Lesser terms—like “mass murder” or “mass extermination”—were inadequate, because they were incapable of conveying the vital element of racial motivation and the desire to destroy entire cultures. How impoverished we would be, Lemkin wrote, if the people doomed by Germany such as the Jews had not been permitted to create the Bible or to give birth to an Einstein [or] a Spinoza; if the Poles had not had the opportunity to give the world a Copernicus, a Chopin, a Curie; the Greeks a Plato and a Socrates, the English a Shakespeare; the Russians a Tolstoy and a Shostakovich, the Americans an
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