What is Genocide?
Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. The term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, in 1943, firstly from the Latin “gens, gentis,” meaning “tribe, clan, or race,” or the Greek root génos (family, tribe or race – gene); secondly from Latin -cide (occido—to massacre, kill).
• As homicide is the murder of a person, genocide is the murder of an ethnicity or the extinction of any human group sharing a genetic or ancestral affinity. Another trendy term for this is ‘ethnic cleansing’. Examples of genocides includes the disappearance of the neanderthals, the murder of all aboriginal Tazmanians, many aboriginal American tribes, and almost every indigenous population of the middle east 1200 years ago. Technically, the Holocaust was an attempted genocide, as – thankfully – Hitler and the ‘ordinary Germans’ failed; colloquially, the term is also applied to attempts – especially if those attempts are well organized and systematic – or significant trends toward extinction.
