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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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466 |
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Contents |
Index |
Home
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Forward |
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| Chapter 21 |
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| Genocide |
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To live means to kill. |
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— ERNST JÜNGER |
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In a dark time the eye begins to see. |
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— THEODORE ROETHKE |
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Doubling facilitates genocide And while Mann’s devil
declares that German “happens to be just precisely my favoured
language,”¹ we know well enough that the Devil can speak in any
tongue. Genocide is a potential act of any nation.
Yet the Nazis did
provide the impetus for the legal naming of a very old crime. The word
“genocide” was coined (from the Greek genos, “race, tribe,”
and the Latin cide, “killing”) in 1944, and defined by the
United Nations General Assembly in 1946 as “a denial of the right of
existence, of entire human groups.” The Convention on Genocide approved by
the U.N. General Assembly in 1948 associated the concept with killing,
seriously harming, or interfering with the life continuity (by preventing
births or forcibly transferring children) of “a national ethnical
racial or religious group.”² Significantly, the original definition
of the word by its coiner, Raphael Lemkin, speaks of “an old
practice in its modern development,” includes long term actions aimed at
“the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national
groups,” and limits the concept to attempts to destroy groups in their
entirety or biological totality.³
This book has been mainly about
what we call the “Holocaust,” a unique expression of Nazi genocide
perpetrated against the Jews — unique in dimensions, in bureaucratic
organization for annihilation, and in degree of absolute focus on a victim
group dispersed throughout the world. Yet it is significant that, in accordance
with their biological vision, the Nazis attempted genocide of other groups
Gypsies Russians, and Poles. Now I shall examine some of the psychohistorical
themes of Nazi genocide in order to derive more general principles. I shall
refer to other genocides notably the Turks’ annihilation of about one
million Armeni […ans] |
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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Page 466 |
Forward |
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