Making genocide a crime was harder than you realize

 

There was a long, protracted, battle to make Genocide a crime.

 

The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, and he started agitating for the recognition of this crime was being, well, a crime, long before Hitler’s rise to power. His activism was on the stage of the World Community and his goal was to get them to accept a unified code that would made the mass murder of civilians a special crime against humanity. Lemkin was primarily motivated by the persecution of the Jews, though he was from Poland, the nation then-best known for ill-treatment oof that group, but by what we now call the Armenian Genocide, a campaign of exceptional savagery was committed by the Ottoman Turks in 1915. He was standing up for victims who were strangers to him.

 

The Armenian Genocide is both largely forgotten and a turning point in World History. Before it, similar savageries had been so typical they rarely even deserved mention in history books. A handful of massacres were elevated to special notice, but generally, these acts were in the context of a struggle and the games of thrones took all attention away from the butchery committed against the commoners.

 

From our perspective today, the past seems prosaic and our contemporary leaders shockingly brutal, because we’ve forgotten how George Washington directed his troops to engage in a campaign of explicit terrorism and ethnic cleaning against Native Americans, or how Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in American history, also against Native Americans, because we needed to evolve enough as a civilization to recognize these things all-too-normal things needed to be viewed as abnormal, and we need to see them as abnormal to even recognize that these things took place. 

Lemkin knew that we needed to make this crime an official crime for it to be recognized as crime, as Slavery had been made an official crime by the League of Nations in 1923. But when Lemkin went to the League of Nations in 1933, calling it the "Crime of Barbarity,” he was rebuffed. By then, Hitler had risen to power in Germany, but had not-yet engaged in any significant military adventurism.

Even before Lemkin was rebuffed, Hilter was confident he would never be held accountable. In 1931, Hitler he confided to a Journalist that expulsions and executions of entire populations had occurred before and the perpetrators had gotten away with it, "Think of the biblical deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages... and remember the extermination of the Armenians."

Then, in 1939, just before his invasion of Poland, he told his top Generals that the goal was wholly destroying the Polish people, and assured them that they wouldn't be held accountable for planned crimes against humanity, "Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

 

When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin fled his home, and made it to the USA in 1941. From the safety of our nation, he saw the all-too-typical crime that he sought to expose escalate to levels unimaginable in earlier histories. Hitler’s genocides go back to his attack on Poland, but his policy of exterminating the Jews specifically wasn’t codified till 1942. Hitler had a special passion for killing Jews, but the victims of his savagery were in fact a vast mosaic.

 

Lemkin coined the word “Genocide” in 1943. Now that it had a name, it was easier to describe the crime and make the case for the need for law. As the word was invented, Hitler was systematically slaughtering the majority of Lemkin’s family back home.

 

The first law was not written and ratified until 1948, by the newly-minted United Nations. The first, and for a long time the only, criminals tried for this crime were Nazis. This made the ideals of justice an embarrassment – not because the Nazis weren’t guilty, they were, but because they were only held accountable in defeat. It was understood even at the time that victors Stalin and Mao were as bad. Today historians have been able to demonstrate that Stalin and Mao were many times worse than Hitler. His Holocaust against the Jews, and his campaigns against groups other than Jews, are now the definition of evil in the modern world, but he in fact ranks a distant third in actual civilian body counts.

 

Even with the crime ratified, made official, many countries refused to sign on to the conventions: there were arguments about how collateral damage during a battle should be weighed, how many must die before it was considered a genocide, should the word only be applied when it reflected an official policy or not, many countries wanted the law to apply only to what invaders did in other countries not what they did to their own, and a lot of complaining about a sovereign nation being required to hand over their citizens to an international body. The real issue was that all nations knew that they were already guilty, though mostly on a smaller scale than Hitler, and they didn’t want to ratify their own indictment.

 

The USA refused to sign. It had committed two campaigns of genocide, both still in living history when the 1948 debate raged, the genocide of the Native Americans in the late-19th c. and the invasion of the Philippines at the dawn-of the 20th (ironically, one of early champions of Lempkin’s ideas was former US President Teddy Roosevelt, who had been appalled with the savagery of the Ottomans, but was himself the architect of the Philippine campaign). The US also faced accusations regarding the terrorism campaign against blacks by the KKK and other vigilante groups which were casually over-looked during the Armenian Genocide and seemed to be on the upswing in the early 1950s (in retrospect that proved mostly incorrect, lynchings had gotten rarer, but they were better reported; they were likely getting rarer because they were getting better reported).

 

Lempkin, a Civil Rights activist, had publicly made it clear that vigilante violence was outside the intended Conventions, that the national government would have to have been actively encouraging the crimes for the word to apply, but that did not assuage the fears within the USA Government who knew damned well they weren’t doing enough yet.

 

Lemkin died in 1959, his adopted home barely beginning to take a strong stand against lynching, and decades before we signed the Conventions against Genocide.

 

Shockingly the US would not sign on to the conventions until 1988. This only, finally, happened because three things converged:

 

Both the genocide of the Native Americans and the Philippine genocide had all but disappeared from living memory.

 

A liberal Senator named Proxmire had shamed the nation by daily tying up the business of the Congress for 21 years condemning our inaction on the issue (I’m not kidding, he gave a total of 3,211 speeches). He had expected this protest to only require weeks or, at worst, months, but when he was surprised to see he was being ignored, he kept at it (I’ve read that Lemkin was much-the-same).

 

Finally, a Conservative President named Reagan, after being embarrassed because he thoughtlessly laid wreaths on the graves of Nazis in a Military cemetery in Germany, finally bucked all, including his own party’s opposition and signed the damned thing.

 

And it wouldn’t be until the late 1990s that any important prosecutions would take place under these conventions.

 

As for the first Genocide in this story. The predators, the Ottoman Empire engaged in it to fore-stall their dissolution in the wake of that defeat, their efforts were not only cruel, but in vain, and the Empire collapsed less than a decade later, and their center, Turkey, became a Republic, and finally a Democracy in 1946. Unwilling to admit to the crimes against Armenia, the Turks have made it a crime to use the world Genocide in relationship to the campaign and as recently of 2019, the Prime Minster called the Ottoman campaign “reasonable.” The Western powers needed Turkey’s allegiance during the Cold War so they went generations not pressing the issue, and the USA didn’t recognize the Armenian Genocide until 2019, more than thirty-years after we finally signed onto the protocols.

 

Armenia did not achieve a stable independence even after the fall of the Empire; they attempted their own Republic in 1918 but lasted less-than a year and they were quickly dominated by the Turks and the Soviets. This was during the reign of Lenin in the USSR, and all too soon they were forced to endure the entire reign of Stalin, a greater genocidal monster than the Ottomans ever were. Armenia didn’t achieve full Independence until 1991.