Genocide – Part One – The ultimate crime

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The war in Gaza has led to accusations of genocide but that word operates on two levels. It’s both a strict legal term that has to be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court and an informal expression of moral outrage. The definition has been contested ever since the word was invented by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in the furnace of the Holocaust. In this two-part episode Dorian and Ian tell the story of genocide as a legal and political category. What exactly does it mean? How is it different from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing? Why is it so hard to prove? And how did it become seen as the ultimate crime? In part one, Ian and Dorian chart the prehistory of genocide — the ancient desire of groups to utterly eradicate their enemies. They go from the vengeful massacres of the Old Testament and Greek myth to the destruction of Carthage and the Holy War of the Crusades. Then they enter the age of empire, from the crimes of the Conquistadors to the elimination of the Tasmanians. Modern genocide began with the slaughter of the Herero in East Africa and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, setting the stage for the Nazis. It’s a disturbing story but a fascinating one, raising essential questions about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group, the difference between reckless violence and targeted destruction, and humankind’s capacity for justifying mass murder. • See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list • Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.) - The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2013 • Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 1998 • Ben Kiernan – Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, 2007 • Norman N. Naimark - Genocide: A World History, 2016 • Samantha Power – A Problem from Hell, 2002 • Philippe Sands – East West Street, 2016 Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:32.6	Hello and welcome to Origin story. In each episode, we take a word, idea or figure from history,
0:43.9	explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Doreen
0:48.7	Linsky, author of the Ministry of Truth and Everything Must Go. And I am Ian Dunt. I am economist
0:52.9	with the art newspaper and I'm the author of how Westminster works and why it doesn't. Welcome to a two-parter
0:58.6	on the extremely bleak but fascinating and necessary topic of genocide. Ian, we have good reasons
1:06.3	for doing this now, right? One reason, we've just had the 30th anniversary of the genocide in
1:11.3	Rwanda, but obviously there's a more topical one. Yeah, which is Gaza. So I think as you watch
1:16.7	coverage of Gaza, but especially people's response to Gaza, the word genocide now kind of functions.
1:25.0	I might be being slightly unfair here, but I don't think I am, almost as a sort of membership
1:29.3	badge for a position on the debate.
1:32.4	So essentially, those who are using the word, typically speaking, use it without much thought
1:37.1	as to whether that is a genocide or not, and as an indication of just the extent of their
1:42.5	moral outrage over what's taking place.
1:45.0	And those who generally have a different position on it, either because they're pro-Israel,
1:48.0	or because they're not quite just fully immersed in one side of that discussion,
1:52.0	tend to refrain from using it because they're aware of its emotive power.
1:56.0	It's a pretty sort of clear-cut case of when a word's emotional power has completely overruled any
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