In the mid-1940s, Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer born and raised in Poland, coined a name for what prior to the 20th century had been unthinkable. He combined the Greek word for â??family,â? â??tribe,â? or â??race,â? and the Latin word for â??killing,â? to describe events like the Nazi extermination campaign against his fellow Jews, Stalinâ??s starvation of millions of Ukrainians, and the Turkish cleansing of their Armenian and Assyrian subjects. The word: genocide.
Lemkin defined genocide as more than the â??mass killings of all members of a nation.â? Genocide, he suggested, was a â??coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.â?
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