Existing comment:
Naming the Crime
"We are in the presence of a crime without a name,"
-- British Prime Minister Winston Churchill informed radio listeners on August 24, 1941. His announcement came two months after British intelligence had received secret information about German mass shootings of Soviet Jews.
Before the war ended in spring 1945, the crime was given a name.
A December 3, 1944, editorial in the Washington Post introduced its readers to a new word, genocide, coined by Polish Jewish immigrant Raphael Lemkin: He defined the crime as the "deliberate destruction" of a nation or ethnic group. |