NAMING THE WORST THING IMAGINABLE
Good Magazine, Israel
Oct 17 2014
by Jeremy Martin
The word by which we call a thing has power. Kill one man, for
example, and 12 jurors may call you a murderer. Kill a million,
and your countrymen may call you a leader. Thanks to the tireless
crusade of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Holocaust refugee, the world at
large has another word for these mass killings: genocide.
Lemkin, who had been a public prosecutor in Warsaw before World War
II, is the central subject of 2005 MacArthur Fellow Edet Belzberg’s
latest documentary Watchers of the Sky. Having studied linguistics
in university, Lemkin first coined the term “genocide” in 1943 to
describe the deliberate killing of a large group of people with
the goal of total annihilation. Though the vile atrocities of the
Holocaust inspired the word, the act itself predates modern history.
Lemkin reasoned that humanity as a whole couldn’t seem to fathom
the systemic execution of 6 million Jews, or 1.5 million Armenians,
or–as Rwandan genocide survivor Emmanuel Uwurukundo describes it
in the film–the slaughter of 100,000 men, women, and children per
day using only machetes. There needed to be some objective measure,
some agreed-upon name, of such hatred and the crimes it inspired in
order to effect legal prosecution.
What Lemkin himself seemed to have trouble fathoming was the
reluctance world leaders would have, despite his pleas, to applying
this straightforward word to the obvious atrocities it described as
they were occurring. Though he fled Poland in 1941 to escape the
very thing he’d pledged himself to fight (but hadn’t yet named,)
Lemkin first became aware of such mass-scale horrors as a teenager
studying what the Republic of Turkey to this day insists on calling
“the events of 1915,” a.k.a. the Armenian Genocide. During the last 15
years of his life–time he spent, according to colleagues interviewed
for the film, haunting first the Nuremberg Trials then the United
Nations as a malnourished, sleep-deprived specter–Lemkin never ran
out of hideous, tragic instances of genocide to call attention to,
each a condemnation of political leaders who continued to allow such
hatred. As the man himself said in an archival interview, “I became
interested in genocide because it happened so many times.”
And it kept happening, Lemkin sadly realized, because the powers that
be were reluctant to name, let alone condemn, genocide as it occurred
due to a variety of Machiavellian concerns. Naming a genocide implies
an obligation to take the complicated and often politically unpopular
steps necessary to stop it. (See: The U.S. government’s delay in
recognizing the Rwandan Genocide in 1994.) Fully recognizing genocide
as an inherent crime against humanity also impinges on sovereignty,
some might argue, as it limits the state’s power to govern its own
citizens, which apparently includes the option to murder the masses
at will.
The threat of genocide, as Watchers so effectively reminds us, is
ever-present and the wheels of progress turn so slowly as to appear as
if they’re not moving at all. As Lemkin–a man whose intimate knowledge
of atrocity could not prevent it from devouring his family, a man who
held millions in his heart but whose funeral was reportedly attended
by less than a dozen people–wrote, “I was shamed by my helplessness.”
While these are some of the most disheartening words ever set to
paper, Watchers also presents a counterpoint: a single notebook page
of Lemkin’s on which a two-word phrase has been repeatedly transcribed:
“I believe.”
So if the frustrated attempts of Lemkin (and those that follow in
his footsteps) to pose these simple arguments to people in positions
of unfathomable power make you feel hopeless, take heart. You’re in
good company. If you can’t stomach the footage of Bosnian citizens
being gunned down or marched off to rape camps interposed with shots
of General Ratko Mladic showing off on the ski slopes, realize that
humans are not designed to accept such horrors. The important thing is
that we do not deny they exist. If we stare at the abyss long enough,
it will stare back. But we might also get a clearer picture of its
outline, so we can spot it looming on the horizon.