish-ment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).1 In recent years, hisword ‘genocide’ has taken on a symbolic moral quality as the crime of crimes,the darkest of humanity’s inhumanity. Yet, little work has been done toexamine Lemkin’s thought on human groups—or ‘nations’—even though thesewere the very things the Genocide Convention seeks to protect. In his publishedworks, Lemkin was vague when it came to defining this central concept. As aresult, scholars writing about Lemkin have tended to assume that Lemkindefined nations in accordance with the geographical and social grouping of thenation-state. This interpretation of Lemkin is not unwarranted; however, it mustbe reevaluated in light of Lemkin’s unpublished papers.

Journal of Genocide Research, 2013Vol. 15, No. 3, 273–296, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2013.821222

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Lemkin intended the word ‘genocide’ to signify the cultural destruction ofpeoples, which could occur without a perpetrator killing a single individual. Inhis 1944 Axis rule in occupied Europe, Lemkin wrote that genocide was ‘a coor-dinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundationsof the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’.2

A colonial practice, genocide had two phases: ‘One, the destruction of the nationalpattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern ofthe oppressor’.3 As a professional jurist and public intellectual, Lemkin wasneither obliged to lay bare his ontology of genocide nor define his concept of a‘nation’. He saved these tasks for his philosophical and social scientific works,which he left unfinished when he died in 1959.4

As A. Dirk Moses put it, Lemkin’s readers are ‘left at sea only if they do notrecall Lemkin’s conception of nationhood’.5 Turning to Lemkin’s manuscripts,Moses asserted that Lemkin believed ‘nations comprise various dimensions: pol-itical, social, cultural, linguistic, religious, economic and physical/biological’.6

Moses began charting Lemkin’s thinking on human groups in The Oxford hand-book of genocide studies, tracing the social discourse of groupism that shapedLemkin’s thinking and provided him with a belief that groups were distinct andautonomous wholes.7 This essay continues Moses’ discussion by arguing thatLemkin saw nations as ‘families of mind’, types of ‘imagined communities’who shared common beliefs and sentiments, whose identities were plastic andwhose members shared a belief that they were part of the group.8

The first section of this essay looks to Lemkin’s unpublished works to betterunderstand what Lemkin believed a human group or a nation was. The secondsection examines Lemkin’s writings on the French genocide in Algeria to demon-strate his thinking on how genocide destroyed nations. The third section continuesthe discussion above through Lemkin’s writings on Soviet genocides from the1930s to the 1950s, and then looks at the ways Lemkin believed genocide couldbe stopped and prevented. Both French and Soviet perpetrators, Lemkin felt,were actively attempting to destroy the ‘family of mind’ of their victims inorder to destroy the cultural diversity of the occupied territories in the name ofeconomic and social progress. In both instances, this paper tries to show how abetter understanding of Lemkin’s idea of a nation helps illuminate Lemkin’sthinking on how to deal with genocide politically and legally.

Lemkin’s romantic signature

Lemkin took up the issue of nationalism, nations and romanticism in a manuscripthe began writing in the 1950s, ‘Introduction to the study of genocide’.9 Dyingbefore he could complete the project, Lemkin intended to chart a path for futurescholars to study genocide in the disciplines of sociology, psychology, economics,political science and cultural anthropology.10 In the opening pages, Lemkin statedthat the idea of a nation generated by modern nationalism was a new form of socialorganization that rose to fit political needs.11 The romantic movement to whichJohann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte gave philosophical content


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gave rise to a form of nationalism that allowed for the political unification ofGermany in the 1870s, Lemkin wrote.12 This German nationalist movementwas typified by anti-Semitic and militarist thinkers, Lemkin wrote, such asErnst Moritz Arndt, Heinrich von Treitschke and Friedrich Ludwig, the philologistand theologian who felt Germany was humiliated by the Napoleonic victories andstarted a nationalist gymnastic movement to unify and strengthen the young menof the country.13

These German intellectuals invented the idea of a singular German Volk thatwas present throughout the history in order to articulate a political expectationfor the future that the various ‘German’ peoples (Danes, Poles, Prussians, Aus-trians, Bavarians and so forth) would form one sovereign nation-state.14 Lemkinwas troubled by these communitarian movements that saw the nation as an objec-tive and organic whole bound by language, blood and territory. A highly exclu-sionary ideology, Lemkin saw this form of nationalism as consolidating theidea of the nation—the Volk —into the service of an intolerant nation-state.15

Rebuking this exclusionary, organic nationalism, Lemkin took a liberal turn inhis writings and quoted John Stuart Mill’s Vindication of the French Revolution,writing that such ‘nationalism makes men indifferent to the rights and interests “ofany portion of the human species, save that which is called by the same name andspeaks the same language as themselves”’.16 He went on to assert, following Mill,that ‘the new feelings of exclusive nationalism and of appeals to historic rights[are] barbaric [because] “the sentiment of nationalism so far outweighs the loveof liberty that the people are willing to abet the rulers in crushing the libertyand independence of any people not of their race and language”’.17

Lemkin was not completely comfortable with Mill’s liberal project, however.Mill’s liberal political nationalism rejected cultural nationalism and insisted thatparticular identities had to be absorbed into a heterogeneous nation-state in thename of citizenship, which guaranteed political equality and individual rights.A nation, for Mill, was a group of individuals who desired to be under a govern-ment that was their own political expression. The historian Eric Hobsbawmdescribes this belief with the equation ‘nation ! state ! people’, which inher-ently defines a nation as a sovereign people and links the nation to a territory.18

When a person expressed the sentiment of cultural nationalism and refused tojoin such a liberal nation-state, Mill wrote, s/he abandoned the ‘privileges’ of citi-zenship and rights in that state and was doomed to ‘sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit’.19 These ‘littlemental orbits’ that Mill disdained were of great value for Lemkin, who did notshare a liberal notion of progress that cast people holding on to their cultural iden-tities as ‘half-savages’. While he agreed with Mill’s warning that cultural nation-alism based on claims to historic rights led people to support rulers who crushedthe liberty of people of other languages or ethnicities, Lemkin also believed thatnation-states could commit genocide when they insisted that particular culturalidentities had to be abandoned as a prerequisite of liberal rights and politicalequality. As discussed below, Lemkin takes up this line of thinking when heaccuses France of committing genocide in Algeria in their attempt to destroy

GENOCIDE, THE ‘FAMILY OF MIND’ AND RAPHAEL LEMKIN

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the Algerian ‘family of mind’ and force Algerians to take on the citizenship andrights of the French Republic.

Indeed, not all nationalism, not all communitarianism and not all romanticismwere bad in Lemkin’s estimation. Far from it: Lemkin begins the above-cited dis-course on nationalism with a few paragraphs dedicated to the intrinsic value andsocial role of the folklores and mythologies indigenous to different cultures.20

Lemkin was not a romantic by definition, and even rejected whole portions ofromanticism as outlined above. Yet, he used certain aspects of romantic thinkingas a method for understanding genocide. Folklore and mythologies unify groups ofpeople, and enrich the human experience, he wrote. What is more, it was theromantic movement that provided for an appreciation of folklore and mytholo-gies—of culture.21 And while he rejected the militant German nationalists, hefound virtue in the romantic Italian nationalists who animated the short-lived1848 Spring of Peoples, the largest overthrow of established governments in Euro-pean history.

Giuseppe Mazzini, a triumvir of the new Roman Republic that emerged fromthe 1848 Spring of Peoples, was especially appealing to Lemkin. He quotedMazzini as saying that the uprisings of the 1848 revolutions were ‘the workwhich gives a people the right to citizenship in the world’.22 While the Springof Peoples fell to reactionary forces throughout Europe and the monarchieswere quickly reestablished, Lemkin saw in the movement a promise of creatinga political structure across geographical borders that maintained the nationalistindependence of each group of people while simultaneously providing a platformfor what he called ‘an international federation of free nations’ to provide this‘world citizenship’.23 Lemkin believed the Genocide Convention followed thisspirit, protecting cultural diversity through universal laws.

In ‘Introduction to the study of genocide’, Lemkin wrote that Herder andromantic thought was an influence on his thinking when he formulated the ideaof genocide.24 Yet, it does seem counter intuitive that Lemkin drew on romanticthinking given that he coined the word ‘genocide’ in the wake of the Nazi occu-pation of Europe. Herder, after all, is often seen as inventing the concept oforganic cultures and the romantic nationalism that opposed the Enlightenmentvalue of reason and universal cosmopolitanism.25 And, as we noted, Lemkinbelieved that the political tradition Herder established led to the unification ofGermany as a nation-state and was ultimately used by the Nazi party to justifyits power.26 However, it was Herder’s anti-colonialism that Lemkin foundappealing.

A complicated, imprecise and contradictory figure, Herder was one of the firstto form a vision of cultural relativism, arguing that tastes, values, aesthetics, con-cepts, beliefs and morals vary greatly from culture to culture and throughhistory.27 In this regard, he is rightly seen as a father of communitarian national-ism. Herder employed this notion of cultural nationalism to formulate one of theeighteenth-century’s most articulate attacks on European colonialism and empirebuilding.28 As Sankar Muthu has written, Herder’s idea of an organic ‘nation’helped to establish the political tradition of de-legitimizing the homogony and


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centralization of the nation-state by arguing that the state destroyed culturaldiversity, which was something worth saving.29 In Herder’s thought everynation and every culture had a right to exist and the state stood as a great oppressorof cultural diversity and human creativity.30

If not directly from Herder, Lemkin reflected these romantic ideals in a 1956interview with The Christian Century when he described to a broad US audiencehis ‘History of Genocide’ book project.31 ‘I am trying to project a democraticidea—the study of people, the development of history through their efforts, notthrough police, armies or emperors’, Lemkin said, emphasizing that this historyof genocide can only be understood outside of the perspective of the state. Inthe next lines, we see how Lemkin used a romantic method to find the verycenter of genocidal thinking to locate what the ‘family of mind’ lost and whatthe state gained through genocide. ‘The history of genocide will prove mypoint’, he continued: ‘Music, art literature, come from the people. When thestate takes over culture, painting degenerates into wall posters and propagandaand the cantata into a parade march. This history of the generations made thisclear long before Nazi Germany’.32

Still, Lemkin never abandoned what Moses called ‘his liberal faith’.33 For asmuch as Lemkin was a cultural relativist, Lemkin was also a universalist, simul-taneously. Philosophically, cultural relativity and moral universalism are usuallytaken as mutually exclusive positions.34 But Lemkin felt he was under no obli-gation to choose either. So, he chose both. He believed that the liberal rule of inter-national law could abolish the universal moral offense of genocide in order toprotect cultural relativity.35 Lemkin’s need to find ways of protecting cultural min-orities without turning to universal rights which was ‘associated with giving upone’s cultural identity’ was indicative of a perspective that Jewish minorities inEastern Europe were trying to portray at the time, ‘that the universalist narrativeobliterates the cosmopolitan potential of the Jewish experience, which straddlesthe interstices of universal identifications and the particular attachments’.36 Thisromantic-liberal, relativist-universalist dichotomy in Lemkin’s thought finds itsclearest form in Lemkin’s archival writings when he wrote that in law ‘culturalrelativity can be a doctrine of hope rather than despair’.37 In the liberal rule oflaw’s endeavor ‘at unifying the world for peace’, he continues, ‘this doctrine[of cultural relativity] has a two-fold significance. It means that we must respectevery culture for its own sake. It also means that we must probe beyond specificcultural differences in our search for a unified conception of human values andhuman rights. We know that this can be done’.38

Genocide: to destroy the family of mind

Although Lemkin considered his later projects to be intellectual continuations ofhis ideas in Axis rule, Lemkin’s ideas did change over time.39 Nevertheless, heviewed these latter writings as intimately connected with the Axis rule and theGenocide Convention.40 What is more, as Moses has argued, it is actually necess-ary to consider Lemkin’s later writings in order to fully understand Axis rule and


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his earlier work.41 Thus, the task of this article is not to demonstrate definitivelywhat Lemkin was thinking while working on minority protection treaties at theLeague of Nations, or when he wrote Axis rule. Rather, this article seeks to com-plicate existing scholarship on Lemkin that tends to see Lemkin’s ‘national cos-mopolitism’ as an ‘anachronistic return to “medieval organic imagery,” orfundamental confusion’.42

Lemkin envisioned genocide as a crime against the ‘human cosmos’ because itdestroyed cultural diversity. As he wrote in Axis rule: ‘The world represents onlyso much culture and intellectual vigor as are created by its component nationalgroups. Essentially the idea of a nation signifies the constructive cooperationand original contributions, based upon genuine traditions, genuine culture and awell-developed national psychology. The destruction of a nation, therefore,results in the loss of its future contributions to the world’.43 Lemkin expressedhis communitarianism by referring to the ‘harmony’ between different culture-bearing groups in the constellation of world society. In Lemkin’s vision,communities interact with each other to produce the human cosmos. He calledthese communities ‘nations’ and ‘culture-bearing groups’.

Bartolome Clavero has helped us parse Lemkin’s ideas in his study on genocidein international law. Clavero has argued that in the 1930s Lemkin was concernedthat the legal tradition recognized offenses against individuals and offensesagainst collectivities, but was unable to conceptualize offenses done against indi-viduals that were intended to attack the collectivity.44 During the League ofNation’s Fifth Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law in Madrid in1933, Lemkin proposed two crimes that would be the precursors to his idea of gen-ocide a decade later: the crimes of vandalism and barbarity. Respectively, thesetwo crimes sought to outlaw the destruction of cultural objects such as works ofart and criminalize massacres or cruelties against people of specially targeted col-lectivities.45 For Clavero, the formulation of the crime of barbarism represents themoment when Lemkin identified that the targeting of individuals could be used toattack collectivities, but he was more concerned with protecting the collectivitythan the individual.

Shifting the focus of law from individuals to collectivities, Lemkin made ananti-liberal move which rested on his belief in what human collectivities—or, anation—were. In a particularly important part of his unpublished work, Lemkinprovides a clear and succinct definition of those groups that make up the humancosmos: ‘Nations are families of mind’, he wrote, quoting Henri Focillon’s defi-nition of ‘nation’.46 A philosopher of art history, Focillon used Medieval andMesopotamian art history to theorize that nations were constituted by a sharedbelief among individuals that they were unified, which manifested itself throughpatterns of aesthetic taste, reoccurring tropes and shared understandings ofsymbols.47 A nation was very much a political, social, cultural, linguistic, reli-gious, economic and physical/biological entity for Lemkin, as Moses summarizesit. But a nation was also a group of people who shared this collective ‘mind’ andthought of themselves as belonging to the same group with the help of sharedlanguages, arts, mythologies, folklores and collective histories. Thus, Lemkin


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departs from the German nationalists outlined above who believed nations wereentities bound by geography and constituted through a uniform language, religionor blood. With this ‘family of mind’ definition of a nation, Lemkin echoes Maz-zini’s dictum that geographical borders and language constitute ‘a populace, not anation. . . the Patria is the consciousness of the Patria’.48

There is a primordial aspect to this belief in that Lemkin saw ‘nations’ or‘families of mind’ as the central groupings of all social life and therefore the‘essential elements of the world community’.49 This concept of a nation is notsynonymous with the concept of the nation generally put forth in nationalist ideol-ogy—a point that Lemkin echoed earlier in Axis rule but never explicitly stated.50

Emphasizing that the idea of genocide should not be interpreted solely through thelens of twentieth century politics and ideologies, Lemkin wrote that ‘The Geno-cide Convention grew out of the experiences of the dim past not necessarily ofthe last war’.51 For much of history before the rise of the nation-state, the ‘furyor calculated hatred’ of genocide was ‘directed against specific groups whichdid not fit into the pattern of the state [or] religions community or even in thesocial pattern’ of the oppressors. ‘A human group is an organic entity’, Lemkinwrote. The organic groups most frequently the victims of genocide were ‘reli-gious, racial, national and ethnical’ Lemkin wrote, including ‘political’ groupseven though the Genocide Convention did not officially recognize them. But gen-ocide victims could also be other organically forming families of mind in a com-munity, ‘selected for destruction according to the criterion of their affiliation witha group which is considered extraneous and dangerous for various reasons’.52

These other groups could be anything imaginable, such as ‘those who playcards, or those who engage in unlawful trade practices or in breaking up unions’.53

Lemkin adopted his definition of a nation as a family of mind in the context ofhis writing on the French genocide against Algeria, where he believed that theFrench colonial power was breaking the ‘bodily and mental integrity’ of the Alger-ian people. In a document on the Algerian genocide that dates most likely to early1957, a time when political violence was at a peak, Lemkin argued that the Frenchcolonial powers in Algeria were committing genocide under the pretext of civilwar and combating terrorism.54 The goal of the genocide was to integrate Alger-ians into the French Republic and prevent Algeria from emerging from colonialrule. The French colonial powers were targeting the various groups in Algeriawho constituted the ‘patriotic element’ because they were ‘the bearers of nationalconsciousness and they provided the forces of cohesion’.55 Political leaders andcharismatic leaders who appealed to an Algerian consciousness as distinct froma French identity were eliminated, and a ‘nation-wide campaign of violence andtorture’ became ‘a governmental institution’ used not only ‘[to extort] informationabout the rebels’ but also to affect, ‘on a mass scale, the bodily and mental integ-rity of the people’.56

‘The Genocide Convention protects specifically the minds of the peoplebecause it is through the mind that the nation exists and transfers its national heri-tage’, Lemkin stated, emphasizing that genocide was about destroying the groupas a sort of imagined community.57 The policy of state terror targeting an


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imagined Algerian national consciousness was enough to constitute genocideunder Article II (b) of the Genocide Convention, causing serious bodily ormental harm, he notes. But this violent destruction of the Algerian ‘family ofmind’ was made all the more devastating by a political and economic systemthat placed political representation, land resources and wealth in the hands ofFrench colonists while the Algerian population was forced to live in extremepoverty in conditions plagued by infectious diseases and high child mortalityrates, in addition to being subjected to state terror.58

Legally, Lemkin wrote, the French government understood its policies consti-tuted genocide and worked to redefine humanitarian laws so that they could not beheld guilty. French delegates proposed a revision to the Genocide Convention thatremoved heads of state, government officials, or private individuals as parties whocould be held responsible for genocide. Instead, French delegates had insisted thatthose responsible for genocide should be only ‘authorities of state or private indi-viduals “acting at the instigation or with the toleration of such authorities”’. Theproposal was purposeful nonsense, Lemkin reasoned, for the provision shiftedculpability to corporate bodies such as ‘authorities’ and effectively preventedany individual from being held guilty of genocide. He insisted that this had impli-cations for all colonial areas. But it was particularly important for Algeria, consid-ering the perpetrators of this genocide were sponsoring resolutions in the UN tomake genocide recognized as a domestic affair, not an international crime, bybringing it under the rubric of human rights and redefining it as ‘one of the greatestforms of discrimination’.59

A few months before Lemkin wrote his essay, the French governmentresponded to a Security Council inquiry over their handling of the Algeriancivil war. In a statement to the Security Council that Lemkin kept in his papers,the French Ambassador Herve Alphand said that the French government did not‘dispute the facts’ about the treatment of ‘the Algerian problem’. The delegateadmitted that the French government committed human rights violations inAlgeria, but cited the doctrine of national sovereignty and insisted that their treat-ment of Algerians was a domestic affair. To those such as Lemkin who suggestedthat the Algerians were a different nation, Alphand asserted that Algeria waswithin France’s legal jurisdiction and the people living in Algeria were citizenseven if they were ‘not the same colour, do not speak the same language, or practicethe same religion as the other people of France’.60 France ‘has the right to ask to betrusted’, he continued, because it ‘was not a colonialist power’ and ‘trying, for allconcerned, to progress towards peace’.61 The Algerian civil war was an unfortu-nate but necessary step in the civilizing project. And France would not ‘abandon,tomorrow, on the Mediterranean shores, people deeply faithful to us, to a minorityof killers of women and children who would, in most horrible manner, throw themback towards barbary [sic], fanaticism, anarchy and poverty’.62 Lemkin called thisFrench policy genocide.

Lemkin’s contemporary Hannah Arendt called the French treatment of Algeria‘restraint’. To demonstrate the uniqueness of Lemkin’s position, it is helpful tocontrast these two theorists. In restraining from outright violence, the French


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have kept open the possibility for political change, Arendt wrote in On Violence.This is a position similar to that of the French ambassador. In The Origins of Tota-litarianism, Arendt argued that totalitarian rule was fundamentally apolitical, forthe totalitarian regime used violence to atomize the public realm where freedomand liberty rested, which dismantled political life. Later, in On Violence, shewrote that politically speaking, violence and power are opposites; violence candestroy power but remains utterly unable to create power, for violence preventsthe formation of human associations from which political power flows. In totali-tarian domination established through violence, at the climax of terror, ‘power dis-appears entirely’.63 Politics was completely impossible in any human societywhere the public sphere (the polis) had been eroded, paving the way for the citi-zenship and rights of the victims to be denied. Like the English in India, Arendtbelieved, the French in Algeria were not allowing colonization to turn into totali-tarian rule and mass-death, to their credit. For Arendt, contrary to Lemkin, indi-viduals were not being violently targeted in large numbers in Algeria andtherefore the possibility of forming a political community—a nation—was stillalive.

Ambassador Alphand mirrored Arendt’s sentiment when he said that France’s‘open objective’ in the Algerian question ‘is free elections’ and ‘to build schools,to promote social and economic reforms, to bring destitute populations to a stan-dard of living which will enable them. . . to manage their own destiny’.64 Alphandframed the ‘Algerian question’ within the language of universal equality and pro-gress, where France was trying to provide Algerians with the privileges and rightsof citizenship in the French state. Lemkin saw something quite different: Francewas intentionally destroying an Algerian national pattern and replacing it with aFrench national pattern, in order to make Algeria easier to govern and controleconomically so that power and wealth could be kept in the ‘hands of theFrench colonists’.65 This French colonization of Algeria was essentially thesame as Axis policy in Europe, Lemkin believed, because both genocidessought to destroy the cultural diversity of the occupied territories for the politicaland economic gain of the perpetrators. Both actions by the perpetrators weredirected towards the destruction of the cultural, social and political institutionsof victim groups—their economies, their intelligentsia, as well as the lives oftheir individual members—in order to destroy their various national, ethnic andreligious ways of life.

It is not surprising that the Genocide Convention has baffled many critics whooftentimes redefine genocide to bring the concept more inline with concepts ofwarfare, in particular mass killings. For scholars such as Irving Louis Horowitz,who made early and important contributions to genocide studies, the GenocideConvention conflicts with the spirit of Western law ‘based upon individual punish-ment for specific deeds’ and with Western morals, which ‘are equally built uponindividually internalized codes of conduct’.66 Horowitz wrote that ‘actual geno-cides involve real deaths’.67 Arguably, this is still the colloquial understandingof genocide, as well as the meaning assumed by most statespeople and criminalcourts. The destruction of a culture or a ‘national pattern’ through political,


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economic, or other means is merely ‘symbolic genocide’, Horowitz wrote.68 Thiswas anything but ‘symbolic’ for Lemkin. Following explicitly in the tradition ofArendt, Horowitz saw the collective group as consisting of individuals who areacting, thinking and communicating together. So it follows that he called for anindividualist understanding of genocide. Genocide therefore ‘means the physicaldismemberment and liquidation of people on large scales, an attempt by those whorule to achieve the total elimination of a subject people; genocide does not meansimply depriving people of their cultural heritage or of opportunities for education,welfare, or health, however hideous such deprivations must be’.69 Clearly, Lemkinhad other ideas in mind.

In connecting genocide to colonial practices that destroy cultural diversity,Lemkin saw that genocide and genocidal violence could achieve tremendous pol-itical gains. The Nazi genocide, Lemkin argued, was pragmatic. The genocide wasintended to create new social, cultural and political constellations in the Axisoccupied territories that the perpetrators perceived as advantageous. Conductedthrough both non-violent and violent means, the genocide ensured that althoughthe Axis powers lost the military battle, the Nazis had won the peace. They hadsucceeded in politically, socially, biologically and economically restructuringthe ‘national patterns’ of European occupied territories in accordance with theirparticular vision of ‘Germanness’. As Daniel Feierstein observed, Lemkin sawgenocide as an attack on cultural diversity, pernicious because it was a social prac-tice that sought to reorder the structure of human society in accordance with theinstitutions and patterns of the oppressor group.70 This was the same phenomenonas the French genocide in Algeria, Lemkin wrote, where what we would now call‘cultural diversity’ was destroyed to strengthen the state’s sovereign claim overthe occupied territories.

The strongest communitarian moment in Lemkin’s work occurs when heargued that culture-bearing groups come together and interact with each otherin the public sphere to form world civilization. In this sense, genocide doesnot destroy the public sphere, but rather destroys component parts of thepublic sphere to create a new public sphere that, post-genocide, is now moreimpoverished because it is less diverse. In the description of his researchproject for ‘Introduction to the study of genocide’, Lemkin stated: ‘The philos-ophy of the Genocide Convention is based on the formula of the humancosmos. This cosmos consists of four basic groups: national, racial, religiousand ethnic. The groups are protected not only by reason of human compassionbut also to prevent draining the spiritual resources of mankind’.71 The inter-action between culture-bearing groups is what prevents cultures from becoming‘static’.72 He argued that cultural interaction is how cultures change and howworld civilization progresses. These interactions are the seat of human creativ-ity, of thought, of human vitality and virtue—enriching cultures and thereby thelives of the individuals who belong to each culture.

Lemkin was born into a Jewish family living on a farm in Bezwondene, Poland,a small village several miles away from the city of Bialystok, which had a largeJewish population.73 In his autobiography, Lemkin described in detail the


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violent pogroms that afflicted the Jewish communities of his youth. When news ofa particularly gruesome massacre of Jews in Bialystok reached the farm, Lemkinremembers his child’s mind trying to make sense out of the violence, connectingthe events with the other horrors of antiquity he read about—the roasting ofFrench Huguenots in Lyon, the water torture of Catholics in seventeenthcentury Japan, the Muslim of Spain crowded onto the decks of ships dyingnaked in the sun. ‘A line of blood led from the Roman arena through thegallows of France to the pogroms of Bialystok’, he writes.74 ‘And I heard thescreaming of Jews in pogroms, with their stomachs [having] been opened, filledwith feathers and tied with ropes’.75 Lemkin carried these stories through life,clearly informing his work on genocide.

Lemkin was raised a conversant Jew.76 But speaking of his own cultural iden-tity as a person born in imperial Russia into a Jewish family who consideredhimself Polish and then American, Lemkin told The Christian Century in 1956that, even though he was born into a Jewish family in Poland, he did not considerhimself to be only Polish or Jewish because he did ‘not belong exclusively to onerace or one religion’.77 Lemkin’s ethics and activism were clearly grounded inJewish traditions.78 Yet, Lemkin hardly mentioned his Jewish identity, or religionin general.79 For Lemkin, it was unthinkable that one could separate out one’s reli-gious experience from other experiences. The Polish and the Jewish aspects of hisidentity, for instance, were bound together. As Yehonatan Alsheh has argued,Lemkin came into adulthood between the two world wars and rose to greatsuccess in Warsaw, a cosmopolitan center where being Jewish was part ofbeing Polish. While Jews were barred from civil service and the army corps(except in the medical and legal sectors), they were free to form politicalparties in Poland, where there was also a thriving free press that published news-papers and magazines in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew.80 Within this context,according to Alsheh, Lemkin as a Jew expressed a deep sense of belonging to acertain Polish national pattern that existed during the time. To borrow NatanSznaider’s phrase, for Lemkin it was clear that one could ‘straddle the interstices’of more than one ‘nation’.81

One of the most striking aspects of Axis rule is not that Lemkin continuouslyreturned to the Nazi destruction of Jews across Poland, but that he consideredthe destruction of Polish Jewry to be the destruction of the Polish nationalpattern.82 For instance, in a chapter documenting Axis policies in Poland, undera section titled ‘Government General: Administration’, Lemkin included a procla-mation issued by the Polish Governor General on October 26, 1939, that reads:‘You shall be permitted to retain your Polish character in all the manifestationsof community life. . . On the other hand, there will be no room for political agita-tors, shady dealers, and Jewish exploiters in a territory that is under German sover-eignty’.83 Lemkin did not see the Polish Jewry as being separate from the Polishgroup and believed the Nazi destruction of Jews in Poland was an attack on what itmeant to be Polish.84 In Lemkin’s thinking, the scale of atrocity could be measuredby the number of times this process was repeated all across Axis occupied Europe.


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As Lemkin saw the European Jewry as part of the Polish ‘national pattern’, sotoo did he see the Jewry across Europe as part of the European ‘national pattern’and, by extrapolation, the ‘national pattern’ of the entire world. Remember, forLemkin, a nation was a ‘family of mind’, and in this sense one could talk of aworld nation just as concretely as one could talk about a Polish nation, a Jewishnation, a Jewish Polish nation, or a nation of card players, criminals, or strike-breakers. Thus, to commit genocide against even the most particular humangroup in the tiniest region of the world was an attempt to restructure the socialorder of the human cosmos. It is worth noting that Lemkin did not devote asingle chapter to the Axis destruction of Jews in his nearly 700-page Axis rule.Instead, he has chapters on the Axis destruction of national patterns in occupiedAlbania, Austria, the Baltic States, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Danzig,Denmark, the English Channel Islands, France, Greece, Luxemburg, the MemelTerritory, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Union of Soviet Socialist Republicsand Yugoslavia. In all of these sections, Lemkin notes that the ‘liquidation of theJews [was] an essential element of German policy’, but he presents the destructionof the Jews as part of the broader destruction of these various ways of life.85

Indeed, he places the destruction of Jewish life alongside the destruction of insti-tutions such as marriage ceremonies (particularly involving Jews and non-Jews),political systems, systems of taxation, French Evangelical churches and Norwe-gian political parties; or groups such as state employees, over-aged people,Gypsies, criminals and Yugoslavian guerillas. As Feierstein has argued, Lemkinsaw genocide as the destruction of the national pattern of a given group, but hedid not believed that the victims of genocide were ‘others’ who were differentfrom ‘us’; genocide was an attempt to restructure the national patterns of worldcivilization by destroying various families of mind and, as such, it was anattack on all humanity.86

In the words of Moses, Lemkin did not structure identity like a zero sumgame.87 One could belong to a Jewish family of mind without detracting fromone’s other religious, political, or ethnic identities, or any other identity for thatmatter. Recognizing that cultures and ethnic identities are plastic, multiformand transient, Lemkin wrote that ‘gradual changes [to a cultural group] occurby means of the continuous and slow adaptation of the culture to new situationsand. . . outside influences’.88 This interaction of outside influences was what pro-vided the human cosmos with its symphonic quality. Protecting cultural diversityunder the rubric of liberal international law, by rendering the attempt to destroycultural diversity a universal moral offense, could therefore ground humanfreedom, Lemkin argued. In public statements upon the passage of the GenocideConvention, he articulates this vision:

We need the specification because a variety of nations, races and religious groups represent agreat enrichment of our civilization. World culture is like a subtle concerto. It is nourishedand gets life from the tone of every instrument. When you destroy one instrument, theharmony is destroyed. That is the reason why the world has been fighting Genghis Khanand Hitler, because it was felt that a brutally imposed, national or racial pattern by onenation or race over the entire world would be an end of civilization.89


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Lemkin’s metaphor of the ‘concerto’ where each culture-bearing group enricheshuman civilization draws on the words of Mazzini, who wrote that each nationplays its own ‘instrument’ to produce a single harmonious ‘symphony ofnations’.90 Lemkin called Mazzini ‘the prophet of the nineteenth century ideaof nationality in a humanist, democratic form with a strong admixture of romanti-cism’.91 Genocide, Lemkin believed, in so far as it destroyed national diversityand disrupted this symphony, threatened this ‘citizenship in the world’ as wellas the foundations of the one world civilization.92

Stopping genocide: the family of mind in the axioms of law and politics

Lemkin believed the political regimes led by Hitler and Stalin both committedgenocide, but he never indicated that he believed these genocides resulted fromtheir far right and far left ideologies. In all of Lemkin’s writing, political ideologyin and of itself has no causal relationship with genocide. He believed that thephenomenon of genocide was not relegated to only some kinds of societies, cul-tures, or governments, a point illustrated by his intention to write a history bookabout genocides in antiquity through modern times that considered genocidescommitted by Rome, Egypt, the Vikings, Mongolia, Japan, Korea, Belgium, theUS and many others.93 Lemkin saw the Nazi genocide as unique because it wasconducted largely through official policy directives mediated through themodern state, and because the idea of human groups was cast in biologicalterms. But genocide as a social practice transcended the ideologies that rise andfall through the scope history, and across the world.

To further illustrate the point, Lemkin believed that Stalin’s genocides weredifferent in form and means than Hitler’s genocide. However, these tworegimes shared the defining characteristic of attempting to destroy the nationalpatterns of the oppressed groups and replace it with a ‘Sovietness’ or ‘German-ness’. Lemkin argued that the Russian and Soviet attack on the Ukrainians,Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Jews, the Crimean and Tatar Republics, theBaltic Nations of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, and the total annihilation of theIngerian nation, were all genocides, before and during Stalin’s reign. Each ofthese attacks through history aimed to erase cultural diversity. These genocidesmight not have been as rapid as the Nazi genocide within Axis occupiedEurope, but the attempt to destroy cultural and national diversity was identical:‘Hitler murdered millions of people outright’, but ‘Stalin is a great master ofslow death procedures, in slave labor and concentration camps’ and through pol-icies aimed at the great destruction of the targeted nations: ‘We call it genocide’.94

It was not just ideology that Lemkin sought to bracket from his analysis of gen-ocide. When confronted with the dizzying array of possible motives for a geno-cide, he tended to ignore the motives of perpetrators, focusing his analysisinstead on perpetrators’ intention to commit genocide. Indeed, the breadth of pol-itical realities in which genocide occurs lead Lemkin to argue ‘the motivations onthe side of the offenders are of no importance. To destroy the [victim] groups forpolitical, economic, or strategic reasons, is genocide’.95 Throughout his archival


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writings, he signaled that ‘the intent to destroy the group is basic to the concept ofgenocide’.96 Lemkin at one point even stated that the motives of genocide are irre-levant, just as ‘the motives of a homicide are of no importance’.97

There were advantages to this approach. The first was pragmatic. Ever the jurist,Lemkin’s focus on intent rather than motives allowed genocide to fall under thepurview of international law.98 Enshrining genocide as a legal category, Lemkinfelt, was the first concrete step in ensuring that genocide could be abolished fromthe human condition. The other advantage was conceptual. By bracketing discus-sions of genocidal motivations and replacing it with intent, Lemkin strengthenedhis ability to isolate genocide as a historical process that occurs throughouthistory without sacrificing an ability to talk about the interests at stake in each indi-vidual case of genocide. After all, the motives and ideologies behind genocidewould be difficult to prove through history but one could easily demonstrate theinterests in committing genocide and intent to commit genocide.

Indeed, Lemkin believed card players or criminals could be the targets of gen-ocide. This belief is what allowed him to call the Algerian rebels ‘the patrioticelement’, to consider them their own family of mind, and to think of them asthe victims of genocide. The French government called them ‘terrorists’ and ‘bar-barians’. A defining characteristic of genocide, therefore, was that somehow thevictim groups—as ‘organic groups’ ranging from religious minorities to gam-blers—were a ‘family of mind’ who were perceived as a political, economic, orsocial threat to the perpetrators. And while the genocide may have a materialgrounding in power or interests, Lemkin wrote, the perpetrators manage topresent the culture of the targeted groups as dangerous to society. In Lemkin’sthought, a state is able to commit genocide in its own interests by casting itselfas acting on behalf of the interests of larger society, and mobilizing peoplestowards destroying the victim group as a ‘family of mind’.

Lemkin was an astute observer of social processes. In ‘Introduction to the studyof genocide’, he wrote that ‘like all social phenomena, [genocide] represents acomplex synthesis of a diversity of factors; but its nature is primarily sociological,since it means the destruction of certain social groups by other social groups or theindividual representatives’.99 Any analysis of genocide must recognize that: ‘Gen-ocide is a gradual process and may begin with political disenfranchisement, econ-omic displacement, cultural undermining and control, the destruction ofleadership, the break-up of families and the prevention of propagation. Each ofthese methods is a more or less effective means of destroying a group. Actualphysical destruction is the last and most effective phase of genocide’.100 Ineach of these sociological phases, there are seemingly illimitable motives forthe perpetrators, especially when the perpetrator is understood to be a state,leaders of a state, public individuals and private individuals—all of which areacting collectively. But the interests and intent were always clear, meaning thatgenocide could be dealt with legally and politically.

As a historian of genocide, Lemkin was far from polished. In compiling hismanuscript on the history of the Spanish genocides of the Americas, forexample, Lemkin attempted to show how the economic system of colonial


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Spain wrapped itself into the religions and political system to lead to thedestruction of the native peoples. But he did not interrogate the reliability ofhis sources and he enthralled himself in a ‘victim history’ that emphasizedthe death and disappearance of the victims’ cultures while ignoring the waysin which the culture continued to live on, as McDonnell and Moses demon-strate.101 But Lemkin acknowledged that he was writing a victim centeredhistory of genocide when told The Christian Century that he was trying tocreate a democratic study of people that told ‘the development of historythrough their efforts, not through police, armies or emperors’.102 Lemkin con-sciously created a method of inquiry that looked historically and sociologicallyat genocide from the perspective of the victim because, from the perpetrator’sperspective, genocide was not genocide; that is, genocide was not the destruc-tion of a ‘family of mind’ but the creation of new social constellations free ofthe undesirables; not the killing of innocents but justice delivered to the guilty;not a crime but progress.

Speaking at a commemoration of the Ukrainian Famine in New York in1953,103 Lemkin displayed an analytical system focused on knowing the phenom-ena of genocide, knowing why it offends the moral senses, and knowing what canbe done to stop it. He said in his speech that the ‘mass murder of peoples and ofnations that has characterized the advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not anew feature of their policy of expansionism’, but a ‘classic example of Soviet gen-ocide’ that marks its ‘longest and broadest experiment in Russification—thedestruction of the Ukrainian nation’.104 Genocide, Lemkin asserted, was a long-term element of the Kremlin’s internal policy and ‘an indispensable step in theprocess of “union” that the Soviet leaders fondly hope will produce the “SovietMan,” the “Soviet Nation”’. Just as the Nazi genocide sought to eradicate thenational patterns of the occupied territories and install a distinct ‘Germanness’to consolidate state control, ‘the leaders of the Kremlin will gladly destroythe nations and the cultures that have long inhabited Eastern Europe’.105 TheUkrainian genocide was ‘an essential part of the Soviet programme for expansion,for it offers the quick way of bringing unity out of the diversity of cultures andnations that constitute the Soviet Empire’.106

Wrapped up in the dynamics of the Cold War, Lemkin took an anti-communistposition and discussed Stalinist terror as genocide in part because he hoped topersuade the US to ratify the Genocide Convention.107 Despite his political motiv-ations, we are able to see in this speech Lemkin’s full system of thought at work.As in his analysis of the French genocide in Algeria, where he wrote that theFrench were purposefully targeting the Algerian ‘family of mind’, Lemkinstated that the Soviet genocide in the Ukraine was intentionally and systematicallytargeting Ukrainian national consciousness:

The first blow is aimed at the intelligentsia, the national brain, so as to paralyse the rest of thebody. In 1920, 1926 and again in 1930–33, teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, politicalleaders, were liquidated, imprisoned or deported. . . 51,713 intellectuals were sent toSiberia in 1931 alone. . . At least 114 major poets, writers and artists, the most prominentcultural leaders of the nation, have met the same fate.108


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The genocide was not that Stalin’s regime killed so many people, but that theseindividuals were killed with the purpose of destroying the Ukrainian way oflife, an argument in line with Lemkin’s writings on how the French colonialstate sought to eradicate Algerian national consciousness through state terror, pol-itical disenfranchisement and poverty. Lemkin had already articulated this pos-ition in Axis rule, when he wrote that the object of genocide is to ‘annihilatethe group themselves’ through the ‘the disintegration of the political and socialinstitution of the culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economicexistence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security,liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to suchgroups’.109

Secondly, Lemkin traced the Russian genocide through the dismantling of theUkrainian Orthodox and Catholic churches:

Going along with this attack on the intelligentsia was an offensive against the churches,priests and hierarchy, the ‘soul’ of Ukraine. Between 1926 and 1932, the Ukrainian Ortho-dox Autocephalous Church, its Metropolitan (Lypkivsky) and 10,000 clergy were liquidated.In 1945, when the Soviets established themselves in Western Ukraine, a similar fate wasmeted out to the Ukrainian Catholic Church. That Russification was the only issue involvedis clearly demonstrated by the fact that before its liquidation, the Church was offered theopportunity to join the Russian Patriarch at Moscow, the Kremlin’s political tool.110

Simply ‘for the crime of being Ukrainian’, Lemkin stated:

. . . the Church itself was declared a society detrimental to the welfare of the Soviet state, itsmembers were marked down in the Soviet police files as potential ‘enemies of the people’.As a matter of fact, with the exception of 150,000 members in Slovakia, the UkrainianCatholic Church has been officially liquidated, its hierarchy imprisoned, its clergy dispersedand deported.111

Lemkin placed the Soviet attack on the Ukrainian clergy and intellectuals asgenocide because they were ‘attacks on the Soul’ of the people that:

. . . will continue to have a serious effect on the Brain of Ukraine, for it is the families of theclergy that have traditionally supplied a large part of the intellectuals, while the priests them-selves have been the leaders of the villages, their wives the heads of the charitable organiz-ations. The religious orders ran schools, and took care of much of the organized charities.112

Lemkin’s language of genocide as targeting the ‘soul’ and the ‘brain’ of a cul-tural group has been criticized as archaic and illiberal, and has been taken as anindication that Lemkin believed ‘that the murder of a poet is morally worsethan the murder of a janitor, because the “brain” without the “body” cannot func-tion’.113 This characterization of Lemkin’s ideas could be amended reasonablywith a closer analysis of Lemkin’s unpublished works. For one, Lemkin definedgenocide ‘as directed against the national group as an entity’, not individuals intheir individual capacity.114 To extend the ‘poet/janitor’ metaphor, Lemkin con-sidered the murder of the ‘janitor’—or any individual—to be genocide so long asthe death of that individual was done with the intention of destroying the family ofmind.


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Consider the following passage from Lemkin’s speech on the Ukrainian geno-cide: ‘The third prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the large massof independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folklore andmusic, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine. Theweapon used against this body is perhaps the most terrible of all—starvation’.115

Lemkin even criticized those who dismissed the death of 5,000,000 peasants—a‘highpoint of Soviet cruelty’—as merely ‘a Soviet economic policy connectedwith the collectivization of wheat-lands’.116 He concluded by quoting a Sovietgovernment official: ‘As a Soviet politician Kosior declared in Izvestiia on 2December 1933, “Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger”, and it was to elim-inate that nationalism, to establish the horrifying uniformity of the Soviet state thatthe Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed’.117

For Lemkin, the Soviet interests were as simple as the French interests inAlgeria: the regime sought the ‘Russification’ of the region in order to facilitatetheir rule. The Ukrainian’s cultural identity as distinct from Russia was a threatin the perpetrators’ minds because the patterns of Ukrainian economic organiz-ation were antithetical to the economic organization promoted by the state.Besides this clear interest and intention, Lemkin added, the genocide couldeven generate a little income for the perpetrators: ‘A famine was necessary forthe Soviet and so they got one to order, by plan, through an unusually highgrain allotment to the state as taxes. . . Much of this crop, so vital to the lives ofthe Ukrainian people, ended up as exports for the creation of credits abroad’.118

These chief steps ‘in the systematic destruction of the Ukrainian nation, in itsprogressive absorption within the new Soviet nation’ made the Soviet actions gen-ocide.119 While ‘there have been no attempts at complete annihilation, such as wasthe method of the German attack on the Jews’, Lemkin said, displaying his ‘familyof mind’ sensibility:

. . . if the Soviet programme succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests and the pea-sants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it willhave lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its commonideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation ratherthan a mass of people.120

The most devastating aspect of the genocide for Lemkin was not the death ofindividuals, but the potential loss of a cohesive group who shared a commonbelief in their unity through language, customs, art, or even a sense of sharedhistory. ‘If for no other reason than this human suffering’, he wrote, ‘we wouldhave to condemn this road to unity as criminal. But there is more to it than that.This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction,not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation’.121 In the very next lines, hereturned to the idea that the annihilation of a family of mind, with peasants andpoets and priests alike, beyond the suffering of individuals, stood as an irreplace-able loss to world civilization:

If it were possible to do this even without suffering we would still be driven to condemn it,for the family of minds, the unity of ideas, of language and of customs that forms what we


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call a nation. . . constitutes one of the most important of all our means of civilization and pro-gress. It is true that nations blend together and form new nations—we have an example ofthis process in our own country—but this blending consists in the pooling of benefits ofsuperiorities that each culture possesses. What then, apart from the very important questionof human suffering and human rights that we find wrong with Soviet plans is the criminalwaste of civilization and of culture. For the Soviet national unity is being created, not byany union of ideas and of cultures, but by the complete destruction of all cultures and ofall ideas save one—the Soviet.122

How does one stop genocide? The answer Lemkin provided was the same asalways: the law. With his ‘liberal faith’ in international law, he believed thatthe spirit of the law was more important than the force of the law when it cameto abolishing genocide from human society. After the passage of the GenocideConvention in 1951, Lemkin spoke to the members of the American Jewish Con-gress gathered at a luncheon in his honor: ‘Since last Friday, January 12, genocideis no longer a word, a promise, a hope’, he told his audience. ‘It is already a lawwhich can be enforced. In practical terms, this law means no more extermination,no more mass killings, no more concentration camps, no more sterilizations, nomore breaking up of families’.123 Lemkin presented to the Jewish Congress alist of ways in which the Genocide Convention could effectively prevent andstop genocides. He told them that political pressure against offending regimescould be garnered more easily with an understanding of the political interests atstake, and various sanctions could be applied.

But the greatest sanction he told them, ‘will be condemnation by worldopinion’, the ‘most powerful weapon now in [our] times’.124 Lemkin saw inter-national law as a conduit for influencing the constitution of human society. Lawwas the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. He even provided what he felt to be a con-crete example of his theory to the Jewish Congress:

We are asked how can the Genocide Convention deal with cases of genocide if committed inthe Soviet Union? The answer is simpler than we think. . . If a case of genocide committed inthe Soviet Union is put before world opinion as a criminal case, not as a political matter, thenthe Soviet Union will have to take into consideration the human reactions of the westernworld and especially of its present friends and supporters.

He concluded to the Congress as he did over and again in his public speeches: ‘Inthis respect, the Genocide Convention can work only if we will have the decisionto make it work. It can work only when our conscience will be constantly keptawake and when we will press for actions under this new law. But our task willbe easier because we have a law’.125

In a memorandum on the Genocide Convention written in the last year of hislife, Lemkin reflected on whether or not the law had actually saved nations andhuman lives. ‘Undoubtedly’ yes, he wrote, citing several sessions of the UNGeneral Assembly where delegates from strong governments were pressed pub-licly about genocidal policies, only to back down from them. In particular,Lemkin wrote that during a 1956 session of UN General Assembly, the Cuban del-egate Nunez Portoundo sought to intervene in what he saw as Soviet genocide, and


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quoted Khrushchev’s own use of the word ‘genocide’ earlier that year to describeStalin’s policies. To the laugher of the assembly floor, the delegate had accusedKhrushchev of denying the Stalinist purges and violence against national min-orities as genocide but committing the same offenses nonetheless. Lemkin thenlisted the Crimean Tartars, the Kalmucka, the Ingush, the Balkarians and the Che-chens as groups against whom the Soviet state ended genocidal campaigns in theface of international embarrassment and world-wide moral pressure. Of course,one doubts that the Convention played as large of a role as Lemkin said it did.That is a topic for another essay. The point is Lemkin believed it did.

As Ann Curthoys and John Docker explained, Lemkin was able to achieve onething at least: the Genocide Convention was a novel law in the post war world‘for its framework of group experience and [group] rights challenges both astress on the individual as the subject of law and the exclusive jurisdiction of thenation-state’.126 The Convention was ultimately a political compromise, with theAmerican states and the major powers defending their sovereignty and insistingthat so-called cultural genocide be removed from the text so that their colonial pol-icies and practice of forcibly assimilating indigenous peoples would not be a viola-tion of international law.127 Nevertheless, the Genocide Convention stood alone asa provision to protect the existence of human groups, safeguarding cultural diver-sity. As Lemkin summarized it, the Genocide Convention ‘brings into internationallaw the very dignified concepts of nations, races, and religious groups as objects ofprotection’.128 The Genocide Convention was enshrined in the liberal framework ofinternational law with a romantic signature, a method that Lemkin hoped wouldabolish genocide from the human condition and protect families of mind—religiousgroups, colonial subjects, card players, criminals and all.

Acknowledgments

A version of this essay was first written in Professor Alexander Laban Hinton’sCritical Genocide Studies seminar in the Division of Global Affairs at RutgersUniversity, and delivered at the 9th Biennial International Association of Geno-cide Scholars Conference held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 19–22 July 2011. Ithank my professors Alexander Laban Hinton, Stephen Eric Bronner, AlexanderMotyl, and Marcelo Raffin and my colleague at Rutgers Jeff Benvenuto. SteveJacobs read a draft of the essay and provided insightful suggestions, and the anon-ymous peer reviewers gave exceptional guidance as well. I am especially gratefulto Donna-Lee Frieze for her many thoughtful comments while reading severaldrafts of this project.

Notes and References

1 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9 December 1948, 78U.N.T.S. 277. See William A. Schabas, Genocide in international law: the crime of crimes, 2nd ed. (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

2 Raphael Lemkin, Axis rule in occupied Europe: laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals forredress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 79.


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3 Lemkin, Axis rule, p. 79. On Lemkin and genocide as a colonial practice, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Empire,colony, genocide: keywords and the philosophy of history’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, colony, geno-cide: conquest, occupation, and subaltern resistance in world history (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008),pp. 3–54.

4 Lemkin’s papers are housed in three archives: the Manuscripts and Archive Division of the New York PublicLibrary (NYPL), 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, New York City, New York; the American Jewish HistoricalSociety (AHJS), 15 West 16th Street, New York City, New York and the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of theAmerican Jewish Archives, 3101 Clifton Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio. See Steven L. Jacobs, ‘The papers ofRaphael Lemkin: a first look’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1999, pp. 105–114.

5 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Holocaust and genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), in The historiography of the Holocaust(Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 539.

6 Moses, ‘Holocaust and genocide’, p. 539.7 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, culture, and the concept of genocide’ in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk

Moses (eds.), Oxford handbook of genocide studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 19–41and pp. 21–25.

8 I do not mean ‘imagined community’ in the strict sense used by Benedict Anderson in Imagined commu-nities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006). For instance,Lemkin does not share Anderson’s belief that the production of cultural differences generates an idea ofthe ‘other’ around which the idea of a nation is formed. There are strong similarities nevertheless, whichthe author leaves to the reader to explore. Speaking directly to Lemkin’s intellectual context, it appearsthat Lemkin is mirroring the Volkerpsychologie (folk psychology) theories typified by the work of MoritzLazarus and Heymann Steinthal. See Egbert Klautke, ‘The mind of the nation: the debate about Volkerpsy-chologie, 1851–1900’, Central Europe, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2010, pp. 1–19. Klautke argues that Volkerpsycho-logie assumed to analyze the national psychologies of nations. Nations were concrete things, but were alsothe mental products of the individuals who belonged to them, and were thus recreated constantly through themental interaction of people. Later in the essay, I point out that Lemkin believed a constant interaction of‘families of mind’ meant that national identities were mutable and constantly changing.

9 See John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the struggle for the genocide convention (New York: Palgrave Mac-Millan, 2008).

10 Raphael Lemkin, ‘Description of the project’, ‘Writings—Genocide’, Raphael Lemkin Papers, ManuscriptCollection 1730, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library (hereafter NYPL),New York, p. 2.

11 Raphael Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, ‘Introduction to the study of genocide’, NYPL, p. 7.12 Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, p. 8.13 Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, p. 8.14 Stuart Woolf, ‘Introduction’ in Stuart Woolf (ed.), Nationalism in Europe: 1815 to the present (London:

Routledge, 1996), p. 15.15 Moses has argued that Lemkin was a communitarian thinker. I agree with this position and am much

indebted to his scholarship on Lemkin, and only seek to point out the nuances in Lemkin’s thinking. SeeMoses, ‘Holocaust and genocide’. On communitarianism as a political tradition, see Stephen EricBronner, Ideas in action (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). Bronner has written that communitar-ianism, positing a cultural relativism at its core, is a tradition of political thinking that stems from late eight-eenth-century romanticism and generally emphasizes the virtue of human diversity and the distinctexperiences of different cultures. Society in this tradition is seen as a living, organic whole, with a distinctculture constituted though shared traditions, myths and symbols. Indeed, the tradition privileges the distinctexperiences of each culture as fundamentally different from the experiences of other cultures.

16 Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, p. 9. See John Stuart Mill, Vindication of the French Revolutionof February, 1848; in reply to Lord Brougham and others (New York: Holt, 1873), p. 53.

17 Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, p. 9.18 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2012), p. 19.19 John Stuart Mill cited in Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 34.20 Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, p. 7.21 Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, p. 7.22 Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, p. 8.23 Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, p. 8. It appears that Lemkin attempted to cross out the word

‘independent’ in the term ‘independent international federation of free nations’. Thus, I refer to Lemkin’sterm as an ‘international federation’. However, it is also possible that Lemkin was trying to hyphenatethe term, and possibly intended to write ‘independent-international federation of free nations’.


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24 John Cooper documents Herder’s influence on Lemkin’s thought. See Cooper, Raphael Lemkin. Both Mosesand Seyla Benhabib, in their own work, have traced Lemkin’s thinking on human groups and culture to theideas of Herder and later romantics. Moses has charted the path for understanding the historical and intel-lectual context of Lemkin’s ‘groupism’ and Seyla Benhabib has done leading work to outline the ontologicalgrounding of Lemkin’s idea of genocide as the destruction of groups. See Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin’. And seeSeyla Benhabib, ‘International law and human plurality in the shadow of totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt andRaphael Lemkin’, in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Politics in dark times: encounters with Hannah Arendt (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 219–246.

25 Isaiah Berlin, The proper study of mankind (New York: Farr, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 359–435.26 The common-held belief that National Socialist ideology was based on Herder’s thought is critiqued by

Bernhard Becker, who argues that the Nazi party employed Herder’s writing about cultural relativity butignored his strong critiques of violence. See Bernhard Becker, Herder-rezeption in Deutschland. Eine ideo-logiekritische untersuchung (St. Ingbert: Werner Rohrig, 1987). Also, Herder believed that the volk was con-stituted through a shared sense of traditions, geographical boundaries and, most importantly, throughlanguage—not race, skin color, or blood, which he explicitly denies. See Sonia Sikka, Herder on humanityand cultural difference: enlightened relativism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

27 See Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘On the change of taste (1766)’, in Michael N. Forster (trans.), Herder: phi-losophical reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

28 Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).29 Muthu, Enlightenment against empire, p. 258.30 On this point, see Isaiah Berlin, The proper study of mankind.31 Robert Merrill Barlett, ‘Pioneer vs. an ancient crime’, ‘Public statements and interviews’, The Christian

century, 18 July 1956, Raphael Lemkin Papers, NYPL. This document is a transcribed and unpaginatedcopy of the interview. The only state Lemkin seems to think is immune to genocide because of its politicalideology was the US, even though he intended to include a chapter in his history book on the US genocideagainst Native Americans and considered the possibility that the slave trade was genocide. In this interview,he articulates a belief that US democracy and respect for minorities precludes it from genocide. It is anunderstandable position given that the US offered him shelter during the Second World War and becausehe was trying to convince a US audience to support the US ratification of the Genocide Convention.

32 Barlett, ‘Pioneer vs. an ancient crime’.33 Moses, ‘Empire, colony, genocide’, p. 11.34 Enlightenment thought, which generates these competing political traditions, is seen by its champions as

establishing a universal morality while its critics see it as the handmaiden of imperialism, justifying thedestruction cultural pluralism. Muthu argues that, in accordance with these strict either/or binaries, Enlight-enment thinkers who opposed imperialism and European empires, such as Kant, Herder and Diderot, areremembered for taking either universal or purely relativist stands. But, these thinkers were far morenuanced in actuality, especially in their stands against empire. Kant for example displayed a great under-standing of the importance of cultural diversity, and Herder maintained a universal human subject as a cul-tural agent and necessarily diverse. See Muthu, Enlightenment against empire.

35 On Lemkin and the rule of law, see Moses, ‘Empire, colony, genocide’, p. 11.36 Natan Sznaider, Jewish memory and the cosmopolitan order (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 82.37 Lemkin, ‘Diffusion versus cultural genocide’, ‘Genocide in soc./pscho./anthro./econ. impact on culture

genocide as socially approved behaviour’, NYPL.38 Lemkin, ‘Diffusion versus cultural genocide’.39 See Bartolome Clavero, Genocide or ethnocide, 1933–2007: how to make, unmake, and remake law with

words (Milan: Giuffre Editore, 2008).40 Ann Curthoys, ‘Raphael Lemkin’s “Tasmania”: An introduction’, Patterns of prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 2,

2005, pp. 162–169.41 Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin’, p. 32.42 On how scholars read Lemkin, see Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin’, p. 23. It was Stephen Holmes who criticized

Lemkin for his ‘medieval organic’ view of society: Holmes, ‘Looking away’, London Review of Books, Vol.24, No. 22, 14 November 2002, pp. 3–8.

43 Lemkin, Axis rule, p. 91.44 Clavero, Genocide or ethnocide, p. 22.45 See Schabas, Genocide in international law, p. 30.46 Raphael Lemkin, Genocide, ‘Genocide Convention’, NYPL, p. 1.47 Henri Focillon, Vie des formes (Paris, Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1934). Lemkin admired Henri Focillon, a

public intellectual of note. On Focillon, see George Kubler’s essay commemorating the life achievement ofFocillon. George Kubler, ‘Henri Focillon, 1881–1943’, College Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1945, pp. 71–74.


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48 Quoted in Federico Chabod, ‘The idea of nation’, in Woolf, Nationalism in Europe (London: Routledge,1996), pp. 133. Chabod’s classic essay provides a seminal discussion of the differences between Germanand Italian nationalism.

49 Lemkin, Axis rule, pp. 90–91. I take this point from Martin Shaw’s insightful reading of Axis rule: Shaw,What is genocide? (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 24.

50 See Shaw, What is genocide?, p. 24.51 Raphael Lemkin, ‘The nature of genocide’, Raphael Lemkin Collection, American Jewish Historical Society

(AJHS), Box 7, Folder 2, p. 14. I estimate that this text was written in the early 1950s.52 Lemkin, ‘The nature of genocide’, p. 14.53 Lemkin, ‘The nature of genocide’, p. 14.54 Lemkin, ‘Genocide’, p. 1. I date the document at least to early 1957; Lemkin mentions a previous memo

written in February 1957.55 Lemkin, ‘Genocide’, p. 1.56 Lemkin, ‘Genocide’, p. 1.57 Lemkin, ‘Genocide’, p. 1.58 Lemkin, ‘Genocide’, p. 1.59 Lemkin, ‘Genocide’, p. 3.60 Herve Alphand, Ambassardor Alphand’s speech to the Security Council on June 26th 1956, ‘Genocide con-

vention—threats’, p. 1.61 Alphand, Ambassardor Alphand’s speech, pp. 4–5.62 Alphand, Ambassardor Alphand’s speech, p. 4.63 Hannah Arendt, ‘On violence’, in Crisis of the republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), p. 155.64 Alphand, Ambassardor Alphand’s speech, p. 4.65 Lemkin, ‘Genocide’, p. 1.66 Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking lives: genocide and state power, 5th ed., (New Brunswick: Transaction

Publishers, 2002), p. 45.67 Horowitz, Taking lives, p. 43.68 Horowitz, Taking lives, p. 43.69 Horowitz, Taking lives, p. 83.70 Daniel Feierstein, El genocidio como practica social: entre el Nazismo y la experiencia Argentina (Buenos

Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2008).71 Lemkin, ‘Description of the project’, p. 1.72 Lemkin, ‘Diffusion versus cultural genocide’.73 Lemkin, ‘Totally unofficial’ in ‘Writings—autobiography’, NYPL, p. 1. At the time, Bialystok was located

in the Russian empire, in a region historically known as Lithuania and now part of eastern Poland. The citywhere he lived would later come to be known as Wolkowysk, or Volkovysk, Belarus. See Tanya Elder,‘What you see before your eyes: documenting Raphael Lemkin’s life by exploring his archival papers,1900–1959’, Journal of genocide research, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2005, pp. 469–499.

74 Lemkin, ‘Totally unofficial’, p. 14.75 Lemkin, ‘Totally unofficial’, p. 1.76 Cooper, Raphael Lemkin, pp. 8–12. Cooper’s account of Lemkin’s childhood, speaking Hebrew in a vibrant

Jewish community, is sometimes at odds with Lemkin’s autobiographical account of growing up on a smallfarm.

77 Robert Merrill Barlett, ‘Pioneer vs. an ancient crime’. With this quotation, we can add a small note to Moses’leading work on Lemkin’s ideas, where he writes that Lemkin ‘had difficulty in conceiving of culturalhybridity and adaptation’. Lemkin did understand that an individual could hold multiple group identitiessimultaneously, at least by the last few years of his life. See Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin’, in Bloxham andMoses, Oxford handbook of genocide studies, p. 28.

78 Steven Leonard Jacobs, ‘The human, The humane, and the humanitarian: their implications and conse-quences in Raphael Lemkin’s work on genocide’, in Agnieszka Bienczyk-Missala and Slawomir Debski(eds.), Rafal Lemkin: a hero of humankind (Warsaw: The Polish Institute of International Affairs, 2010),pp. 153–162.

79 Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin’, p. 23.80 Yehonatan Alsheh, ‘Puede un ethnoscape heterogeneo constituir un genos y su exterminio genocidio?’,

Revista de Estudio Sobre Genocidio, Vol. 5, 2011, pp. 11–27.81 Sznaider, Jewish memory, p. 82.82 Daniel Feierstein, personal correspondences with the author. See Feierstein, El genocidio como practica

social: entre el Nazismo y la experiencia Argentina. See also Alsheh, ‘Puede un ethnoscape heterogeneoconstituir un genos y su exterminio genocidio?’, pp. 19–21.


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83 Lemkin, Axis rule, p. 524.84 I am indebted to Daniel Feierstein for this point.85 Lemkin, Axis rule, p. 249.86 Feierstein, El genocidio como practica social.87 Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin’, p. 24.88 Lemkin, ‘Diffusion versus cultural genocide’.89 Raphael Lemkin, Draft supplemental remarks by Dr Lemkin, ‘Public statements and interviews’, NYPL, p. 1.90 Lemkin, The new word and the new idea, NYPL, p. 8. This connection is highlighted by Moses, ‘Holocaust

and genocide’. Moses also raises this point in ‘Raphael Lemkin’, p. 23. For an analysis of Mazzini andHerder’s thought, see Michael Walzer and David Miller, Thinking politically: essays in political theory(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 212.

91 Lemkin, ‘The new word and the new idea’, p. 8.92 Ann Curthoys and John Docker write that Lemkin saw world culture as one entity, which they call Lemkin’s

‘oneness of the world’. They note that this idea diminished as Lemkin became more and more riveted byCold War politics. However, this essay suggests that Lemkin never lost his belief in the ‘oneness of theworld’. See Curthoys and Docker, ‘Defining genocide’, in Stone, The historiography of genocide, p. 13.

93 Lemkin, ‘Description of the project’. See sections titled Part I antiquity through Part III modern times.94 Raphael Lemkin, The truth about the genocide convention, ‘Genocide convention’, NYPL, p. 4.95 Lemkin, ‘The truth about the genocide convention’, p. 2.96 Lemkin, ‘The truth about the genocide convention’, p. 2.97 Lemkin, ‘The truth about the genocide convention’, p. 2.98 On this point regarding intent, see William Schabas, ‘The law and genocide’, in Bloxham and Moses, Oxford

handbook of genocide studies, pp. 123–141.99 Raphael Lemkin, ‘The concept of genocide in sociology’, ‘Genocide in soc./pscho./anthro./econ. impact on

culture genocide as socially approved behaviour’, NYPL.100 Lemkin, ‘The concept of genocide in sociology’.101 Michael A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas’, in

Dominik J. Schaller and Jurgen Zimmerer (eds.), The origins of genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a historian ofmass violence (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 76.

102 Barlett, ‘Pioneer vs. an ancient crime’.103 See Roman Serbyn’s essay on Lemkin’s address, ‘Lemkin on genocide of nations’, Journal of international

criminal justice, Vol. 7, 2009, pp. 123–130.104 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, ‘Ukraine’, NYPL, p. 1.105 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 1.106 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 8.107 Anton Weiss-Wendt, ‘Hostage of politics: Raphael Lemkin on “Soviet genocide”’, in Schaller and Zim-

merer, The origins of genocide, pp. 107–116.108 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 3.109 Lemkin, Axis rule, p. 79.110 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 3.111 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 4.112 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 4.113 Adam Jones, Genocide: a comprehensive introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 11.114 Lemkin, Axis rule, p. 79.115 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, pp. 4–5.116 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 5.117 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 5.118 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 5.119 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 6.120 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, pp. 6–7.121 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 8.122 Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine’, p. 8.123 Raphael Lemkin, ‘Text of statement by Dr Raphael Lemkin at testimonial luncheon in his honor by

New York region of the American Jewish Congress at the Hotel Pierre, Thursday, January 18th’, ‘Publicstatements and interviews’, NYPL. The document is undated, but the author places the date to January18th, 1951, a week after the Genocide Convention came into force on Friday, January 12th, 1951.

124 Lemkin, ‘Text of statement by Dr Raphael Lemkin’.125 Lemkin, ‘Text of statement by Dr Raphael Lemkin’.126 Curthoys and Docker, ‘Defining genocide’, p. 9.


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127 Bartolome Clavero, Geografıa jurıdica de America Latina: Pueblos Indıgenas entre constituciones Mestizas(Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2008), p. 165; and see Clavero, Genocide or ethnocide.

128 Lemkin, ‘Draft supplemental remarks by Dr Lemkin’, p. 1.

Notes on contributor

Douglas Irvin-Erickson holds a MA in English literature and is a PhD candidatein the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University, Newark, United States. Heis an associate of the Rutgers Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resol-ution and Human Rights and he teaches courses in human rights and genocidein the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the English Department.


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Genocide, the ‘Family of Mind’ and the Romantic Signature of Raphael Lemkin

Documents

Transcript of Genocide, the ‘Family of Mind’ and the Romantic Signature of Raphael Lemkin