By Pamela Casey Nagler
Published 10/21/2023 | 10:37am PST

“a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups” - Rafael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who coined the term, genocide, and lobbied tirelessly for international law to cover the destruction of groups.

The word, genocide repeated often, in various contexts, has a distinct meaning and a distinct history. 

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, coined the term in 1943 from genos (Greek for family, tribe or race) and cide (Latin for killing), as a reaction to the Armenian Genocide in WWI and the Holocaust or atrocities in Axis-occupied Europe during WWII - the Nazi regime’s treatment of Poles and Jews - but it was intended to be extrapolated to cover many other situations including the European conquests in the Americas that began in the 1490s. 

Lemkin defined genocide as the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole, or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group:

"Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation.

It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor's own nationals.”

According to Lemkin, genocide can refer to mass killing, but it also refers to such coordinated actions as removal and assimilation, the threat to the security of a people and their exposure to substandard living conditions. Genocide refers to government-sanctioned activity, rather than the act of independent individuals against other individuals.

In 1947, the Secretary General of the newly formed United Nations, pursuant to its Economic and Security Council Resolutions, assigned Lemkin to head a committee charged with drafting a law to define, prevent and punish the crime of genocide. As the head of the Committee, Lemkin clarified, and expanded, who was protected under his definition of genocide. Formerly, he had referred to “national” or “oppressed” groups, but he updated his list to include “racial, national, linguistic, religious, political” groups - with economic groups implied.  

Lemkin defined policies as genocidal if they worked for the destruction of a group and/or prevented the preservation and development of the group. He characterized genocidal policy in three interrelated ways: physical, biological and cultural - not arranged in any particular hierarchical order.

According to Lemkin’s definition, physical genocide included more than outright and direct extermination, but also including “slow-death measures” such as, subjection to conditions like improper housing, clothing, food, hygiene and medical care; excessive work likely to result in debilitation or death; mutilations and biological experiments for other than curative purposes; deprivation of the means of livelihood by confiscation and looting, curtailment of work; denial of housing and supplies otherwise attainable to other inhabitants of the territory.

He defined biological genocide as including involuntary sterilization, compulsory abortion, segregation of the sexes or other obstacles to marriage as well as other policies that were intended to prevent births within a target group.

He defined cultural genocide as the imposition of an alien national pattern on a target group, and he included all policies aimed at destroying how a group defines themselves, forcing them to become something else. Among these destructive acts, he included the forced transfer of children; the forced and systematic exile of individuals who represented the group; the prohibition of the use of a language; the systematic destruction of books printed in the national language; the disruption of religious works; the prohibition of new publications; the systematic destruction of national or religious monuments (or their diversion to alien uses); and the destruction or dispersion of objects of historical, artistic, or religious value including objects used in religious worship.

Lemkin’s draft, submitted initially to the UN’s Economic and Social Council,  was eventually reviewed by a seven-member committee. The delegate from the Soviet Union managed to have political groups removed from the list, while the delegate from the United States managed to eliminate or ‘gut’ the cultural genocide category for obvious reasons - it stood as an indictment of the way the US Government had treated, and continued to treat Indigenous People. In spite of these revisions, the final draft, though diluted, still retained many of Lemkin’s original ideas.  

The 1948 United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that instances of genocide have taken place throughout history, but now places the crime of genocide under the jurisdiction of international law. Its Second Article defines the crime of genocide as occurring if any of the “following acts were committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” It included 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 and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

According to the UN, persons - rulers, public officials or private individuals - committing these crimes could be punished. 

Since the 1940s, others have suggested other kinds of genocide - mathematical or bureaucratic genocide and environmental genocide. Mathematical or bureaucratic genocide refers to the deliberate miscounting of numbers of people affected and environmental genocide as a result of local, unwanted land use (LULU). 

Pamela Casey Nagler is currently finishing her book, A Century of Disgrace: The Removal, Enslavement, and Massacre of California’s Indigenous People 1769 - 1869.