Ethnocide
Raphael Lemkin: From Genocide to Ethnocide
In 1944, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who immigrated to America as he fled the Nazis, coined the words genocide and ethnocide. Lemkin intended for the words to be interchangeable because the mass atrocities inflicted upon the Jewish people in Germany and the Armenians in Turkey sought to murder (-cide) the people (genos) and culture (ethnos) of a society.
While the term genocide came into more common usage and ethnocide remained in the footnotes of history, the denial and destruction of culture became a systemic tool for perpetual oppression and inequality that persists today.
In the United States, the ethnocidal policies of European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade continue to reverberate on the way Americans live today.
“Ethnocide is the destruction of the culture and identity of a group without the physical destruction of its people”
Animation provided by Fabian Tejada at DLA Studio
Ethnocide in America
The United States’ involvement in the transatlantic slave trade created a perpetual culture of ethnocide in the Americas.
European colonizers forcefully extracted and denied African culture to African people in order to enslave, oppress, and exploit them indefinitely. America’s social, racial, political, and financial inequality and division are founded upon ethnocide, which continues to shape American society today.
Unlike its linguistic sibling, the “final solution” of ethnocide is not the eradication or removal of a people, but the creation of a society dependent upon the perpetual oppression and exploitation of a specific segment of its population.
American society succumbs to the ravages of ethnocide because we are unaware of its existence. Thus far, the lack of a cultural philosophy, language, and methodology to combat ethnocidal systemic oppression has prevented America from combatting a crime that previously went unnamed.
“The first step in liquidating a people,’ said Hubl, ‘is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
Combatting Ethnocide
To dismantle ethnocide, SCL applies an interdisciplinary approach inspired by the Italian Renaissance that merges philosophy with art, politics, and activism. The Renaissance changed European civilization by supporting philosophers and fostering their collaboration with artists. Through art, complex philosophical ideas can be easily understood by the masses and create both political and cultural sustainable activism.
Far too often groups seeking to create sustainable cultural change overlook the importance of philosophy, and this oversight undermines their mission because without philosophy we are more prone to developing reformist instead of revolutionary ideas. Reformist ideas aspire to prevent abuses of the existing system and implore people to properly use the system. Revolutionary ideas aspire to create a new system. Without philosophy revolutionary aspirations will become reformist actions.
Progressing beyond ethnocide requires philosophy, art, and activism. SCL exists to create this American Cultural Naissance.