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from Part I - The Language of Transgression
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2021
The academic and popular fixation on Raphael Lemkin confuses biography with historical explanation of the genocide concept. An actual intellectual history of genocide needs to attend to his context rather than rely on his misleading autobiography, Totally Unofficial. His conception of humanity as comprising distinct nationalities did not originate in the liberal cosmopolitanism he postulated upon arriving in the USA, but in a lifelong Zionist commitment to Jewish statehood in Palestine. Similarly, Lemkin couched his appeal to end genocide not in terms of abstract human rights, let alone crimes against humanity, but in relation to an ideal of world civilization whose constituent parts were national, religious, and racial groups. His fixation on such groups and “small nations” led him to ignore the category of “the civilian” and other forms of civilian destruction, such as interwar debate about aerial bombing on cities. In doing so, he contributed to the depoliticization of the language of transgression.
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