Albeit in French, I already said as much in this very blog. But, for all intents and purposes, let me reiterate it, in English this time : I don’t like it…
I understand it has a legal meaning since the Convention pertaining to it came into force, in 1951. And by no means is my brief and clumsy dissertation on the matter meant to challenge the importance of either the reality it is supposed to convey, or its legal ramifications.
Etymologically, however, I think the word is inadequate.
Following the fall of the nazi empire, both Lauterpacht and Lemkin, considering the nature and the extent of the crimes it had perpetrated, felt the need to introduce new legal concepts, better able to encompass said crimes.
At the Nuremberg trial, Lauterpacht prevailed…
Although he didn’t coin the phrase, he managed to raise the concept of “crime against Humanity” to the pinnacle of international law.
As Oxford University Press makes clear : while one of the prerequisites for crimes to be labeled crimes against Humanity is that they be committed in time of war, crimes against Humanity can be committed both in times of war and peace…
In his 1890 open letter to then-Belgian King Leopold II denouncing in no uncertain terms the royal atrocities perpetrated in the Congo, George Washington Williams, a U.S. minister, didn’t explicitly mention the phrase, but it can clearly be deduced, which is why he is now remembered as the one who coined it…
https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/primary-documents-global-african-history/george-washington-williams-open-letter-king-leopold-congo-1890/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity#Origins_of_the_term
And what concept, I ask you, is more powerful and more universal than this one in condemning those whose crimes are so abject not only Humanity as a whole, but also each and every human being individually, in full and direct solidarity with said crimes’ primary victims, may legitimately consider their own human rights, their own human dignity, their own humanity, to have been ruthlessly violated, in that other human beings’, whatever their ethnic identity, have been, beyond what the mind can grasp ?
From a strictly legal standpoint, you might object that a “crime against Humanity” need not be perpetrated against any particular group with the intent to annihilate it, and that the notion, furthermore, doesn’t address state responsibility, but only considers individual responsibilities. And you would be right…
To tackle those, to fill that legal gap, which resulted from extraordinary circumstances, another concept was indeed needed, but, in my view, it shouldn’t have been the one which was adopted…
According to several reports, entire Palestinian families have been wiped from the civil registry as a result of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. In that sense, the use of the word “genocide” is etymologically – and maybe even legally – appropriate.
But if you are of the opinion, as the government of South Africa is, as so many around the world are, and as I am, that the explicit incitement laid out in the case presented before the I.C.J. pertained to the eradication of an entire ethnic group, an entire people, then that concept, while legally applicable, is etymologically flawed, were it only for the fact that, as the previous paragraph shows, it would have competing meanings.
Lauterpacht allegedly despised Lemkin, whom he viewed as but a minor legal scholar. But the latter, aside from getting his scholarly revenge through the international ratification of the aforementioned Convention, and subsequently, although posthumously, through the Eichmann judgment…
had also coined another neologism, which, to this day, however, the official legal lexicon has shunned : “ethnocide”…
The Latin suffix, as we all know, means “the killing, the murder [of]”. Likewise, the Greek “ethnos” leaves no room for semantic doubt.
Logically, what is now legally defined as “genocide” should actually have been “ethnocide”, namely the killing of an ethnic group, “in whole or in part”.
… in German, as any of the (overwhelmingly Jewish ?) “terrorists” camping on the “Reichstag” lawn would tell you.
Yet, for mysterious reasons defying both logic and etymology, while “genocide” is now meant to express the physical killing of a people, “ethnocide” – which, in this blog, means exactly that – is supposed to evoke only the eradication of a people’s culture (which, of course, has also been the case in Palestine… to the point the word “Palestine” itself is now considered controversial in polite U.S. society).
‘What matters right now is what has been happening over there for the past seven months. Never mind the etymology !‘, some of you might say. To that, I would respond that the horrors (Note the plural…) of what has been happening over there have been the exclusive topic of this blog ever since October 7, 2023. And, standing my ground before resting my case, I would further refer to Camus : “To name things wrongly is to add to the woe of the world”…
Yannick Baele 
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