To Reckon With Evil

Raphael Lemkin is my new hero. And he is, perhaps, one of the most deserving humans to ever bear that title. One could argue that his zealous passion for changing the world as he saw (and felt it) was mere long-lived emotionality. Yet as Samantha Power writes, Lemkin knew the only way to stimulate changes globally was to appeal to that keystone of humanity, emotion. Too often, coldhearted and heavy handed calculations decide the fate of too many. Lemkin, though he was a lawyer and a scholar, never lost the ability to let his heart rule where it must. Power writes that “[New York Times reporters] were fond of Lemkin but recall the horror of many a correspondent and diplomat when the wild-eyed professor with steel rimmed glasses and a relentless appetite for rejection began sprinting after them in the corridors, saying ‘You and I, we must change the world.’”

Lemkin was not afraid. Morality and the Ethics of Humanity were his witness and his friend. He did succeed in changing the world, though it took all of himself and the many he touched in life. Yet like so many wonders of architecture and painted masterpieces, that which takes a lifetime to build can be undone in a day. That which Churchill called a “Crime without a name,” committed under the “barbaric fury of the Nazis” now had a fitting name, and thanks to Raphael Lemkin that name became the core of international law banning this barbarity, this crime of Genocide.

Yet for decades the United States of America didn't ratify the treaty, annuling it in the eyes of those who understand that the most powerful country in the world will neccessarily make or break international law by its decision to recognize it or not. And when the pressure mounted and the US finally did ratify it, certain Senators, among them one Mr. Orrin Hatch, made sure that the ratification was so burdened with RUDs (Reservations, Understandings, and Declarations) that the resulting dilution of the treaty carried little weight and was more of a slap in the face of humanity, and Lemkin personally, than an act of morality.

As Samantha Power wrote, “Despite graphic media coverage, American policymakers, journalists, and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil.” Has the great American nation become so numb to the problems of the world that we can’t wake up? Are we lulled into a drooling slumber by the murmur of the oceans which surround and protect us from so many evils? Have time and wealth wrought a schism in our minds, dividing us from a history that once painted us as outgoing individuals and good-hearted people? Far too often, yes, yes, and yes.

Power writes that “[US leaders] brand as ‘emotional’ those US officials who urge intervention [in genocide] and who make moral arguments in a system that speaks principally in the cold language of interests.” But lest those brave few lose hope, those who still call people with a different color passport brother or sister, let us remember that “In each case [of genocide] a few Americans stood out by standing up. They did not lose sight of right and wrong, even as they were repeatedly steered to a ‘context’ [of international politics] that others said precluded action.”

Lemkin’s call to each of us is simple, humble, and unabashedly straightforward. A native Pole who was able to lecture in English within weeks of his arrival to America, he pleaded: “If women, children and old people would be murdered a hundred miles from here, wouldn’t you run to help? Then why do you stop this decision of your heart when the distance is 3,000 miles instead of a hundred?”

Before the graves in Rwanda have had time to rest; and long before the last tears were shed in Bosnia; Darfur started burning under the hellfire of Genocide. They still cry out: the women who are raped while fetching water; the children who have learned to fear the sound of hooves and airplanes as they bring fire and death; and the men who see that there are so few of them left and no one seems to care: They still cry out; though the desert and the ocean and the TV muffle their cries.