Video Archives - Lunchtime Talk with Douglas Irvin (2012)

Wednesday, February 29^th, 2012: The Origins of Genocide: Tracing the Lemkin-Arendt debate in Lemkin's Archives

Lecturer: Douglas Irvin, Ph.D. candidate at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University.

In this Lunchtime talk at the Arendt Center, Douglas Irvin explores the connections between Arendt and Raphael Lemkin. Both were public thinkers engaged with the question of genocide and the events surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust, and both were vocal critics of the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Also, they both would have known about each other. Though much of his tens of thousands of pages of writing went unpublished, Lemkin was a widely known figure in international law circles. Irvin is confident that one particular passage in The Origins of Totalitarianism is a veiled critical reference to Lemkin—when Arendt mentions the “jurist and professional idealist” whose genocide convention is “not fit for the protection of animals.”

[caption id="attachment_13900" align="alignleft" width="208"] Douglas Irvin[/caption]

The key theoretical divergence between Lemkin and Arendt is their understanding of humanity, which in turn colors their idea of what constitutes genocide. For Arendt, humanity is defined by a plurality of individuals and genocide is a systematic attack on plurality by the attempted elimination of a particular group, nation, or category of people. Lemkin, by contrast, is more of a communitarian. Humanity for him is defined by the collections of nations, groups who share a cultural patterning of life. Influenced by French romanticism and contemporary anthropology, as well as a longstanding fascination with Spanish colonial theology and jurisprudence, Lemkin defines the basic unit of humanity not as individuals, but as a family of minds. Thus, while Arendt bases her theory on the protection of individuals, Lemkin concludes that cultural groups and not individuals must be protected because the former is crucial for human freedom.

[caption id="attachment_13902" align="alignright" width="208"] Raphael Lemkin[/caption]

A consequence of this difference is that Lemkin has a broader view of genocide; genocide is not tantamount to the violent attempt to eliminate a particular group of people. Genocide is instead defined as the disruption of the cultural pattern of an oppressed group, which is then followed by the imposition of a cultural pattern of another dominating people. Whereas Arendt considers genocide to be the new phenomenon of administrative massacre unique to the advent of totalitarianism, Lemkin considers genocide as old as culture itself. The attack on nations, not the attack on the individual, is what constitutes the crime against humanity in genocide. Genocide can be legal, financial, etc.—violence and killing are just two possible forms. This leads Lemkin to develop a view of the Holocaust that is much wider than Arendt’s.

Though both were European Jewish intellectuals and both wrote about darkness and oppression at the hands of the same regimes, their different conceptions of what defines “humanity” had drastic consequences for their understandings of the gruesomeness that was the Holocaust.

Analysis by Dan Perlman

You can watch the full lunchtime talk with Douglas Irvin below:

Lunchtime Talk: Douglas Irvin from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.

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