Review of 'A Problem from Hell': America and the Age of Genocide
newsdepo.com
On March 14, 1921, a 24-year-old Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated the retired interior minister of Turkey, Mehmed Talaat. It was Talaat who determined and then administered the most effective way to kill almost 1,000,000 Armenians in 1915. SoghReview of 'A Problem from Hell': America and the Age of Genocide
On March 14, 1921, a 24-year-old Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated the retired interior minister of Turkey, Mehmed Talaat. It was Talaat who determined and then administered the most effective way to kill almost 1,000,000 Armenians in 1915. Soghomon Tehlirian, who lost his family to the Turkish slaughter, was only one of his victims. But it was a report of his trial that led to the naming of the previously unnamed crime of genocide. Until 1945, mankind did not even have a name for the practice of destroying an entire race, ethnicity, or religion. We called them, for lack of anything better, crimes against humanity, or slaughter, or massacre. But none of those words really captured the vastness of the wrong. Samantha Power, before she became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wrote about a man named Raphael Lemkin, a linguist and lawyer from Poland who lost his family to the Holocaust. Twenty years before, he had questioned his linguistics professors about why it was so wrong for Tehlirian to kill one man who had killed almost a million. Why was one a crime, and the other not? The answer was that there was no law against the mass execution of a people by their government. Lemkin devoted his adult life to changing that. But first he had to define the crime in a manner that would catch the attention and stir the anger of people and politicians around the world. His word would do it all. It would be the rare term that carried in it society’s revulsion and indignation. It would be what he called an “index of civilization.”38 The word that Lemkin settled upon was a hybrid that combined the Greek derivative geno, meaning “race” or “tribe,” together with the Latin derivative cide, from caedere, meaning “killing.” “Genocide” was short, it was novel, and it was not likely to be mispronounced. Because of the word’s lasting association with Hitler’s horrors, it would also send shudders down the spines of those who heard it. His story, and the stories of Americans who either ignored the crime or fought futilely to prevent it, are included in Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell. Read more