Raphael Lemkin

Y vemos cómo la hambruna, eh, que es una, es uno...

Nos decía Rafael Lemkin, el, el gran jurista judío que, que, que acuña el término genocidio.

Rafael Lemkin decía que la hambruna era el peor de todos los crímenes dentro de los crímenes que se, que se, que cabían dentro de ese, de esa, de esa sombrilla que se llama genocidio, porque la hambruna es esa, una muerte lenta que deshumaniza y degrada.

Entonces, eh, Goya nos muestra no solamente los cuerpos famélicos, no solamente los niños ya muertos, sino nos muestra las muchachas bellas que se están vendiendo a los soldados franceses para poder sobrevivir.

Y muestra la degradación de la sociedad, porque la hambruna no solamente destruye el cuerpo, sino destruye todo el tejido social y destruye todos los tabús.

Um-

Yeah, but so, you know, you begin the book, uh, by talking about the Polish Jewish lawyer, uh, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term.

Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about that history.

But no, his parents sadly died in Treblinka.

Um, and he got to the US and tried to get, um, uh, the US government to really understand the depths of the Holocaust while it was happening, but nobody could actually believe this, even though Hitler had outlined it in Mein Kampf.

So he's always been a, a complicated hero because he created the Genocide Convention, and then, um, had trouble getting it ratified because of global politics, and at the end of his life, um, collapsed at a bus stop in New York City in 1959, and he ended up dying, um, penniless and friendless with people from the UN running from him because it was, "Oh, God, here comes Lemkin.

He's gonna want us to ratify." And, and countries put off ratifying, like the United States, because they knew they might, uh, they were vulnerable because, in fact, as soon as the Genocide Convention was created, Black Americans brought a petition to the United Nations charging the United States government of genocide, using their language of, in the language of the time, a genocide against the Negro people.

So you've got this incredible kind of mess.

How do you deal with someone like Zach Polanski, for example, who takes his hatred to such a level that he really seems to believe that Israel is the evil country in the world? And to say it's a genocide, that word, as you well know, Olly, was created by a Polish Jew called Raphael Lemkin, whose whole family were murdered by the Nazis.

And he was looking for a word to apply to an attempt to wipe a whole people off the face of the world.

That's what genocide means.

Now, this idea that only some sort of terrorist sympathizer would accuse Israel of genocide, there's a tweet here from the Lemkin Institute of Genocide Prevention.

Raphael Lemkin was the coiner of the term genocide.

And the Lemkin Institute says, this is about the Abdullah al-Sayed discussion with Scott Galloway, who said, how dare you call this genocide? Lemkin Institute says Abdul El-Sayed is exactly right on the subject of genocide.

It is wonderful to hear a politician using the language of prevention so deftly.

But the word genocide has got immense emotional power.

So if you use that word, even if you're not speaking of the definition of genocide according to Raphael Lemkin and so on and so forth, you immediately...

You know, if I...

If I say to somebody, this is a crime against humanity, they'll look at me and say, okay, that sounds pretty bad, whatever.

And, and I would, like, p- randomly pick up a book off the shelf and just sit down in front of a window and just read for a bit.

One of the most life-changing moments is I read this book by Raphael Lemkin called Genocide, and it is about Raphael Lemkin, who was the Polish lawyer who witnessed what happened in Germany and, uh, came to America and basically spent the, like, l- most of his life advocating for a definition of genocide.

He came up with the phrase genocide.

Mm-hmm.

it took many years, I think, for the UN to recognize that as a genocide.

And it's taking many years right now, and I think in Palestine, to recognize this as a genocide.

But one of the things that Raphael Lemkin talked about was genocide isn't necessarily just the actual killing of people, it is the entire both dehumanization of those people as a group of people and the, and reducing their ability to, to live further on.

It's entirely removing them from the planet.

... for, uh, the Holocaust.

In fact, genocide, uh, was, uh, I believe coined by Raphael, um, uh, Lemkin, uh, about the Armenians being slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks.

So I get the same thing, but at the same time, what the lesson to be learned is, is you don't sit idly by when you see something, uh, slaughter of the innocents or ethnic cleansing or anything else.

And if, y- you know, people always remember.