Tweet
Daily Sabah, Turkey
July 31 2014
THE LEMKIN HOLE IN THE SWISS CASE
"When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he cited the
annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide." This is
an entirely false statement as Lemkin did not mention Armenians even
once
Tal Buenos
One name is found at the center of the Swiss case for a review of
Perinçek v. Switzerland in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of
Human Rights (ECHR): Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin is at the heart of the
Swiss claim that the ECHR decision in December 2013 creates artificial
distinctions, specifically between the Holocaust and the Armenian
tragedy. The distinction between the two sets of events is relevant
because the Swiss government is seeking to justify the decision of its
Federal Court by pointing out that if Holocaust denial is a crime,
then so should there be a reconsideration of the ECHR's ruling against
the Swiss decision that DoÄ?u Perinçek was guilty of a crime for
rejecting the term genocide as descriptive of the Armenian tragedy.
Through reference to Lemkin - or, more accurately, the popularized
unscholarly narrative on the man - the government of Switzerland is
hoping to establish in the ECHR's Grand Chamber, for the appeasement
of Armenian pressure and to the delight of anti-Turkish institutions
in the West, that one man's application of the term genocide somehow
blurs the recognizable differences between the Holocaust and the
Ottoman reaction to Armenian rebellion in World War I.
According to the Swiss government, "The present case is the first case
which concerns the massacres and deportations¦ that Raphael Lemkin had
in mind when he coined the term genocide." Furthermore, it notes as
significant that "four of the seven judges of the Chamber stressed
that Raphael Lemkin had precisely in mind the massacres and
deportations of 1915 when he coined the term genocide," as if to
suggest that the narrative on Lemkin somehow makes up for there having
been no recognition of genocide by an international court in the
Armenian case.
The following questions beg to be asked: How is it that European
judges and officials express themselves so confidently about what
Lemkin had in his mind in 1944? How much difference would it make to
learn the actual facts about Lemkin's life-story?
Although he came to fame as an American and died an American, Lemkin
is commonly described by the narrators of the genocide story as a
Polish Jew, which gives his character a sense of internationality and
dissociation from greatpower interests. According to some secondary
sources he was born in 1900 and according to others in 1901. His birth
town of Biazvodna in the vicinity of Vawkavysk was a territory of
Imperial Russia that went under German occupation during World War I.
Meaning, in addition to not being an Ottoman historian at any point in
his life, as World War I broke out in 1914, Lemkin was merely a
teenager in a rural area in today's Belarus and likely received
distorted information on Armenians, Turks, and the war, through
channels of Russian propaganda filled with hatred of Turks.
Nevertheless, due to existing political influences, there are in the
West, textbooks in which young Lemkin's impressions of World War I and
Armenian suffering have the capacity to overshadow academic analysis
of the complex political developments that explain the nature of the
Turkish-Armenian conflict.
The spotlight on an image of one individual, Lemkin, is designed to
give the appearance that the term genocide and its use were the
authentic hand-made creation of a morally committed Jew, thereby
leaving in darkness any discussion on the political origin and
utilization of the term, and in particular the political advantages
gained by establishing an artificial connection between Armenian and
Jewish suffering.
While there are thousands of references to how genocide was "coined"
by Lemkin in a book that he published in 1944, "Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe," the actual big-name publisher of the book is typically either
omitted or downplayed: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Who was Andrew Carnegie? For a time, he was the richest man in the
world. He made his wealth thanks to the booming steel industry, and
during a long period of retirement between the 1880s and World War I
he invested a huge amount of money in trust funds that were aimed at
changing global politics through a number of organizations. Being a
Scottishborn American - and a close friend of Britain's most prominent
politician, William Gladstone, and main organizer of the Armenian
rebellion, James Bryce - he endeavored to use his money to establish
an Anglo-American control of the international economy by employing
"peace" as a mechanism to halt any other power's growing ambitions.
In 1898, Carnegie wrote that the Anglo-American nation "would dominate
the world and banish from the earth its greatest stain - the murder of
men by men ¦ Such a giant among pigmies as the British-American Union
would never need to exert its power, but only to intimate its wishes
and decisions." To him, this was Britain's only chance to maintain a
status quo that is favorable to its imperial success: "The only course
for Britain seems to be reunion with her giant child, or sure decline
to a secondary place¦"
It was in Carnegie's mind, surely not Lemkin's, where the blueprint
for laws of international peace were first drawn, and it was meant to
extend imperial dominance; it was Carnegie's fortune that built the
Peace Palace "so nations shall appeal to the Court at the Hague."
Who set up, and was the first to lead, the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in 1910? Unites States Senator, Elihu Root, a
former secretary of war and secretary of state, whose idea it was that
Carnegie create trusts for political and educational organizations,
which would have an unprecedented influence on international politics.
When "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe" came out under Lemkin's name, the
head of the endowment's International Law Division was George A.
Finch, who started off as a State Department employee. In the book,
Lemkin thanks Eleanor Lansing Dulles, a career State Department woman,
who at the time served as an economic officer in the Division of
Postwar Planning, and whose brothers were Allen Dulles, director of
the Central Intelligence Agency from 1953 to 1961, and John Foster
Dulles, the chairman of the board for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace before serving as secretary of state under Dwight
Eisenhower. Another person thanked by Lemkin is Florence J. Harriman,
who served as the U.S. ambassador to Norway, and moved to Sweden
following the German invasion in 1940. She may have been the liaison
who facilitated Lemkin's move from Stockholm to America in 1941.
Robert R. Wilson, an advisor to the State Department, was also thanked
by Lemkin in the book. Wilson was a recipient of the Carnegie
fellowship in international law until earning his Ph.D. at Harvard
University. When Lemkin first arrived in the U.S., he was offered a
position at Duke University where Wilson was the chair of the
department of political science. Already in 1939, five years before
"Axis Rule," Wilson wrote in detail on the same topic of post-war
reclamation in consideration of Germany's foul wartime conduct in
Carnegie and Root's American Journal of International Law, stating
that: "The taking of drastic measures against individuals as a matter
of policy in certain countries, whether for reasons of racial origin
or other motives, raises a new questions of the possible significance
of these developments from the standpoint of international law."
Lemkin's book simply echoed the writings of this distinguished
government-affiliated professor who guided him into full-time
employment by the U.S. government in 1942.
Are we to believe that, despite this overwhelming association with
professional policy-makers in the foreign affairs of the U.S.
government, the book
"Axis Rule" and the term genocide are in fact Lemkin's? Any reasonable
person who has ever bothered to read through the book would be of the
opinion that this is the work of several native speakers of English,
and not the work of one foreigner who did not live in an
Englishspeaking country until his 40s. Oddly, even an article written
in perfect English under Lemkin's name in 1942, a mere year after his
emigration to the U.S., - "The Treatment of Young Offenders in
Continental Europe," in Law and Contemporary Problems - does not
credit anyone for translating, proof-reading, or editing the work. It
seems that Lemkin's real value lied in his image as a Polish Jew, for
such a figurehead must have added much credibility to the
Anglo-American campaign to establish international law according to
Carnegie's vision.
Lemkin began his government work as a chief consultant on the U.S.
Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration before
transitioning into being an eminent government lawyer who held offices
in the Pentagon and the War Department. For this he received an annual
salary, which today would near six figures in U.S. dollars. After
parting ways with the U.S. government in 1947, he took a position at
Yale in 1948 and helped pass the United Nations Convention for the
Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
In the 1950s, during a time of personal desperation marked by an
unpublished autobiography, Lemkin became isolated from the government
in his efforts to apply "genocide" around the world - such as calling
the potato famine in Ireland a genocide - and reportedly became
obsessed with its promotion as it became attached to his own name and
reputation. It was during this time that he received interest and
support from Christian groups. In return, he began to condemn as
genocide the past treatment of Christian Armenians by the Ottoman
state and Christian Koreans by Japan in order to find favor with
nongovernment Christian lobbies of missionary agendas and enhance his
legacy in this manner. In this state of mind, he claimed that he
always had the Armenians in mind.
Yair Auron of the Open University in Tel Aviv is often quoted for
stating that "When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he
cited the annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide."
This is not even a half-truth, but an entirely false statement: The
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publication under Lemkin's
name in 1944 did not mention Armenians even once. If the honorable
European judges in the Grand Chamber elect to structure their decision
on the fables of promoters of genocide scholarship such as Auron - who
suddenly began to write profusely on the Armenian issue in the 1990s,
15 years after the completion of his doctoral dissertation on a
completely different topic of Jewish youths in France - then there
should be a much publicized questioning of their intellectual
integrity.
The Lemkin hole in the Swiss case is an important reflector of an
overall imprudent statement by the Swiss government that the
distinction between the Holocaust and the Armenian tragedy is
"questionable." The suffering of many Armenian communities is known as
tragic because of the sense of inevitability brought about by the
persistent attempts of the Entente and the irresponsible nationalist
leaders of the Armenian people to utterly destroy the Ottoman state.
For the European judges at the ECHR's Grand Chamber to say that there
is no distinction between the German Jewish leaders during the
Holocaust and the Ottoman Armenian revolutionaries in World War I
would be inaccurate, insensitive, and, quite frankly, unnecessary.
The story of genocide is not Lemkin's own story, and it must find
itself a new symbol, which shall no longer project inaccuracies that
conceal its real roots in powerful political minds. Only then, may the
context of the Armenian pressure in the U.S. and Europe be revealed.
* University of Utah
http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2014/08/01/the-lemkin-hole-in-the-swiss-case
From: Baghdasarian
July 31 2014
THE LEMKIN HOLE IN THE SWISS CASE
"When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he cited the
annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide." This is
an entirely false statement as Lemkin did not mention Armenians even
once
Tal Buenos
One name is found at the center of the Swiss case for a review of
Perinçek v. Switzerland in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of
Human Rights (ECHR): Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin is at the heart of the
Swiss claim that the ECHR decision in December 2013 creates artificial
distinctions, specifically between the Holocaust and the Armenian
tragedy. The distinction between the two sets of events is relevant
because the Swiss government is seeking to justify the decision of its
Federal Court by pointing out that if Holocaust denial is a crime,
then so should there be a reconsideration of the ECHR's ruling against
the Swiss decision that DoÄ?u Perinçek was guilty of a crime for
rejecting the term genocide as descriptive of the Armenian tragedy.
Through reference to Lemkin - or, more accurately, the popularized
unscholarly narrative on the man - the government of Switzerland is
hoping to establish in the ECHR's Grand Chamber, for the appeasement
of Armenian pressure and to the delight of anti-Turkish institutions
in the West, that one man's application of the term genocide somehow
blurs the recognizable differences between the Holocaust and the
Ottoman reaction to Armenian rebellion in World War I.
According to the Swiss government, "The present case is the first case
which concerns the massacres and deportations¦ that Raphael Lemkin had
in mind when he coined the term genocide." Furthermore, it notes as
significant that "four of the seven judges of the Chamber stressed
that Raphael Lemkin had precisely in mind the massacres and
deportations of 1915 when he coined the term genocide," as if to
suggest that the narrative on Lemkin somehow makes up for there having
been no recognition of genocide by an international court in the
Armenian case.
The following questions beg to be asked: How is it that European
judges and officials express themselves so confidently about what
Lemkin had in his mind in 1944? How much difference would it make to
learn the actual facts about Lemkin's life-story?
Although he came to fame as an American and died an American, Lemkin
is commonly described by the narrators of the genocide story as a
Polish Jew, which gives his character a sense of internationality and
dissociation from greatpower interests. According to some secondary
sources he was born in 1900 and according to others in 1901. His birth
town of Biazvodna in the vicinity of Vawkavysk was a territory of
Imperial Russia that went under German occupation during World War I.
Meaning, in addition to not being an Ottoman historian at any point in
his life, as World War I broke out in 1914, Lemkin was merely a
teenager in a rural area in today's Belarus and likely received
distorted information on Armenians, Turks, and the war, through
channels of Russian propaganda filled with hatred of Turks.
Nevertheless, due to existing political influences, there are in the
West, textbooks in which young Lemkin's impressions of World War I and
Armenian suffering have the capacity to overshadow academic analysis
of the complex political developments that explain the nature of the
Turkish-Armenian conflict.
The spotlight on an image of one individual, Lemkin, is designed to
give the appearance that the term genocide and its use were the
authentic hand-made creation of a morally committed Jew, thereby
leaving in darkness any discussion on the political origin and
utilization of the term, and in particular the political advantages
gained by establishing an artificial connection between Armenian and
Jewish suffering.
While there are thousands of references to how genocide was "coined"
by Lemkin in a book that he published in 1944, "Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe," the actual big-name publisher of the book is typically either
omitted or downplayed: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Who was Andrew Carnegie? For a time, he was the richest man in the
world. He made his wealth thanks to the booming steel industry, and
during a long period of retirement between the 1880s and World War I
he invested a huge amount of money in trust funds that were aimed at
changing global politics through a number of organizations. Being a
Scottishborn American - and a close friend of Britain's most prominent
politician, William Gladstone, and main organizer of the Armenian
rebellion, James Bryce - he endeavored to use his money to establish
an Anglo-American control of the international economy by employing
"peace" as a mechanism to halt any other power's growing ambitions.
In 1898, Carnegie wrote that the Anglo-American nation "would dominate
the world and banish from the earth its greatest stain - the murder of
men by men ¦ Such a giant among pigmies as the British-American Union
would never need to exert its power, but only to intimate its wishes
and decisions." To him, this was Britain's only chance to maintain a
status quo that is favorable to its imperial success: "The only course
for Britain seems to be reunion with her giant child, or sure decline
to a secondary place¦"
It was in Carnegie's mind, surely not Lemkin's, where the blueprint
for laws of international peace were first drawn, and it was meant to
extend imperial dominance; it was Carnegie's fortune that built the
Peace Palace "so nations shall appeal to the Court at the Hague."
Who set up, and was the first to lead, the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in 1910? Unites States Senator, Elihu Root, a
former secretary of war and secretary of state, whose idea it was that
Carnegie create trusts for political and educational organizations,
which would have an unprecedented influence on international politics.
When "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe" came out under Lemkin's name, the
head of the endowment's International Law Division was George A.
Finch, who started off as a State Department employee. In the book,
Lemkin thanks Eleanor Lansing Dulles, a career State Department woman,
who at the time served as an economic officer in the Division of
Postwar Planning, and whose brothers were Allen Dulles, director of
the Central Intelligence Agency from 1953 to 1961, and John Foster
Dulles, the chairman of the board for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace before serving as secretary of state under Dwight
Eisenhower. Another person thanked by Lemkin is Florence J. Harriman,
who served as the U.S. ambassador to Norway, and moved to Sweden
following the German invasion in 1940. She may have been the liaison
who facilitated Lemkin's move from Stockholm to America in 1941.
Robert R. Wilson, an advisor to the State Department, was also thanked
by Lemkin in the book. Wilson was a recipient of the Carnegie
fellowship in international law until earning his Ph.D. at Harvard
University. When Lemkin first arrived in the U.S., he was offered a
position at Duke University where Wilson was the chair of the
department of political science. Already in 1939, five years before
"Axis Rule," Wilson wrote in detail on the same topic of post-war
reclamation in consideration of Germany's foul wartime conduct in
Carnegie and Root's American Journal of International Law, stating
that: "The taking of drastic measures against individuals as a matter
of policy in certain countries, whether for reasons of racial origin
or other motives, raises a new questions of the possible significance
of these developments from the standpoint of international law."
Lemkin's book simply echoed the writings of this distinguished
government-affiliated professor who guided him into full-time
employment by the U.S. government in 1942.
Are we to believe that, despite this overwhelming association with
professional policy-makers in the foreign affairs of the U.S.
government, the book
"Axis Rule" and the term genocide are in fact Lemkin's? Any reasonable
person who has ever bothered to read through the book would be of the
opinion that this is the work of several native speakers of English,
and not the work of one foreigner who did not live in an
Englishspeaking country until his 40s. Oddly, even an article written
in perfect English under Lemkin's name in 1942, a mere year after his
emigration to the U.S., - "The Treatment of Young Offenders in
Continental Europe," in Law and Contemporary Problems - does not
credit anyone for translating, proof-reading, or editing the work. It
seems that Lemkin's real value lied in his image as a Polish Jew, for
such a figurehead must have added much credibility to the
Anglo-American campaign to establish international law according to
Carnegie's vision.
Lemkin began his government work as a chief consultant on the U.S.
Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration before
transitioning into being an eminent government lawyer who held offices
in the Pentagon and the War Department. For this he received an annual
salary, which today would near six figures in U.S. dollars. After
parting ways with the U.S. government in 1947, he took a position at
Yale in 1948 and helped pass the United Nations Convention for the
Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
In the 1950s, during a time of personal desperation marked by an
unpublished autobiography, Lemkin became isolated from the government
in his efforts to apply "genocide" around the world - such as calling
the potato famine in Ireland a genocide - and reportedly became
obsessed with its promotion as it became attached to his own name and
reputation. It was during this time that he received interest and
support from Christian groups. In return, he began to condemn as
genocide the past treatment of Christian Armenians by the Ottoman
state and Christian Koreans by Japan in order to find favor with
nongovernment Christian lobbies of missionary agendas and enhance his
legacy in this manner. In this state of mind, he claimed that he
always had the Armenians in mind.
Yair Auron of the Open University in Tel Aviv is often quoted for
stating that "When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he
cited the annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide."
This is not even a half-truth, but an entirely false statement: The
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publication under Lemkin's
name in 1944 did not mention Armenians even once. If the honorable
European judges in the Grand Chamber elect to structure their decision
on the fables of promoters of genocide scholarship such as Auron - who
suddenly began to write profusely on the Armenian issue in the 1990s,
15 years after the completion of his doctoral dissertation on a
completely different topic of Jewish youths in France - then there
should be a much publicized questioning of their intellectual
integrity.
The Lemkin hole in the Swiss case is an important reflector of an
overall imprudent statement by the Swiss government that the
distinction between the Holocaust and the Armenian tragedy is
"questionable." The suffering of many Armenian communities is known as
tragic because of the sense of inevitability brought about by the
persistent attempts of the Entente and the irresponsible nationalist
leaders of the Armenian people to utterly destroy the Ottoman state.
For the European judges at the ECHR's Grand Chamber to say that there
is no distinction between the German Jewish leaders during the
Holocaust and the Ottoman Armenian revolutionaries in World War I
would be inaccurate, insensitive, and, quite frankly, unnecessary.
The story of genocide is not Lemkin's own story, and it must find
itself a new symbol, which shall no longer project inaccuracies that
conceal its real roots in powerful political minds. Only then, may the
context of the Armenian pressure in the U.S. and Europe be revealed.
* University of Utah
http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2014/08/01/the-lemkin-hole-in-the-swiss-case
From: Baghdasarian