Lemkin’s Greek Friends: Abusing History, Constructing Genocide–and Vice Versa
In his autobiography, Raphael Lemkin recounts how the crime of "withdrawing children from an ethnic group" came to be included in the Genocide Convention. In his advocacy of this point, Lemkin had been influenced by unnamed friends who spoke on behalf of the rightist government during the Greek Civil War. Lemkin's readiness to accept at face value their statements about that civil war and about Greece's history within the Ottoman Empire reflected pragmatic, as much as historical or moral, considerations. Defining genocide by universal legal notions may obscure the fact that the history of each genocide or purported genocide reflects contingent factors—and that the historical memory of each reflects particular interests. Moreover, criminalizing the systematic effort of a state or political movement to exterminate a people entails the thorny issue of what constitutes "a people." The following considers specific examples of the corresponding pitfalls that attended formulation of the Genocide Convention.
Quelle: http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/30/3/488?rss=1
The Politics of Remembering: Representation of the Armenian Genocide in Kurdish Novels
Kurds were among the main perpetrators of violence against Christian minorities in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican periods, most notably during the Armenian Genocide. Themselves denied basic national and cultural rights since the foundation of the Republic in 1923, however, many Kurds have come in recent decades to empathize with the Armenian experience and to advocate acknowledging the Genocide. Not only have Kurdish political figures apologized on behalf of perpetrator-ancestors, but dozens of Kurdish novels have represented the experience of the Armenians by privileging "real" historical events and biographies. The incorporation of the Armenian Genocide into Kurdish novels frames social memory and reflects evolving Kurdish politics. To explore this mobilization of "history" and "memory," this article analyzes five novels in the Kurmanji dialect of Turkish Kurdistan.
Quelle: http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/30/3/458?rss=1
William L. Shirer and International Awareness of the Nazi „Euthanasia“ Program
In the United States as well as in many other countries, early reports of industrialized mass murder perpetrated by the Germans during the Second World War were connected not with the Holocaust but—beginning in early 1941—with crimes committed as part of the German "euthanasia" program. The writings and reports of journalist and popular radio personality William L. Shirer in particular shaped public perception of the murder of disabled people. The author of this article traces Shirer's German and American sources, drawing possible connections to journalists, State Department officials, and members of the German resistance.
Quelle: http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/30/3/433?rss=1