Genocide and the Holocaust – the reality
As the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ are now so widely misused, I searched for primary sources to clarify their origins and real meaning.
The term “genocide” was coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, combining the Greek “genos” (race or tribe) and Latin “cide” (killing). It signifies a coordinated plan to destroy the essential foundations of life of national groups.
Lemkin was driven by the failure to punish the Ottoman Empire’s actions against Armenians in WWI, and later, the loss of 49 family members in the Holocaust. He succeeded in having “genocide” included in the Nuremberg indictment against Nazi leadership, though it was not yet recognised as a distinct legal crime at that point.
According to Wikipedia the term “holocaust”, derived from a Greek word meaning “burnt offering”, was an ordinary English word for centuries also meaning “destruction or sacrifice by fire” or, figuratively, “massacre”. During the 1950s, it started to become the most common word used to describe the Nazi extermination of Jews. However at a time when our war of survival is fought with words as much as in the battlefield, like “genocide” it too has had its meaning degraded through misuse for propaganda purposes irrelevant to its origins and intent, referring to a unique event in the annals of history.
On December 11, 1946, the General Assembly of the United Nations resolved that genocide was a crime under international law. This was approved and ratified as a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948. The convention defines genocide as: “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, by:
- 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.
A number of specific actions have been deemed to be punishable under the convention. These are:
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