Episode 15 – Lemkin’s Genocide – How Armenians Hijacked and Abused the Term

Episode 15 – Lemkin’s Genocide: How Armenians Hijacked and Abused the Term. ►Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1943 and introduced it in his 1944 book entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe where he did not mention Armenians at all. Lemkin was born in 1900 in the Russian Empire, in the region known as Belarus today. His father was a farmer and his mother an intellectual. Lemkin and his two brothers were homeschooled by their mother. The Lemkin family farm was destroyed during the WWI by fighting between Russian and German troops. After getting his initial education in Poland, Lemkin went to Heidelberg University in Germany to study philosophy and returned in 1926 to Lwów in Ukraine to study law. Lemkin was the Public Prosecutor in Warsaw from 1929 to 1934. In 1939, barely evading German Nazi capture, Lemkin left Warsaw. He went to Sweden where he lectured at the University of Stockholm in 1940. Lemkin then received permission to enter the United States and arrived in 1941. He managed to save his own life but lost 49 loved ones in the Holocaust. Lemkin joined the law faculty at Duke University in 1941 and lectured at the School of Military Government at the University of Virginia in 1942. He was appointed consultant to the US Board of Economic Warfare in 1943. From1945 to 1946, Lemkin served as an advisor to Supreme Court of the United States Justice and Nuremberg Trial chief counsel Robert H. Jackson. In 1948, Lemkin started giving lectures on criminal law at Yale University and in 1955, he became a professor at Rutgers School of Law. Lemkin drafted a resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty and urged a number of countries to sponsor it. The United States supported the idea and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted on December 9th, 1948. It came into force three years later when the 20th nation had ratified the treaty in 1951. The greatest irony in all this may well be the fact that the United States, Lemkin’s own adopted country, did not ratify the Genocide Convention during his lifetime. The Democratic Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin pleaded for the U.S. to ratify the Genocide Convention in over 3,000 speeches 32 years, between 1957 and 1989. The U.S. finally ratified it in November 1988. The Raphael Lemkin papers at the New York Public Library show that Lemkin considered 62 cases in History to be genocide. Of the 41 cases in modern times, number 39 states “Armenians.” Number nine on that list is “Genocide by the Greeks against the Turks.” The Lemkin papers also show that he had 100 pages on the case of “Belgian Congo” and 98 pages on the “Genocide against the American Indians.” So why did the Armenians deliberately misrepresent this reality to the public as “Lemkin’s motivation was 1915 events?” His autobiography, rejected by publishers in the 1950s due to lack of public interest, was published in 2013 as a result of the influence exerted by the so-called genocide scholars. The book is replete with unwarranted and irrelevant references to Armenians, turning it into Armenian propaganda book. Lemkin would not have approved of such a diversion and deception if he were alive. The book narrates Lemkin’s life frequently in Armenian-oriented terms, whereas we know from his resume, that was not the case. The Armenian references were arbitrarily inserted into the Lemkin’s autobiography.

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