Lemkin on minorities

From autobiographical writings from box 1, reel 2, NYPL

"Who does not remember the pogroms under the Tzar, the destruction of 1,200,000 Armenians in 1915 , and who will dare to forget the destruction of 6,700,000 Jews by Hitler? This last example shows that Genocide is more dangerous than war. After a war which is lost, a nation may rebuild its technical and financial resources, and may start a new life. But those who have been destroyed in genocide have been lost forever. While the losses of war can be repaired, the losses of genocide are irreparable. In my mind of a young an inexperienced man was always alive an episode of the Jewish history in Russia. Under Tzar Nicholas I, the persecutions of the Jews wee very sharp. Not only pogroms took place, but the Tzar directed his attacks against Jewish children. In the ages between eight and 12 years, they were taken away for 25 years' military service and were lost to their relgion and families forever."

More or less the very same thing occurred during slavery. Note the following quote from Orlando Patterson's Rituals of Blood (page 39):

"Mothers were torn from their infants long before the period of lactation was over, in order to return full-time to the fields. Wilma King considers this to be one of "the most unsettling events in the lives of [slave children]," who, on plantations of more than 20 slaves, were placed in "nurseries where there care was in the hands of slaves either too infirm, too old, or too young to work elsewhere." Usually, these old slaves, tired and overwhelmed with too many infants, simply neglected their wards or else beat them with switches when they became unruly. As soon as they were able to, children were put to work, which, according to King, "can be rightly called the thief who stole the childhood of youthful bond servants." Patterson goes on to present Steckel's findings that young children were horribly malnourished. "Owners hedged their bets, not wanting to invest resources in the offspring of their slaves until they were certain that they would become productive adults. An unusual pattern of growth emerged in which those children who survived this Malthusian hurdle were then well fed from their adolescence onward. Steckel has correctly pointed out that this would have had disastrous consequences for the personalities of the slave children. Like malnourished children today, they are likely to have been "apathetic, emotionally withdrawn, less aggressive, and more dependent."

So when you combine these ideas with the knowledge that this went on for literally hundreds of years afterwards because of the horrors of sharecropping, and unjust incarceration for the purpose of acquiring cheap labor for the coal and steel mines, then Jim Crow, and finally segregation in urban ghettos after white flight, the loss of the black middle class and the evacuation of major industries, you have exactly what Lemkin predicted. The victims of genocide who never recovered from the crimes committed against them. I realize that Lemkin did not have all of the facts, but he had enough information to arrive at the conclusion that genocide against Americans had occurred. I do not excuse him. He was too wrapped up in his own issues and fear and frustration of the U.S. not ratifying the genocide convention.