Genocide – Part Two – The search for justice

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2024

⏱️ 65 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 two, Ian and Dorian tell the story of Lemkin’s invention of genocide and his efforts to make it an international crime. They explain how legal wrangling during the Nuremberg trials led to the 1948 Genocide Convention, and why it took so long for anybody to be charged with the crime, let alone brought to justice. Why do so many of the twentieth century’s most horrendous offences not qualify as genocide? Why did international condemnation fail to prevent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur and the former Yugoslavia? And why is the case against Israel so contentious? 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 limits of international law, 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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0:27.7	slash setup.
0:32.6	Hello, welcome to origin story.
0:40.9	In each episode, we take a word, idea or figure from history, explain its origins and talk
0:45.1	about how it influences political discourse today.
0:47.9	I'm Doreen Linsky, author of the Ministry of Truth, and everything must go.
0:51.0	And my name is Ian Dunt.
0:51.8	I'm a columnist with the art newspaper, and I'm the author of
0:54.4	How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn't, a book whose title I'm already very deeply sick of saying over and over again on this podcast.
1:00.7	And welcome to part two of genocide. So last episode, we did a quick trot through all of the worst things that humankind has ever done to itself, starting with the
1:12.5	ancient Greeks and working our way up to the First World War.
1:17.0	Against our really quite solid tradition of ending first parters at the Second World War,
1:22.1	we ended before the Second World War, because that's just what we're like.
1:24.7	We just like to shake things up a little bit.
1:27.0	And against Dorian's literary instincts, which particularly despises any kind of structure
1:32.3	that sets it up as, and watching from the sidelines was a man.
1:36.1	And that man's name was, he did exactly that maneuver and thought he could get away with it.
1:42.6	That was the cliffhanger that we ended the final episode.
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