The opening chapter of “A Problem from Hell” describes the atrocity committed against the Armenian people in Turkey. The Armenians were being slaughtered in Turkey during World War I and the world did nothing. This atrocity was committed by Mehmed Tallat who was ruthlessly efficient at it. Although, the word atrocit

The next several chapters in “A Problem from Hell” focus on Raphael Lemkin and his efforts to address the crime of genocide a word the he himself coined. Raphael Lemkin at a young age had a fascination with history of mass slaughters. Lemkin was Polish refugee and international lawyer and he fled to the U.S during the 1930’s. Lemkin heard of the crimes being committed against the Jews and it was to him and to others beyond imagination. Although, Lemkin believed the stories of the killings and knew something had to be done. Begging in the 1930’s, Lemkin labored for years, alone and uncompensated, to secure the passage of an international law outlawing genocide within the United Nations. Lemkin knew what was happening to the Jews was more than just mass murder, it ran deeper than that. In 1944 Lemkin coined the term “genocide” as a kind of “speech act”. When he coined the term genocide Western governments and political pundits quickly embraced it Power wrote “His intention was to name a crime whose magnitude, combined with its broad singularity of motive, distinguished it even in the annals of cold blooded mass murder. He meant for the crimes very name to be a call for universal opprobrium one that would inspire, if it did not mandate, punishment and prevention” (p.35). Lemkin wrote that genocide had two phases “one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals” (p. 43). Not soon after World War II was over was the United Nations created. A Genocide Convention was held in 1948. The architects of the convention understood the danger of making Hitler’s crimes the standard by which to determine future genocides. States must be able to identify as genocide acts aimed at destroying “in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” (p.73). The charter drafted by this convention was ratified by the United Nations on December 9, 1948. This was a great victory for Lemkin, but the U.S did not follow suit immediately. It was not until 1986 that the Senate ratified the United Nations Genocide Convention resolution. Power wrote this about Americans “American policy-makers, journalists and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination need to reckon with evil” (p.80). Moreover the participants in the convention made the explicit decision to exclude political groups. Powers asserts that there is a tendency to assume before the fac

Some topics in this essay:
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