John Cooper (3) (1935–)

No true reader needs to be convinced of the importance of words. Oral and written symbols (however imperfect) of meaning, the tools with which we humans identify, struggle to understand, and in many cases create, the reality around us, words have immense power. The ancients understood this. They knew that words were a kind of sorcery: that to name something was to claim mastery over it, and many are the linguistic taboos and strictures that have developed in human cultures down through the years, as a result. Even in those societies far removed from a belief in magic, there exists still this idea of the perils of language, and while the words we consider dangerous may have changed, the underlying concern has remained a constant.

But just as our words have sometimes been circumscribed by fear, whether of trespassing against the divine, or of causing harm to our fellows, so too have they broken loose, upon occasion, helping us to understand and confront new or difficult concepts, freeing us from the mistaken ideas of our past. There have been times when we have confronted realities for which we had no words - not because they were forbidden, but because they did not exist - and it is then that we benefited from the work of brilliant visionaries, of poets or philosophers who, daring to name the unnameable, and give shape to some vaguely sensed, but imperfectly understood idea or trend, created new words. One such visionary was Raphael Lemkin, the most influential twentieth-century thinker of whom you've never heard, and the word he gave us was genocide.

Born in 1900, to a Jewish family living near the Polish village of Bezwodene - part of a "contested borderland" that switched hands many times over the course of the twentieth century - Rafal (later Raphael) Lemkin was a brilliant scholar, mastering multiple languages at an early age. A sensitive young man, alive to the realities of human suffering, he grew to adulthood during the terrible years of the First World War, and the chaotic time that followed, a regular witness to the injustices and atrocities caused by ethnic and religious hatred. Deeply influenced by the anti-Semitic violence visited upon his own community, as well as the reports of the Armenian massacres that were current in his youth, he developed an intense interest in the history of ethnic, racial and religious intolerance and persecution, eventually switching - as a student at the University of Luov - from the study of philology to that of law.

A successful lawyer, who - despite the anti-Semitic discrimination of the day - won many public appointments, and who was active in international legal circles, Lemkin proposed the addition of two crimes to the international penal code in 1933. The Crime of Barbarity, involving the extermination of ethnic, social, and religious groups through massacres, pogroms, and economic discrimination; and The Crime of Vandalism, in which the cultural and artistic heritage of a specific people were destroyed; are clearly fore-runners of his subsequent ideas concerning physical and cultural genocide, and although not adopted by the League of Nations, were an important (and ground-breaking) step in the development of concepts that would eventually be accepted by the world community.

Escaping from occupied Poland at the onset of World War II, Lemkin made his way - via Sweden - to the United States, where he became a member of the law faculty at Duke University. Forty-nine of his relatives were not so fortunate, and perished in the Holocaust. It was in this period, as the war raged in Europe, that Lemkin began to organize and analyze the many legal decrees of the various Nazi occupations that he had been collecting, culminating in the 1944 publication of his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, which laid out his new concept of genocide, and which would be so influential in the prosecution of the Nuremberg Trials.

Taken from the Greek γένος (or génos), meaning "race," or "kind," and the Latin -cidere, meaning "to kill," genocide is the deliberate extermination of a national, racial, religious, political, or ethnic group. Lemkin, who wrote the first (incomplete and unpublished) history of genocide, believed that it was a crime which had dogged humanity for all of its existence, though it had never before had a name, and he was as passionately committed to his idea of cultural genocide - the destruction of a group's cultural integrity, of those qualities, intellectual and artistic, that made them a group in the first place - as he was to that of physical genocide (the outright extermination of peoples), and biological genocide - the prevention of a group's survival through such means as forced sterilization.

Briefly influential with members of the State Department following the war, Lemkin used his position, and his many contacts amongst Jewish, Christian, labor, and women's organizations, to begin a campaign for the adoption of a Genocide Convention at the United Nations. It is this campaign - for the passage and ratification of the Genocide Convention - to which John Cooper devotes the bulk of his book.

Dense, and highly academic in style and tone, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention is the first full-length work on the "father of genocide" to be published. Perhaps I should say that it is the first full-length work of an historical, and scholarly nature to be published on Lemkin - who slipped into obscurity after his death in 1959 - as James Joseph Martin's The Man Who Invented Genocide: The Public Career and Consequences of Raphael Lemkin, was published by the odious Institute for Historical Review ("Holocaust Denial Central" here in the United States) in 1984. I suppose that it is a sign of the central importance of Lemkin's work, both to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, and to the correct understanding of the Holocaust, and its place in history, that such an organization would single Lemkin out, more than two decades before the field of Genocide Studies caught up with the subject.

However that may be, as someone with a long-standing interest in the Holocaust, and in the wider issues of genocide in history, I have long been aware of Lemkin's central role in generating both the term and the concept, and have hoped for the publication of just such a work as Cooper's for many years. Truly, it is an event to be celebrated, and although I have some minor criticisms, all in all I would say that the book is a success.

I was struck by so many things, in the course of my reading, both about Raphael Lemkin the man, and about his revolutionary idea, that it is difficult to know where to begin. Lemkin himself seems to have been an extraordinary human being, both brilliant - when entering college in 1920, he already spoke nine languages, and could write twelve - and compassionate, with a "receptivity to the suffering of other victims" that seems quite atypical. The product of an unusual background - his father was a farmer (an occupation Jews were rarely allowed to pursue), and his mother an artist and intellectual - Lemkin seems to have benefited both from the rigorous education of his youth - he attended a heder, or Jewish elementary school - as well as a greater degree of exposure to diverse peoples and customs than may have been possible for many others of the time. He learned Ruthenian, for instance, from the laborers' children he knew on his father's farm, a skill that would later save his life.

In fact, although Cooper never explicitly makes such a claim, I found myself wondering whether Lemkin's passion for languages - which must necessarily have brought some knowledge of, and respect for, the cultures from which they sprang - combined with his natural sense of empathy, served to strengthen his seemingly instinctive ability to make connections, and draw comparisons between the experiences of disparate peoples. It must surely have been this extraordinary quality - this ability to look past the suffering and persecution of a single human group, even his own, and see the connections to other experiences - that allowed Lemkin to perceive a pattern in the course of history, and to conceive of this category of human behavior that he named genocide.

Lemkin was not without flaw, of course, being a mortal like anyone else, and it was disappointing to read of his rather lackluster response to the incipient Civil Rights Movement here in the United States, his willingness to believe that the communist sympathies of some participants meant that the movement as a whole could be laid at the door of Soviet efforts to derail the Genocide Convention. It seems fantastic to me that anyone would imagine blacks wanting an end to Jim Crow had damn-all to do with the USSR, but hind-sight is 20/20, I guess. Ironically, Civil Rights did have an effect on the convention, not because they were part of a Russian propaganda ploy, but because conservative Southern Democrats were so terrified of the very idea of them, that they successfully blocked Congressional ratification of both the Genocide Convention, and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, which they believed would bolster African-American demands for equality. How interconnected and interdependent are the diverse prejudices of the world!

Lemkin also seems to have been somewhat paranoid, particularly as the struggle for the U.S. Senate ratification wore on, with little result. It was sad to think of such a perceptive man being blinded by disappointment, turning on his fellows, and alienating so many allies by accusations of sabotage or inattention. It was also rather strange to think that the causes of human rights and genocide prevention were seen as antagonistic (at least by Lemkin), as I have always thought them complimentary, one dealing more with individuals, and the other with groups. Cooper delves into all the political details of Lemkin's many campaigns, and credits him with saving the convention from being "watered down," which would seem to indicate that the rivalry was real. It was also fascinating to note the continued opposition of both the UK and the USSR to the Genocide Convention, and although Cooper does not dwell on this at great length, it is readily apparent that both nations were rather concerned at the idea of an international law that might, sometime in the future, be used to focus world attention on their imperial misbehavior. Politics makes for strange bed-fellows, as they say!

Finally, as someone who falls firmly on the comparative side of the comparative/exclusivist divide in the world of Holocaust studies - someone who believes that the Holocaust is unique, but only in those ways in which all human events are unique (ie, that they are the products of a particular set of historical circumstances) - I find it instructive to note that our ability to even conceptualize the Holocaust would be irreparably impaired by the absence of comparison. There would not, in fact, be such a concept as genocide, were it not for the comparative approach, and without that idea - that notion that the deliberate targeting of distinct human groups for elimination is qualitatively different from the "regular" mass-murder of war (however horrific) - it is difficult to imagine a legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials.

How fortunate that scholars are once again paying attention to the work of Raphael Lemkin, and to his central, but hitherto unacknowledged, influence on the ways we perceive the Holocaust, and other instances of genocide. Hopefully this sort of work will dispel the myths put out by those who would divorce the Holocaust from the rest of human history, and allow us to focus on the truly important question: how do we organize international society, and law, so that this sort of behavior does not continue? As one of Lemkin's students once wrote to him, in a personal letter: "It is true that you cannot see the results of your work. But your work is great, far greater than this generation. The results can only be known with the passage of time. You yourself will in all likelihood never see the concrete result you wish to see. But generations to come will enjoy and know the ideals you strive to realize." It is my profound hope that these words are prophetic...… (mer)

An interesting subject but not exactly what I was hoping for. The book researched the food of the Jews from biblical times up until the two world wars. I was more interested in what they ate and why but this book covered more what they ate and why. I really could have been quite happy simply reading the conclusion chapter. Learned just as much from it as from the entire book, really.

rel="nofollow" target="_top">Experiments in Reading… (mer)