[Raphael] Lemkin “breaks genocide into three types: physical, biological, and cultural. He recognized that the events and processes of genocide, which culminate in the loss of a national, racial, religious, ethnic, or political group in whole or in part, could manifest in multiple ways, for different reasons, and include multiple modes of destruction of the group and its members besides the loss of life. Each type manifests differently, but the end result of each is the same: an irreparable and tragic loss of a culture that carries further implications of their shifted future.
The gruesome and violent physical forms of genocide raise the hairs on our sensibilities, and the biological forms tug on our heartstrings with broken families and mistreatment of women, yet both of these horrible forms of genocide occur as events making them both identifiable with an end. The process of cultural genocide, the grouping left out of the legal definition, is a large scale deletion of a culture. The impact of a cultural genocide is the permanent inability to continue as a group by wiping out its identity and structure. The loss of language, history, leadership, religion, important locations, and oftentimes even their homeland, have far reaching effect on the future, and its unlikely possibility, of the group.
Yet when Lemkin presented his ideas and definition to the United Nations, they chose to leave cultural genocide, the largest of the three types, out of their new legal definition. Why did the UN leave a third of the definition out, when it was so important? The answer is likely an insidious one— leaving it in would implicate the major powers (ones drafting the law, no less) in the largest genocide in the history of mankind. Leaving it out scales the genocide of the New World back to separate (yet related) events scattered across two continents, questionable documentation, and the larger question of intent, thus creating the problem of labeling the event, in its entirety, as genocide.”
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