The least-remembered "Day"

This is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and of the half-dozen newspapers and magazines I check every morning, only Commentary bothered to remember it. There, Seth Mandel argued that today's antisemites are doing their best to erase the Holocaust from our memory by replacing it with "genocide".

A primer: the word "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew teaching at Duke, a haven he reached after fleeing Warsaw in September 1939 as Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between them. His great interest during the war years was what he then termed the crime of "barbarity," from the Roman persecution of Christians (he'd read Quo Vadis as a boy), through the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915, to the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany. The last led in 1944 as Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the first time "genocide" was defined in print.

Lemkin became an adviser to Justice Robert Jackson in the postwar Nuremberg Trials. In the 1950s, at his urging, the UN formally recognized genocide as a crime, and he helped Arab lawyers build a case against the 19th century French genocide in Algeria. Of interest today, as Vladimir Putin tries to extinguish Ukraine, Lemkin also argued that Stalin's mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants -- the Holdomor of 1933-34 -- constituted a genocide.