Never Again Raphael Lemkin Analysis

“Never Again”
In an ordinary farm surrounded by a forest in German Lemberg, an extraordinary Jewish boy, Raphael Lemkin, developed curious wonderings about the workings of the criminal world. Having witnessed the harsh reality of war during the First World War where the Germans seized their land, young Lemkin knew the difference between warfare and merciless slaughter.
During his educational years, he decided that linguistics interested him, so he went to study philology, the evolution of language, at the University of Lwow in 1920. Despite this, after hearing that Talaat, one of the leaders of the Ottoman Empire during the mass killings of Armenians, had been assassinated by one of the Armenian victims, Tehlirian, Lemkin transferred to Lwow

law school. He was intrigued by the fact that a man who killed many could run free but the man who murdered the slaughterer be condemned. Driven by his curiosity, he asked one of his professors why this happened. In response, “the professor said there was no law under which [Talatt] could be arrested” (Power 17).
Lemkin continued on to become a lawyer, devoting his free time towards submitting a draft law to the Madrid conference, hoping to ban what he referred to as “barbarity” and “vandalism.” In response, the conference “would not say ‘yes,’ and they could not say ‘no’” (Power 22), so they tabled Lemkin’s law. The world was not ready to intervene in another state’s separate affairs; as Robert Lansing once said, "the essence of sovereignty [was] the absence of responsibility" (Power 14).
Later on, news of Hitler’s immoral intentions reached Lemkin, prodding him into flight. He begged his friends and family to join him in his escape, but they refused, claiming that no harm would come to them as long as they cooperated. Using the last of his money, Lemkin telegrammed Sweden, asking for refuge and they accepted, allowing him to teach law at the University of Stockholm. Lemkin intended to eventually reach the United States, and that time finally came when Duke University in North Carolina invited him become a professor for law there. As the Second World War raged on, however, Lemkin was hired as an international law expert by the US War Department. During this time, he sought out officials who would listen to him about atrocities such as the mass murder of the Armenians and Hitler’s intentions of extirpating the Jews, even going as far as to contact President Roosevelt; every time he faced disappointment. To gain support of his ideas, Lemkin went to publish a book about the rule imposed by the Axis powers in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. His book accomplished little other than stirring up controversy on the topic.
At the most unlikely of times, Lemkin received inspiration from a speech from Churchill: “’The whole of Europe has been wrecked and trampled down by the mechanical weapons and barbaric fury of the Nazis…As [Hitler’s] armies advance, whole districts are exterminated…We are in the presence of a crime without a name’” (Power 29).

The terms that Lemkin used when addressing the Madrid conference to describe this new, absurd crime lacked the ability to embody what exactly happens when an entire human group is targeted. He eventually devised the word genocide meaning “’a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aims of annihilating the groups themselves’” (Power 43); Lemkin celebrated the day that the word got accepted in the

dictionary.
Creating a word promoted acknowledgment of the problem but failed to persuade people to prevent such a crime.

Lemkin pushed for the condemnation of genocide through using the Nuremberg trials as an example. While his hopes proved to be a little high, the Nuremberg indictment stated that all 24 defendants committed genocide (the first recognition of the atrocity in an international legal setting). Finally, on December 11, 1946, “the General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution that condemned genocide as ‘the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups’” (Power 54) after lots of urging from Lemkin.
After that success, Lemkin decided to work on putting a book together about all of the genocides that occurred in documented history while pushing for genocide to become a punishable crime. By December 9, 1948, the genocide convention officially banned genocide when all of the members of the UN voted it into existence. Despite this triumph, twenty countries had to ratify the convention before genocide would become a crime; this happened on October 16, 1950, nearly 17 years since Lemkin first proposed

it.
Even with genocide becoming an international crime, Lemkin fought for the United States to ratify the convention, but “nearly four decades would pass before [they] would ratify the treaty, and fifty years would elapse before the international community would convict anyone for genocide” (Power 60). Human rights seemed to overshadow the genocide convention for years as people believed that they proved more significant in their lives. When confronted with this argument, Lemkin argued “’genocide implies destruction, death, annihilation, while discrimination is a regrettable denial of certain opportunities of life. To be unequal is not the same as to be dead’” (Power 75).
By the time of Lemkin’s death, “[he]…coined the word ‘genocide’…[drafted] a treaty designed to outlaw it [and saw it] rejected by the world’s most powerful nation” (Power 78).