Posted on 01/22/2015 5:49:16 PM PST by Nachum
Thank you, and thank you, everybody, for being here. Let me thank you, Ambassador Winid, and the Polish Mission to the United Nations for organizing this important event and for bringing together such a diverse group of speakers to grapple with a question that we cannot ask too often: Why have we failed in preventing genocide? And, how can we do better?
The exhibit that opens today in conjunction with this event, of art made in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, is testament to why this is such a resonant issue for Poland and for all countries.
And we would likely be having a very different conversation today were it not for a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin, who in 1920, when he was a 21-year-old linguistics student at the University of Lvov, was first seized by the paradox that while there were laws to punish taking a single life, no law prohibited the annihilation of entire nations, races, or religious groups. Indeed, there was not then even a word to describe the systematic destruction of a people. With the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930s, Lemkin’s question became increasingly bound up with his own fate. He fled Poland shortly after the Nazi invasion in September 1939. Forty-nine members of his family were killed in the Holocaust. Eventually, Lemkin himself fled to the United States, where he invented the word “genocide”; and where his personal lobbying efforts, here at the United Nations, almost single-handedly lead to the drafting and adoption of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the UN’s very first human rights treaty.
Lemkin’s efforts laid several foundational pillars of an international system aimed at preventing and stopping genocide – a system that has been strengthened by subsequent generations of advocates like Lemkin. We have created the International
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Anne Bayefsky @AnneBayefsky
US-UN Amb sings praises of Int'l Crim Court now gunning for Israelis. At Auschwitz event.
The list, Ping
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Mrs. Powers, preventing genocide is very simple:
1. Acquire a rigorous understanding of the definition of human life, so that your thoughts are consistent with reality.
2. Oppose genocide in truth, not merely in appearance.
3. Know why you oppose it. In this way you can understand the principles underlying your opposition. Applying the principle to all instances of genocide will prevent scenarios where you do something stupid, like approving of genocide.
wow. Nice gig!
Remarks by Ambassador Samantha Power, U.S. PERMANENT Representative to the United Nations, at a Special Event to mark the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
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