A word coined in 1944 to name an occupation: the pattern of a people destroyed, and the occupier's pattern imposed on the people who remain or on the land alone. Four years later the treaty kept the destruction and dropped the imposition. Two definitions share the stem, and the narrower one governs.
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Raphael Lemkin made the word in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), from the Greek genos, tribe or kin, and the Latin -cide, killing. He was explicit that it did not mean only the immediate destruction of a nation. It meant a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the essential foundations of the life of national groups.
And he gave it two phases. The first is the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group. The second is the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor, which, he wrote, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor's own nationals.
The word was coined to name an occupation, and its founding definition names the settler form in its own sentence.
[See OCCUPATION · THE PRIOR RESIDENT · TERRA NULLIUS · LEBENSRAUM]
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THE SECOND PHASE
The book's subtitle is Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Lemkin was reading decrees: what the occupier did with language, schools, courts, property, place names, credit, the church. He found the killing inside a larger operation that ran largely on paper.
The second phase is the part a reader of the first can miss. Destruction leaves a vacancy, and the occupier's pattern is what is installed in it: its law, its grammar of title, its names on the rivers. It can be imposed on the survivors, who are then taught it as their own. It can be imposed on the ground itself, emptied and resettled. Either way the imposition is the phase that stays, because it is built to.
What remains after a genocide in Lemkin's sense is not a ruin but an installation, standing on the ground where the pattern it replaced used to be.
[See TRESPASS THEOLOGY · SETTLER CHRISTIANITY · THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY]
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THE NARROWING
The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on 9 December 1948. Article II defines the crime as any of five acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing its members; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction; imposing measures intended to prevent births within it; forcibly transferring its children to another group.
Two things were cut on the way. Political groups were excluded, at the insistence of the Soviet Union among others. And the article on cultural genocide, the destruction of a group's language, religion or culture, was deleted by a vote of 25 to 16 with 4 abstentions, with colonial powers and settler states among those opposed.
The Convention kept the half of Lemkin's definition that looks like war and dropped the half that looks like settlement.
One clause of the second phase survived: the transfer of a group's children into another group, which is the imposition performed on the generation that would have carried the pattern forward. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, reporting in 2015 on the residential schools, called them cultural genocide, the name of the article that had been deleted, for conduct that the surviving clause describes.
The United States ratified the Convention in 1988, forty years after it opened for signature, with a reservation that no dispute could be taken against it to the International Court of Justice without its consent in each case.
[See THE RECONCILIATION SWINDLE · THE FORGED WARRANT OF FORCE]
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INTENT, AS SUCH
The legal crime requires intent to destroy the group as such: not the killing alone, and not the destruction alone, but proof that the destroying was aimed at the group for being the group.
That requirement locates genocide in a mind. It asks what a perpetrator wanted, and a perpetrator who can show he wanted something else, the land, the sheep, the timber, the rent, the order restored, has an answer to the charge while the destruction stands. The clearances were run on the calculation that sheep paid better than tenants. The famine was administered by men who believed in the market. The residential schools were founded to civilize.
The intent requirement asks for a mind, and the operation the word was coined for runs on a ledger, which has none.
This is the place where the prefix does not decide and a party does. The stem is the same in both definitions. Which one applies is not settled by the word. It is settled by who is asked, and the Convention's answer is a court, applying a standard written by states, some of which it would have reached.
[See THE PREFIX DECIDES · CLEARANCE LOGIC · AN GORTA MOR · ACCOUNTING THEOLOGY]
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TWO DEFINITIONS, ONE STEM
The contest over the word is usually conducted as though there were one definition and the question were whether a history meets it. There are two, and they answer different questions.
Lemkin's asks what was done to a people's pattern of life and what was put in its place. It can be answered from the documentary record: the decrees, the school registers, the survey maps, the renamed rivers. The Convention's asks what a perpetrator intended, and it can be answered only by a tribunal with jurisdiction, before which the United States, for one, reserved its consent.
Where the word is used without a court it is Lemkin's, where a court is asked it is the Convention's, and the gap between the two is exactly the occupation's second phase.
[See THE NAZIS · THE GRAMMAR OF ADMISSIBILITY · THE LEDGER]
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What was removed from the definition was not removed from the land.
The pattern imposed on the territory alone is still standing where it was put: in the title records, in the county lines, in the names on the maps. It is not a crime under the instrument, because the instrument was written to leave it out, and it is being maintained this hour by whoever holds the title the imposition conveyed.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
