Never Again Raphael Lemkin Analysis

“Never Again”
In an ordinary farm surrounded by a forest in German Lemberg, an extraordinary Jewish boy, Raphael Lemkin, developed curious wonderings about the workings of the criminal world. Having witnessed the harsh reality of war during the First World War where the Germans seized their land, young Lemkin knew the difference between warfare and merciless slaughter.
During his educational years, he decided that linguistics interested him, so he went to study philology, the evolution of language, at the University of Lwow in 1920. Despite this, after hearing that Talaat, one of the leaders of the Ottoman Empire during the mass killings of Armenians, had been assassinated by one of the Armenian victims, Tehlirian, Lemkin transferred to Lwow

The terms that Lemkin used when addressing the Madrid conference to describe this new, absurd crime lacked the ability to embody what exactly happens when an entire human group is targeted. He eventually devised the word genocide meaning “’a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aims of annihilating the groups themselves’” (Power 43); Lemkin celebrated the day that the word got accepted in the

Lemkin pushed for the condemnation of genocide through using the Nuremberg trials as an example. While his hopes proved to be a little high, the Nuremberg indictment stated that all 24 defendants committed genocide (the first recognition of the atrocity in an international legal setting). Finally, on December 11, 1946, “the General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution that condemned genocide as ‘the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups’” (Power 54) after lots of urging from Lemkin.
After that success, Lemkin decided to work on putting a book together about all of the genocides that occurred in documented history while pushing for genocide to become a punishable crime. By December 9, 1948, the genocide convention officially banned genocide when all of the members of the UN voted it into existence. Despite this triumph, twenty countries had to ratify the convention before genocide would become a crime; this happened on October 16, 1950, nearly 17 years since Lemkin first proposed