What to call the genocides of the Second World War and why?

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

8 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

01/13/2009

Category :

History & geography

Sub category :

Modern history

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Summary :

Introduction.
1. The controversy about the proper name to give to the genocides perpetrated by the Nazis.
2. The sensitivity of the name's issue
Genocide/Genocides.
1. The official definition of the term 'genocide'.
2. The beginning of the 'Genocide studies'.
3. The path to the juridical recognition of 'genocide'.
4. LEMKIN's definition nor UNO's.
5. Entanglement of notions.
'Memorial' words.
1. The general 'inclusive' trend to accept a certain amount of collective murders as genocides, politicides or genocidarian massacres.
2. 'Competition' with the highly famous 'Holocaust'.
3. The problem with all those terms.
4. Names are nor transparent, neither neutral.
5. The impossibility of compare massacres.
Conclusion.
Bibliography.

Abstract

"Historians are not always trustful guides when we have to reconstitute past". Those words, of Lucy DAWIDOWICZ -an American historian who wrote quite a lot of books about the historiography of genocides- directly aimed at criticizing historians of genocides, who treated the murder by the Nazis as a "normal" historical object, that is, comparing it with other historical phenomena, and categorizing it. Categorizing involves, among other things, to give precise and adapted definition of the genocides, and, at first, a relevant name for this historical event. Thus, we can say that the controversy about the proper name to give to the genocides perpetrated by the Nazis during the second world war is a sensitive subject. Many historians have been, and are still today for some of them, arguing about this. Indeed, this field of the Holocaust studies is particularly interesting, because it started much earlier than the main stream of Holocaust studies. Indeed, after the second world war, the public attention, and the historians' interest too, was mainly focused on the Resistance and the survivors.