Comparative Genocide Research

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Comparative genocide research , also known as comparative genocide research , is a scientific discipline that deals with the investigation of planned mass killings of people (also known as democide or genocide ).

The Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin is considered to be the founder of genocide research . In 1943 he used the term “ludo-bójstwo” from Polish : “lud” = people and “zabójstwo” = murder , which he named in 1944 with the English . The term “genocide” (from Greek : “genos” = “people” and Latin : caedere = “to kill”) reproduced.

As early as 1933, he took the genocide of the Armenians as an opportunity to travel to Madrid on his own initiative to attend a conference of the League of Nations lawyers . However, he did not succeed there in implementing the acceptance of a convention against the annihilation of entire peoples, as happened to the Armenians in 1915 under the Young Turks . It took another decade and a half and another world war to come to the aforementioned UN resolution against genocide.

Lemkin wrote in American exile a book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe , which appeared in 1944, in which he introduced the term “genocide” and defined it as the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group . Lemkin's book speaks of the Jews only as one of numerous national or ethnic groups. "The technique of mass killing is mainly used against Poles, Russians and Jews," he wrote. He consistently placed the extermination of the Jews in line with other “genocides”, whether they were committed by the National Socialists or in earlier epochs. In 1946 Lemkin proposed a resolution against genocide to the UN , which was adopted almost unchanged in 1948 as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide by resolution of the UN General Assembly .

The comparative study of genocides is still vehemently rejected by parts of the people who are on the side of the perpetrators and by parts of the people who are on the side of the victims. If the former want to make the deeds forgotten, the latter see any comparison of the suffering of their people as a relativization or even mockery of the victims and cannot perceive the suffering of the other due to the suffering caused to them. Reputable genocide researchers therefore emphasize the singularity of every single historical fact that can be described as genocide; However, especially in terms of preventing future genocides, they consider it sensible and even necessary to develop categories that make structural comparisons possible.

Two congresses in Europe (Sarejevo) and Latin America (Buenos Aires) in 2007 (see web links) represent the current state of scientific research and international discussion of the relatively young, international and transnationally oriented comparative genocide research. Aspects of early detection and prevention of genocide were also debated there.

Quotes

"[...] Genocide is a new technique of occupation, aimed at winning the peace even though the war itself is lost."

"First comes the act and then comes the word: first [the crime of] genocide is committed and then the language emerges to describe a phenomenon."

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ quoted from: Rainer Huhle: "Brief history of an unfortunate term" in: Insight 15, Bulletin of the Fritz Bauer Institute , title topic: The Armenian Genocide 1915/16, spring 2016, 8th year, ISSN  1868-4211 , p. 30-37.
  2. ↑ Raphael Lemkin, 1944, p. 81.
  3. ↑ Irving Louis Horowitz , 1980, p. 183.