Great moments in presidential campaign diplomacy

The ghosts of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are getting a mordant chuckle out of this, assuming they have Twitter in Hell, and really how could they not?

Somewhat related, this (gift link) is an interesting essay on the slow evolution of the legal concept of genocide. The author argues that the inventor of the concept, the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, did not intend the concept to be interpreted nearly as narrowly as international courts have interpreted it since its codification in international law shortly after World War II.

For nearly 80 years, the word has been indelibly associated with the Holocaust. To invoke “genocide” is to immediately conjure up the memory of the destruction of the Jewish people and its associated architecture of murder: concentration camps and deportation trains, ghettos and gas chambers. This relation has at once augmented genocide’s moral force and undermined its legal uses. The Holocaust is viewed both as the awful standard against which all modern atrocities must be measured and as a supposedly unrepeatable catastrophe to which they must never be compared. The Genocide Convention effectively enshrined this paradoxical understanding of the Shoah and established a nearly impossible bar for genocidal intent based on its example. As a result, international courts have rarely recognized more recent mass killings as instances of the crime, and peoples seeking to have their suffering recognized as such have been bitterly disappointed.

Lemkin lost 49 family members in the Holocaust, and in a grim irony the Holocaust has ended up as the modal genocide against which other possible examples of the concept are measured, with the result being the very narrow definition that, per the author, Lemkin himself rejected.