Michael Ignatieff reviews Totally Unofficial, a new biography of Raphael Lemkin, the man who invented the word genocide and campaigned for the Genocide Convention:
Potential friends drew away from him because his normal conversation was apt to dwell at unsavory length on horrible punishments and excruciating cruelties. He was a man who could not desist from telling strangers his nightmares. He devoted every spare minute of his final years to a world history of genocide. This project, mad in its Borgesian determination to create a total encyclopedia of world cruelty, lay unfinished at his death. It would be easy to turn aside from Lemkin’s bleak obsessions or to dismiss them as sadomasochistic were they not paired with a redeeming belief that fate had chosen him to save future generations from the genocidal furies that had claimed his own family.
The question that the autobiography raises but leaves unanswered is how he chose for himself the role of the humanitarian hunger artist. Extreme moral careers often have aesthetic roots: people choose their lives as dramatic acts of self-creation. There is something childlike, and also as unyielding as a child’s desire, in Lemkin’s self-dramatization. From an early age, he imagined himself as a hero in the popular turn-of-the-century Polish romantic novel Quo Vadis, with its kitsch world of noble slaves and lasciviously corrupt Roman owners. At the height of his influence right after World War II, he struck the disabused and cynical diplomats at the United Nations as “an agreeable fanatic,” but by the end of his life, his self-dramatization was a crippling caricature of lonely defiance, surrounded by imagined enemies bent on his humiliation and defeat.
The Dish 