When, in 1881, the German anti-Semite Dühring urged a "final settling of accounts" with the Jews, he spoke, rather obliquely, of the need for a "Carthaginian" solution (p. 113f.). This was not merely a euphemism, however, as it might now seem. On the contrary, it was well known that Rome had utterly destroyed Carthage in the last Punic War. Hence Dühring's meaning was clear. But his phrasing remained cryptic because the vocabulary of mass death had not yet attained technical precision. Not until World War II, in fact, were the terms "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" introduced. Thus, in December 1948, when the United Nations declared the willful destruction of an entire people to be a breach of international law—a principle enshrined in the U.N. Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide—the very word for mass murder was still novel.

Conceptual Roots