Who now remembers the Armenians?

The Armenian genocide is generally considered the first modern genocide, and in many ways it laid the groundwork for the world's response to later genocides.

While there were a few individuals who spoke out and agitated for action, overall, the crime was met with resounding silence from the international community. Even at the end of WWI, when the Treaty of Sèvres required the Ottoman Empire to "hand over to the Allied Powers the persons...responsible for the massacres," the leaders responsible for the genocide were ultimately exchanged for Allied prisoners.

The lack of international response caused another leader - Adolph Hitler - to tell Nazi commanders on the eve of his invasion of Poland, "Go, kill without mercy. After all, who remembers the Armenians?"

While Armenian genocide may have influenced future perpetrators, it also became the birth of the modern anti-genocide movement.

Raphel Lemkin, the linguistics student mentioned in the last post, found it inconceivable that a nation's sovereignty could be used as political and legal cover for mass murder of that nation's own people. He was so shocked by the situation, that he went to law school to study the legal issues more fully.

Ultimately, Lemkin coined the word genocide and lobbied tireless for the adoption of the U.N. genocide convention. The anti-genocide movement has never been large, but Lemkin single handedly shaped the concept of genocide as something separate from other atrocities and made it against international law to perpetuate.