Seventy years ago this November, a new word entered the lexicon which would contextualize and put a name to the mass killings of minority groups that had gone on for centuries: genocide.
The Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the word, Raphael Lemkin, used it for the first time in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in November 1944. Lemkin had been deeply troubled with mass killing and the lack of legal framework for adjudication of its perpetrators from a young age. He found it appalling that in the name of “state sovereignty” a leader was effectively able to kill his own citizens, without punishment under the law.
Lemkin’s coining of the word was followed by a relentless, single-handed effort to lobby diplomats, heads of states, and then the newly formed United Nations to create a law which would make illegal this recently named crime against humanity. Lemkin’s efforts were eventually rewarded when on December 9, 1948 the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed into law the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
History reveals many “crimes against humanity” which preceded this development in international law. The current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, notes a few of these in her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
And there are still many other largely unknown genocides that deserve our recognition. One of these will be covered in an upcoming Acton Institute art and lecture event on Thursday, November 6: “The Famine Remembered: Lessons from Ukraine’s Holodomor and Soviet Communism.”
The event will place particular focus on the Holodomor, meaning “death by hunger” in the Ukrainian language, the man-made famine imposed on Ukraine by Joseph Stalin’s Communist regime in the 1930s. It amounted to an assault on human dignity, private property, and religious freedom, and is estimated to have claimed, through murder and forced starvation, the lives of almost 7 million Ukrainians. The Holodomor is now recognized as a genocide by over a dozen countries, including the United States.
Acton’s director or research, Samuel Gregg, will speak at the event, along with Luba Markewycz, chair of the education committee at Chicago’s Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Markewycz will share the art exhibit she commissioned, composed of contemporary Ukrainian children’s depictions of the Holodomor.
We invite you to come learn about this tragic and largely unknown chapter of Ukrainian history and see it depicted through art. For more information and to register, please visit the event’s webpage.
