Wait ’till next year
Phantom Scribbler notes that today is the yahrtzeit, the death anniversary, of Raphael Lemkin, the man who invented the word "genocide" and spent his life fighting for it to be recognized as a crime. She writes:
"Lemkin’s obsessive faith in the power of the law and words themselves to change our grim human realities still stands for me as one of the astonishing triumphs of the twentieth century: to hope, still and again, that someday we will break the back of hatred, enclose it, unman it."
I’m feeling a bit gloomy about the world today. This morning’s newspaper reminded me of the one-year anniversary of the massacre in Beslan. And then comes September 11, and its memories. I suppose there’s not a date on the calendar where there hasn’t been pain and bloodshed, somewhere, somewhen.
PS points out that Lemkin was rescued from obscurity by Samantha Power and her Pulitzer-winning book A Problem from Hell. I once read an interview with Power where she was asked how she can avoid despair, given the world’s consistent history of inaction in the face of genocide. She responded that she was a Red Sox fan, and so she always had faith that maybe this would be the year when the pattern was broken, or if not this year, maybe next.
(I can’t find the quote online — if anyone has it, I’d love to put the exact quote up.)
August 29th, 2005 at 5:55 pm
Thanks for the link, Elizabeth. I’ll have to look for the quote and see if I can get it for you. As a Red Sox fan, I can only nod my head vigorously and mutter something about impossible dreams coming true.
August 29th, 2005 at 5:59 pm
Oh, and one of the things that helped restore my faith after too much reading about Bosnia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, and other horrors was Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, by Philip Hallie, about a remote French village that worked together to save the lives of many Jewish children.