The very term “genocide,” with its legalistic overtones, and increasingly legalistic applications, lets the user pick and choose his own targets for prosecution,

Of Genocide and Other Liberal Nostrums

By David Warren

While I am against murder, and therefore also against the slaughter of people in large numbers – quite viscerally opposed – the word “genocide” does not move me. This has something to do with its history; and since it was, after all, invented “to make a point,” I must step carefully in explaining what I mean by this.

It is not an old word, as English words go. From what I can make out, it was coined (from the Greek genos, for “race” or “kin”) only at the end of the last World War, apparently by the Polish-American jurist Raphael Lemkin in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944).

That it put a Latin ending on a Greek stem (cidere means “to kill”), will not be my point. This is bad form in English word formation, but we can all agree that mass murder is worse. (“Genticide” would have been more correct.)

That it refers to something real, we may take as given by previous words used in its place, such as populicide, which went from French to English in the late 18th century, to describe phenomena associated with the French Revolution. It was another unpretty word for an unpretty thing.

“Killing off the whole tribe” – the very idea is as old as social man. We have evidence enough for little wars of extermination among our distant ancestors in the bush. Yet this is part of what makes me uncomfortable about the neologism: that it suggests something new in human history.

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