On 16 October Professor Norman Naimark from Stanford University held a lecture at the Telus Centre Auditorium, University of Alberta. The event was this year's Annual Toby and Saul Reichert Holocaust Lecture organized by the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies. Professor Naimark is professor in the history department at Stanford University; he holds the Robert and Florence McDonnell Chair in East European History and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. He specializes in modern Eastern European history, and genocide and ethnic cleansing in that region. He is an expert on modern Eastern European, Balkan, and Russian history, and has focused his research and writing on the problems of radical politics in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe. Most recently, Professor Naimark has been focusing his studies on the history of genocide in the twentieth century, and on postwar Soviet policy in Europe.
The well-attended lecture at the University of Alberta was titled ˝The Holocaust in the History of Genocide˝. Professor Naimark traced the origin of the term genocide, originally formulated by Raphael Lemkin, and emphasized that the current definition by the United Nations does not include extermination of social and political groups. It is limited to national, ethnical, racial or religious groups. He analyzed the Holocaust as part of a long history of mass killings in human civilisation, including those which happened in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Darfur, Ukrainine or Armenia. What was unique about the Holocaust was its scope and longstanding impact. Its uniqueness is also evident in regret about the Holocaust that is highly visible in German culture today and is highly embedded in the national collective consciousness of Germans. However, Professor Naimark concluded that, despite its unique features, the Holocaust should be viewed comparatively as part of the long and sad history of genocide. Genocide is not only a modern phenomenon but a recurring event in the history of humankind.