#historicalmemory

Family memories before everything changed.

“The Mispucha: Jewish Families Before WWII” explores Jewish life, tradition, and community before WWII.

Alfonso De Lalla’s powerful words honor sailor Vincenzo Farese, fallen at Bargal (1925). A rare handwritten/typescript document of memory, duty, and sacrifice.

Genocide is one of the most serious crimes recognized under international law. Its legal definition was established in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 in direct response to the Holocaust and other atrocities committed during World War II.

According to Article II of the Convention, genocide is defined as:

"Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."

The acts listed as genocidal under the Convention include:

Killing members of the group.

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part.

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

–Limitations of the current legal definition–

Although the 1948 Convention represented a milestone in international criminal law, its definition of genocide presents serious limitations that fail to encompass other systematic forms of group destruction:

• Exclusion of political, sexual, and cultural groups: The Convention recognizes only national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups as potential victims of genocide. This excludes other communities that have been historically targeted, such as:

Political groups, like leftist activists and militants forcibly disappeared or executed during the military dictatorships in South America.

LGBTIQ+ communities, subjected to extermination or “re-education” policies under regimes like Nazi Germany or, more recently, in Chechnya.

Cultural and linguistic minorities, often displaced or assimilated through colonial or neocolonial policies aimed at destroying their ways of life.

• A narrow focus on physical or biological destruction: The Convention does not consider other forms of group annihilation, such as cultural or symbolic genocide. As a result, it excludes:

The suppression of Indigenous languages or religions.

The imposition of a single national identity at the expense of diverse cultural expressions.

The systematic erosion of a people’s collective memory, traditions, and worldview.

• The burden of proving specific intent: The legal requirement to prove a specific intent to destroy the group “as such” (dolus specialis) poses a high threshold in court. This has complicated the legal recognition of genocidal acts in cases such as Bosnia, Guatemala, or Darfur, where the systematic nature of the violence is evident but direct evidence of intent is difficult to obtain.

–Toward a broader definition of genocide–

Given these limitations, the legal definition of genocide must be expanded to better reflect the many ways in which a group can be systematically destroyed. A more appropriate and inclusive definition could be:

"Genocide is the systematic implementation of actions—whether killings, persecution, torture, displacement, disappearances, sterilizations, or other means—aimed at destroying, in whole or in part, a human group defined by its collective identity, whether ethnic, national, racial, religious, political, sexual, cultural, or gender-based, through a deliberate, planned, and sustained policy, usually carried out by the State or structures of power."

This definition widens the legal scope to include not only direct physical violence but also structural forms of destruction, such as cultural alienation, systemic exclusion, and institutional marginalization.

The definition of genocide in the 1948 Convention was a necessary response to the horrors of World War II. However, it reflects the historical and political context of its time, focusing narrowly on physical extermination. Today, that framework is insufficient to understand and prosecute other systematic forms of violence aimed at eliminating human groups because of who they are.

Revisiting the concept of genocide is not a mere academic exercise—it is an urgent task in the pursuit of a more inclusive and comprehensive justice. One that recognizes that peoples and communities can also be destroyed through silence, assimilation, forced forgetting, or the erasure of their cultural foundations.

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Men's gift, General de Gaulle, June 18th call, digital art, photo montage, London radio BBC, unique model France, historical memory

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Go to the shop on a ETSY

all my creations 

☞https://www.etsy.com/fr/shop/FrenchPhilatelicArt

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or directly ☞

With all the details.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/720460050/mens-gift-general-de-gaulle-june-18th?ref=shop_home_active_1&frs=1

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Gift man, General de Gaulle, call of June 18th, digital art, photo montage, radio London, unique model France, historical souvenir.

This creation is a unique piece like everything that I create and it is a gift idea for the history lovers of France and the Second World War.

You can frame this digital montage with these decorative stamps in an entrance, living room, library, dining room or bedroom. It will be a work of art at reasonable price and you can also please you if you are collector.

It is the homage to a man who will have marked his time and history, regardless of the political views of each.

Beautiful presentation with a custom location for these two blocks of stamps which is accompanied by a card that envelops it.

The novelty lies in the customized location reserved for them; they are protected and can not move.Practical, they can be extracted from their prison, with precautions of course, to be checked, admired, or just to make them take a little air; they can just as naturally be put back in their place. (see more details in the presentation of the shop)

The pages for sale in this article are in views 1 to 4.

The other views provide you with other viewing angles of the set.

For any other information, whatever it is, I remain of course at your disposal.

Some technical details on this article:

- a very high quality semi-gloss photo paper with immediate drying: 280 g / m2 and its size is A4 (21 x 29.7 cm).

- the weight of this article: about 90 g + hard cardboard sleeve.

- Souvenir sheet issued by France in 2010; the 2019 price is 10 € and the block is inserted in a card sold 3 €