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"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
Former UN Ambassador Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis of America's repeated failure to stop genocides around the world
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning examination of the last century of American history, Samantha Power asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Power, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, draws upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policymakers, thousands of declassified documents, and her own reporting from modern killing fields to provide the answer. "A Problem from Hell" shows how decent Americans inside and outside government refused to get involved despite chilling warnings and tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act. A modern classic, "A Problem from Hell" has forever reshaped debates about American foreign policy.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning examination of the last century of American history, Samantha Power asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Power, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, draws upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policymakers, thousands of declassified documents, and her own reporting from modern killing fields to provide the answer. "A Problem from Hell" shows how decent Americans inside and outside government refused to get involved despite chilling warnings and tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act. A modern classic, "A Problem from Hell" has forever reshaped debates about American foreign policy.
620 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2002
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About the author
Samantha Power
21books1,030followersSamantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, writer, and academic. She is affiliated with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School, holding the position of Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy.
A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. From 1993 to 1996 she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the U.S. News and World Report, the Boston Globe, and The New Republic. In 2003, Power won the Pulitzer Prize for her work “A Problem from Hell�: America and the Age of Genocide. She has contributed reporting to the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She spent 2005 to 2006 working in the office of Senator Barack Obama, then served as the Director of Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council. She is currently the United States Ambassador to the United Nations in New York.
A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. From 1993 to 1996 she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the U.S. News and World Report, the Boston Globe, and The New Republic. In 2003, Power won the Pulitzer Prize for her work “A Problem from Hell�: America and the Age of Genocide. She has contributed reporting to the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She spent 2005 to 2006 working in the office of Senator Barack Obama, then served as the Director of Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council. She is currently the United States Ambassador to the United Nations in New York.
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February 15, 2023
U.S.A. E GENOCIDIO
Che fine stanno facendo i Rohingya?
Samantha Power è nata in Irlanda nel 1970. Quando aveva dieci anni la sua famiglia si trasferì in USA. Quando ne aveva diciannove stava coronando il suo ‘american dream�: essere una giornalista sportiva (per la CBS), anche se solo leggendo il punteggio. Sullo schermo dello stadio di Atlanta, nel giugno del 1989, passarono le immagini di piazza Tienanmen, e Samantha capì di essere nel posto sbagliato, capì che stava sbagliando, non era lo sport la sua meta.
Da allora è diventata una delle più importanti studiose dei diritti umani.
Questo libro ha vinto il premio Pulitzer nel 2003 e da allora è diventato un fondamentale libro di testo nelle più prestigiose università americane.
10 000 volti in acciaio punzonato sono distribuiti sul pavimento dello Spazio Vuoto della Memoria, l'unico spazio vuoto del Museo Ebraico di Berlino realizzato da Libeskind in cui è possibile entrare. L'artista israeliano Menashe Kadishman ha dedicato la sua opera non soltanto alle vittime della Shoah, ma a tutte le vittime di guerra e violenze. I visitatori sono invitati a camminare sui volti e ad ascoltare il fragore prodotto dalle lastre di metallo che sbattono l'una contro l'altra e contro le persone che passano. Foto MD'O.
È un lungo saggio di oltre ottocento pagine basato sullo spoglio di migliaia di documenti e su centinaia di interviste a politici e funzionari, nel quale la Power scava a fondo nei genocidi del Secolo Breve, come lo storico Eric Hobsbawm ha definito il Ventesimo Secolo.
Partendo da quello del popolo armeno in Turchia, passando ovviamente per la Shoah, per arrivare attraverso gli stermini compiuti in Cambogia dai Khmer rossi a quei massacri che la cronaca (e le immagini televisive) hanno reso più familiari negli ultimi anni: i curdi sterminati dai gas di Saddam, l'orrore in Ruanda, la pulizia etnica in Bosnia, quella contro gli albanesi del Kosovo.
Con un unico filo conduttore, il ruolo, i silenzi e a volte le stesse complicità avute dagli USA in questi genocidi.
Tombe collettive al Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda, prima del genocidio del 1994 Murambi Technical School. In questo memoriale sono sepolte circa 50mila vittime. Furono il vescovo e il sindaco a consigliare a circa 65mila tutsi di rifugiarsi all’interno della scuola, dove speravano di essere al sicuro. Invece, chi non fu ucciso sul posto il 21 aprile, lo fu il giorno dopo nella chiesa locale. In seguito le forze di pace francesi scavarono fosse comuni per nasconder ei corpi e sopra ci costruirono un campo da pallavolo. Foto MD'O.
Ma il libro non ha nulla di antiamericano.
È un libro "pesante" (nella migliore accezione del termine) che aiuta a riflettere sulle tante ipocrisie che le ideologie e la realpolitik del mondo moderno ci hanno imposto; un libro che affronta con coraggio e senza pregiudizi le assurdità degli stermini di massa; un libro che denuncia come anche le migliori democrazie - perfino le migliori oligarchie, come gli US - non sono immuni da colpe, da ritardi, da incomprensioni, da inazione.
Libro fondamentale, splendido, da tenere sempre a portata di mano, da leggere integralmente e poi consultare ogni volta che serve (spesso, ahimé).
Foto di Danilo Krstanović.
È agghiacciante quello che scrive e racconta.
È agghiacciante che succeda e si ripeta ancora.
Ci si riempie la bocca con frasi pregne come MAI PIÙ, JAMAIS PLUS, NEVER AGAIN, le ho viste scritte su bandiere che sventolavano nei luoghi storici: ma succede sempre di nuovo, di qua e di là - restiamo a guardare, anche se qualche voce si alza più rapidamente che in passato.
Intanto la gente muore e l'orrore si ripete.
PS
Il termine di "genocidio" nasce dall'isolata (e per anni oscura) lunga tenace difficile battaglia di Raphael Lemkin, un ebreo polacco fuggito in America nel 1941.
La Convenzione per la prevenzione e la repressione del delitto di genocidio adottata il 9 dicembre 1948 dall’ONU non venne ratificata dagli Stati Uniti per i successivi quaranta anni.
PPSS
Grande donna, Samantha Power, nonostante l'inutile gaffe che la portò a dover abbandonare la campagna elettorale e lo staff di Barack Obama.
L’autrice, Samantha Power, laureata in legge a Yale, corrispondente di guerra in Bosnia, direttore del "Carr Center for Human Rights Policy" di Harvard.
Che fine stanno facendo i Rohingya?
Samantha Power è nata in Irlanda nel 1970. Quando aveva dieci anni la sua famiglia si trasferì in USA. Quando ne aveva diciannove stava coronando il suo ‘american dream�: essere una giornalista sportiva (per la CBS), anche se solo leggendo il punteggio. Sullo schermo dello stadio di Atlanta, nel giugno del 1989, passarono le immagini di piazza Tienanmen, e Samantha capì di essere nel posto sbagliato, capì che stava sbagliando, non era lo sport la sua meta.
Da allora è diventata una delle più importanti studiose dei diritti umani.
Questo libro ha vinto il premio Pulitzer nel 2003 e da allora è diventato un fondamentale libro di testo nelle più prestigiose università americane.
10 000 volti in acciaio punzonato sono distribuiti sul pavimento dello Spazio Vuoto della Memoria, l'unico spazio vuoto del Museo Ebraico di Berlino realizzato da Libeskind in cui è possibile entrare. L'artista israeliano Menashe Kadishman ha dedicato la sua opera non soltanto alle vittime della Shoah, ma a tutte le vittime di guerra e violenze. I visitatori sono invitati a camminare sui volti e ad ascoltare il fragore prodotto dalle lastre di metallo che sbattono l'una contro l'altra e contro le persone che passano. Foto MD'O.
È un lungo saggio di oltre ottocento pagine basato sullo spoglio di migliaia di documenti e su centinaia di interviste a politici e funzionari, nel quale la Power scava a fondo nei genocidi del Secolo Breve, come lo storico Eric Hobsbawm ha definito il Ventesimo Secolo.
Partendo da quello del popolo armeno in Turchia, passando ovviamente per la Shoah, per arrivare attraverso gli stermini compiuti in Cambogia dai Khmer rossi a quei massacri che la cronaca (e le immagini televisive) hanno reso più familiari negli ultimi anni: i curdi sterminati dai gas di Saddam, l'orrore in Ruanda, la pulizia etnica in Bosnia, quella contro gli albanesi del Kosovo.
Con un unico filo conduttore, il ruolo, i silenzi e a volte le stesse complicità avute dagli USA in questi genocidi.
Tombe collettive al Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda, prima del genocidio del 1994 Murambi Technical School. In questo memoriale sono sepolte circa 50mila vittime. Furono il vescovo e il sindaco a consigliare a circa 65mila tutsi di rifugiarsi all’interno della scuola, dove speravano di essere al sicuro. Invece, chi non fu ucciso sul posto il 21 aprile, lo fu il giorno dopo nella chiesa locale. In seguito le forze di pace francesi scavarono fosse comuni per nasconder ei corpi e sopra ci costruirono un campo da pallavolo. Foto MD'O.
Ma il libro non ha nulla di antiamericano.
È un libro "pesante" (nella migliore accezione del termine) che aiuta a riflettere sulle tante ipocrisie che le ideologie e la realpolitik del mondo moderno ci hanno imposto; un libro che affronta con coraggio e senza pregiudizi le assurdità degli stermini di massa; un libro che denuncia come anche le migliori democrazie - perfino le migliori oligarchie, come gli US - non sono immuni da colpe, da ritardi, da incomprensioni, da inazione.
Libro fondamentale, splendido, da tenere sempre a portata di mano, da leggere integralmente e poi consultare ogni volta che serve (spesso, ahimé).
Foto di Danilo Krstanović.
È agghiacciante quello che scrive e racconta.
È agghiacciante che succeda e si ripeta ancora.
Ci si riempie la bocca con frasi pregne come MAI PIÙ, JAMAIS PLUS, NEVER AGAIN, le ho viste scritte su bandiere che sventolavano nei luoghi storici: ma succede sempre di nuovo, di qua e di là - restiamo a guardare, anche se qualche voce si alza più rapidamente che in passato.
Intanto la gente muore e l'orrore si ripete.
PS
Il termine di "genocidio" nasce dall'isolata (e per anni oscura) lunga tenace difficile battaglia di Raphael Lemkin, un ebreo polacco fuggito in America nel 1941.
La Convenzione per la prevenzione e la repressione del delitto di genocidio adottata il 9 dicembre 1948 dall’ONU non venne ratificata dagli Stati Uniti per i successivi quaranta anni.
PPSS
Grande donna, Samantha Power, nonostante l'inutile gaffe che la portò a dover abbandonare la campagna elettorale e lo staff di Barack Obama.
L’autrice, Samantha Power, laureata in legge a Yale, corrispondente di guerra in Bosnia, direttore del "Carr Center for Human Rights Policy" di Harvard.
October 8, 2008
Samantha Power's 'A Problem from Hell' is a broad attempt to document the major acts of genocide/human rights violations of the 20th century paired with the international community's subsequent negligence in each case. She reports on the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and especially her major areas of research- Rwanda and Serbia.
However, Powers is content to simply recount major instances of crimes against humanity that the U.S. and other major Western powers simply ignored (a worthy historical task), rather than to document the major atrocities the U.S. supported/participated in (the far more morally serious and honest task). While she is scrupulous in her documentation of the horrors of Rwanda and Iraq, her sections on Indo-China fail miserably. She provides a lengthy and conventional chapter on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, without mentioning to inform us about the U.S.'s massive contribution to such atrocities (only side references are provided). Additionally, she mentions in a rather depraved manner, that "In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away" (147). In actuality, the U.S. did not look away: it funded the genocide, and President Carter deliberately escalated the intensity of the atrocities. This is the essence of Power's political backwardness. Pointing to the atrocities of official enemies is easy, it is far more difficult and necessary to point to the atrocities of the U.S. and its allies. Nowhere does Powers discuss Israel and the Palestinians, nowhere does she discuss Pinochet, or the Contras, or Kissinger for that matter. So long as the the liberal intelligentsia refuses to stare in the mirror, the world will continue to be an arena of exploitation, injustice, and crimes against humanity.
However, Powers is content to simply recount major instances of crimes against humanity that the U.S. and other major Western powers simply ignored (a worthy historical task), rather than to document the major atrocities the U.S. supported/participated in (the far more morally serious and honest task). While she is scrupulous in her documentation of the horrors of Rwanda and Iraq, her sections on Indo-China fail miserably. She provides a lengthy and conventional chapter on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, without mentioning to inform us about the U.S.'s massive contribution to such atrocities (only side references are provided). Additionally, she mentions in a rather depraved manner, that "In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away" (147). In actuality, the U.S. did not look away: it funded the genocide, and President Carter deliberately escalated the intensity of the atrocities. This is the essence of Power's political backwardness. Pointing to the atrocities of official enemies is easy, it is far more difficult and necessary to point to the atrocities of the U.S. and its allies. Nowhere does Powers discuss Israel and the Palestinians, nowhere does she discuss Pinochet, or the Contras, or Kissinger for that matter. So long as the the liberal intelligentsia refuses to stare in the mirror, the world will continue to be an arena of exploitation, injustice, and crimes against humanity.
March 16, 2014
I have a lot of complaints and very few positive remarks about this book. I'll start with the little good: I enjoyed the biographical information about Raphael Lemkin. That said, there are many other more in-depth books about him out there that could tell an even fuller story.
The majority of this book, however, was a hollow argument for the superiority of liberal interventionism. The structure of each case study goes like this: a genocide started; the US MAY have borne some blame for the conditions that allowed the violence to start; the US didn't intervene; OR the US did intervene and everything went great. The historical background for all the genocides is superficial at best. For example, Power never even addresses the issue of how the Hutu and Tutsi identities came into being in Rwanda. She mentions that there was some animosity based on the structure of the colonial administration and not much else. I understand that the majority of this book was dedicated to the American response to genocides throughout history, but not properly contextualizing the situation is at best a mistake and at worst a deliberate attempt to strengthen an argument. I was amazed that this book was so long, given how little detail she put into the case studies.
Most importantly, though, I think this book operates from an inherently false and dangerous premise. The basic assumption from which the whole book flows is that the US is a world superpower (true) and has the means to stop violence around the world (also true). Few people can dispute those two facts. And yes, the US should make as many efforts as possible to stop violence, especially genocide, around the world. But the US is also one of the leading causes of violence around the world. From Chile in the 1970s to Iraq in the 2000s, the US has been responsible for high levels of violence and human rights abuse. Power doesn't even mention these points, instead focusing on how the US could have stopped other states who were killing people. Presenting only this half of the coin is to portray the US as a state that just hasn't done enough a couple of times to stop these huge acts of violence committed by other states.
That is the danger of this book's premise: propagating the idea that the American government is just a bystander that failed to act, and not a primary source of death and murder. The cases Power points to are correctly labeled as examples of American failure and shame. The US could and should have done more to stop the Rwandan genocide and many others like it. But the US also should not have led the overthrow of many democratically elected governments and inserted strongmen who oppressed and murdered their own citizens (Pinochet and Mobutu, to name two). Not pointing out both of these faults in American foreign policy is, again, either intellectually lazy or worse.
The majority of this book, however, was a hollow argument for the superiority of liberal interventionism. The structure of each case study goes like this: a genocide started; the US MAY have borne some blame for the conditions that allowed the violence to start; the US didn't intervene; OR the US did intervene and everything went great. The historical background for all the genocides is superficial at best. For example, Power never even addresses the issue of how the Hutu and Tutsi identities came into being in Rwanda. She mentions that there was some animosity based on the structure of the colonial administration and not much else. I understand that the majority of this book was dedicated to the American response to genocides throughout history, but not properly contextualizing the situation is at best a mistake and at worst a deliberate attempt to strengthen an argument. I was amazed that this book was so long, given how little detail she put into the case studies.
Most importantly, though, I think this book operates from an inherently false and dangerous premise. The basic assumption from which the whole book flows is that the US is a world superpower (true) and has the means to stop violence around the world (also true). Few people can dispute those two facts. And yes, the US should make as many efforts as possible to stop violence, especially genocide, around the world. But the US is also one of the leading causes of violence around the world. From Chile in the 1970s to Iraq in the 2000s, the US has been responsible for high levels of violence and human rights abuse. Power doesn't even mention these points, instead focusing on how the US could have stopped other states who were killing people. Presenting only this half of the coin is to portray the US as a state that just hasn't done enough a couple of times to stop these huge acts of violence committed by other states.
That is the danger of this book's premise: propagating the idea that the American government is just a bystander that failed to act, and not a primary source of death and murder. The cases Power points to are correctly labeled as examples of American failure and shame. The US could and should have done more to stop the Rwandan genocide and many others like it. But the US also should not have led the overthrow of many democratically elected governments and inserted strongmen who oppressed and murdered their own citizens (Pinochet and Mobutu, to name two). Not pointing out both of these faults in American foreign policy is, again, either intellectually lazy or worse.
November 19, 2021
This is a difficult book to read. Both for its content and length. Most books about genocide are difficult, so this is no surprise. I have read extensively about the Armenian Genocide (Meds Yeghern), and the Shoah, or Holocaust of European Jews. These parts of the book added little to my knowledge. But, the rest of the book was very informative and distressing, relaying the stories of genocide after the world had declared "Never again"!
These were the stories of the Cambodian, Kurdish, Bosnian, Rwandan, Srebrenica (part of the Bosnian, and Kosovar genocides. The history is made more interesting because these things happened in my lifetime! While I was going about my life, going to school, getting married, and building my career, these slaughters were taking place and being debated and reported on. While I remember bits of some of these tragedies, more about others, I don't remember the details, or what I felt at the time. (I assume horror when the details were finally revealed.) I thus share in the shame of knowing atrocities happened on my watch. I did not protest, write letters, or raise hell! I felt self righteous as I asserted, when reading about the Shoah, that I would have protested, done everything in my power, to make a difference in ending the slaughter. However, I will be one of those future generations will ask about. Why did you do nothing? Very humbling!
The rest of the book relates the history of Mr. Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who lost family members in the Shoah, who coined the term genocide, and gave the rest of his life working to see this become an international crime, punishable in International Courts as "crimes against humanity". The United States took over 40 years to ratify this United Nations resolution, long after many other countries had done so. The first case of genocide coming before an international tribunal, after the Nuremberg trials, was that involving the Serbs against Muslims in the 1990s!
We read about the foot dragging of the United States, over and over again, through multiple presidencies, and see how the State Departments response to many atrocities, was exactly the same as their response to the Holocaust/ Shoah! I gained respect for some politicians, and lost some respect for others, who looked the other way, even multiple times!
The attacks on American soil of 9/11 brought it home in a way like no other. When a group wants to annihilate another group for "who" they are, not for anything they have done, it is Chilling!
I will end with a quote from the book, which shook me. She was discussing the Rwandan massacre, explaining that they experienced the equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days! "When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to its friends around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. When the Tutsi cried out (or the Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Bosnians, Kurds), by contrast, every country in the world turned away."
These were the stories of the Cambodian, Kurdish, Bosnian, Rwandan, Srebrenica (part of the Bosnian, and Kosovar genocides. The history is made more interesting because these things happened in my lifetime! While I was going about my life, going to school, getting married, and building my career, these slaughters were taking place and being debated and reported on. While I remember bits of some of these tragedies, more about others, I don't remember the details, or what I felt at the time. (I assume horror when the details were finally revealed.) I thus share in the shame of knowing atrocities happened on my watch. I did not protest, write letters, or raise hell! I felt self righteous as I asserted, when reading about the Shoah, that I would have protested, done everything in my power, to make a difference in ending the slaughter. However, I will be one of those future generations will ask about. Why did you do nothing? Very humbling!
The rest of the book relates the history of Mr. Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who lost family members in the Shoah, who coined the term genocide, and gave the rest of his life working to see this become an international crime, punishable in International Courts as "crimes against humanity". The United States took over 40 years to ratify this United Nations resolution, long after many other countries had done so. The first case of genocide coming before an international tribunal, after the Nuremberg trials, was that involving the Serbs against Muslims in the 1990s!
We read about the foot dragging of the United States, over and over again, through multiple presidencies, and see how the State Departments response to many atrocities, was exactly the same as their response to the Holocaust/ Shoah! I gained respect for some politicians, and lost some respect for others, who looked the other way, even multiple times!
The attacks on American soil of 9/11 brought it home in a way like no other. When a group wants to annihilate another group for "who" they are, not for anything they have done, it is Chilling!
I will end with a quote from the book, which shook me. She was discussing the Rwandan massacre, explaining that they experienced the equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days! "When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to its friends around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. When the Tutsi cried out (or the Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Bosnians, Kurds), by contrast, every country in the world turned away."
May 11, 2018
Samantha Power is an Irish born, American raised woman who served in a myriad of important posts within the US Government, including US Ambassador to the United Nations. Given her high status and delicate position, you wouldn't be blamed if you thought that she, like many others who held public office, would NOT write a book about how absolutely disgusting the US behaviour has been with regards to genocide. And yet she did. And this book is it. The size and scope of this work is huge - Armenia, Holocaust, Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda and Bosnia are all covered - and meaningful details are cleverly pushed forward so the reader can understand situations, people and policies. The author's tone is clear, stern, demanding on the mind but totally appropriate for the topic she is discussing. More importantly, although the book is highly biased - it blames the US for an immense amount of mistakes - it is not pedantic or excessively angry. It is, instead, sharp in its indictment. For those interested in the subject, this is a necessary read, and one which will open your eyes to the inability of the "greatest power in the world" to live up to its name.
April 20, 2009
Samantha Power has written a very well-researched book profiling cases of genocide in the 21st century (in Turkey, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda, Balkans, Srebrenica, and Kosovo). Powers descibed the crusade taken on by numerous heroic individuals to avert genocide (none of whom I had previously heard of), such as Raphael Lemkin, William Proxmire, Henry Morgenthau, and James Kenneth Galbraith.
Power not only describes the recognition and responses to genocide in each of the case studies profiled, but she also describes the birth of the word genocide and the UN treaty that criminalized it. We take for granted the recognition and definition of the term "genocide", but at the time of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, the word did not even exist. We also take for granted the existence of a UN treaty condemning genocide, but it took 40 years after UN adoption for the US to even ratify the treaty, fearing that accusations of genocide might be brought against the US.
Power reveals many examples of the impotence of the United Nations (particularly the United States) in preventing or intervening in mass killings in the 20th century. Not until national interests were in jeopardy (and after genocide had already taken a heavy toll) did the United States and the international community act. For example, not until American oil interests in Kuwait were threatened did the United States intervene against Iraq in its extermination of the Kurds. The Anfal Campaign of 1988 carried out by Saddam Hussein killed ~150,000 Kurds and importantly was carried out with chemical weapons; yet, the US showed a range of reactions (that typify its response to the other atrocities as well): denial, blame of the victims, hope that perpetrators could be swayed, downplaying of the accusations, and simply inaction. In the end, there was insurmountable (with rare exceptions) inertia to even condemning acts of genocide.
Power is critical of previous American presidents (particularly hard on G. Bush I and Bill Clinton) for their inaction, but she is balanced in her lambast. She provides sufficient details on the political climate and internal debates in the various administrations that provides contexts in which the decisions to not intervene took place. She frequently concedes ground to counterpoints, such as the idea that action might actually exacerbate genocide. This adds depth to her book and gives her credibility as a realist rather than some hippie liberal.
The book does not get a 5/5 from me because of the lack of coverage of atrocities that the US contributed to. Powers asserts numerous times that the US was concerned that "rogue" states might bring up genocide charges against the US, but she did not elaborate on the validity of these claims. The US was complicit in and contributed to genocide carried out by Pinochet in Chile and the military in Guatemala, among others. Also, US treatment of Native Americans could also be counted as a genocide. None of these accounts were mentioned. These inconvenient aspects of our history is crucial in understanding why the United States dragged its feet on ratifying the UN treaty on genocide and why the US voted against the creation of the International Criminal Court, a permanent tribunal to prosecute genocide and other crimes against humanity. These details are important int understanding why the United States has been so inept in responding to these human atrocities, but were not covered.
I would describe my political views as that of a pacifist, but this book has turned me towards the idea of the need for a truly independent international body (rather than the UN) that can and will intervene militarily to avert genocide.
All in all, this was a stellar piece of investigative work that taught me a lot about the history of genocide. The progress in making genocide history is painstakingly slow, but the progress is apparent and of course the hope that the world will be able to shake inertia toresponding to genocide in the future.
Power not only describes the recognition and responses to genocide in each of the case studies profiled, but she also describes the birth of the word genocide and the UN treaty that criminalized it. We take for granted the recognition and definition of the term "genocide", but at the time of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, the word did not even exist. We also take for granted the existence of a UN treaty condemning genocide, but it took 40 years after UN adoption for the US to even ratify the treaty, fearing that accusations of genocide might be brought against the US.
Power reveals many examples of the impotence of the United Nations (particularly the United States) in preventing or intervening in mass killings in the 20th century. Not until national interests were in jeopardy (and after genocide had already taken a heavy toll) did the United States and the international community act. For example, not until American oil interests in Kuwait were threatened did the United States intervene against Iraq in its extermination of the Kurds. The Anfal Campaign of 1988 carried out by Saddam Hussein killed ~150,000 Kurds and importantly was carried out with chemical weapons; yet, the US showed a range of reactions (that typify its response to the other atrocities as well): denial, blame of the victims, hope that perpetrators could be swayed, downplaying of the accusations, and simply inaction. In the end, there was insurmountable (with rare exceptions) inertia to even condemning acts of genocide.
Power is critical of previous American presidents (particularly hard on G. Bush I and Bill Clinton) for their inaction, but she is balanced in her lambast. She provides sufficient details on the political climate and internal debates in the various administrations that provides contexts in which the decisions to not intervene took place. She frequently concedes ground to counterpoints, such as the idea that action might actually exacerbate genocide. This adds depth to her book and gives her credibility as a realist rather than some hippie liberal.
The book does not get a 5/5 from me because of the lack of coverage of atrocities that the US contributed to. Powers asserts numerous times that the US was concerned that "rogue" states might bring up genocide charges against the US, but she did not elaborate on the validity of these claims. The US was complicit in and contributed to genocide carried out by Pinochet in Chile and the military in Guatemala, among others. Also, US treatment of Native Americans could also be counted as a genocide. None of these accounts were mentioned. These inconvenient aspects of our history is crucial in understanding why the United States dragged its feet on ratifying the UN treaty on genocide and why the US voted against the creation of the International Criminal Court, a permanent tribunal to prosecute genocide and other crimes against humanity. These details are important int understanding why the United States has been so inept in responding to these human atrocities, but were not covered.
I would describe my political views as that of a pacifist, but this book has turned me towards the idea of the need for a truly independent international body (rather than the UN) that can and will intervene militarily to avert genocide.
All in all, this was a stellar piece of investigative work that taught me a lot about the history of genocide. The progress in making genocide history is painstakingly slow, but the progress is apparent and of course the hope that the world will be able to shake inertia toresponding to genocide in the future.
August 2, 2013
Grinding, grueling, exhausting account of a series of genocides and the United States's response � or generally lack thereof.
Other people have criticized this book at length for failing to address the ways the United States was actively complicit in genocidal violence through support of its perpetrators. The criticism is accurate, though I think it's a product of the focus of this book very specifically on passive complicity.
I had read excerpts of this over the years, and I'm glad I finally sat down and went through all of it, cover-to-cover. But this is a first generation book, and now I want the fifth generation, or the seventh generation, if you know what I mean. Because Power spends a lot of time documenting American disinterest in mass death, and some time talking about the reasons, but the reasons are very . . . cerebral. This economic interest, that political exigency, a few general comments about racism.
This book made me think a lot about pain, and being the observer of it. I mean, most of us catch glimpses of indescribable anguish out of the corners of our eyes all the time, but we've developed defensive emotional blinders. But once in a while, someone looks at the newspaper headline that ten thousand other people read and forgot, and that one person is seared. Irrevocably changed just by knowing that five thousand people halfway around the world were "disappeared." I've known some people like that, and worked with them. One of them was the first person to make me read excerpts of this book.
I want the book about those people. And the contextual, psychological, physiological, etc. differences between them and the rest of us. And the book that takes a deeper, more honest look at the psychology of passive complicity, not just its economic logic. Because Power wrote mostly about when and where and who, and left me pretty messed up over why.
Other people have criticized this book at length for failing to address the ways the United States was actively complicit in genocidal violence through support of its perpetrators. The criticism is accurate, though I think it's a product of the focus of this book very specifically on passive complicity.
I had read excerpts of this over the years, and I'm glad I finally sat down and went through all of it, cover-to-cover. But this is a first generation book, and now I want the fifth generation, or the seventh generation, if you know what I mean. Because Power spends a lot of time documenting American disinterest in mass death, and some time talking about the reasons, but the reasons are very . . . cerebral. This economic interest, that political exigency, a few general comments about racism.
This book made me think a lot about pain, and being the observer of it. I mean, most of us catch glimpses of indescribable anguish out of the corners of our eyes all the time, but we've developed defensive emotional blinders. But once in a while, someone looks at the newspaper headline that ten thousand other people read and forgot, and that one person is seared. Irrevocably changed just by knowing that five thousand people halfway around the world were "disappeared." I've known some people like that, and worked with them. One of them was the first person to make me read excerpts of this book.
I want the book about those people. And the contextual, psychological, physiological, etc. differences between them and the rest of us. And the book that takes a deeper, more honest look at the psychology of passive complicity, not just its economic logic. Because Power wrote mostly about when and where and who, and left me pretty messed up over why.
May 12, 2014
Samantha Power gives a compelling account of the twentieth century history of genocide and American responses (largely non-responses) to this horrendous evil. She covers a sobering reality with a journalists skill of both careful documentation and rendering a riveting narrative.
She begins with the life of Rafael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who became fascinated at the crimes against humanity wrought by the Turks against Armenians in World War 1. Fleeing Poland when he recognizes the same patterns in the Third Reich, he suffered the loss of most of his family and became a lifelong advocate against these crimes, to which he gave the term "genocide". His crowning achievement was to participate in the drafting of the UN conventions against genocide.
And so we come to the US response. Lemkin died in 1959 without seeing the US ratify these conventions, which would have done so much to strengthen the world's response to genocide. We see the bloody regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the war-weary non-response of the US. Ultimately, our former enemies, the Vietnamese brought down this bloody regime and exposed their crimes. Only in 1985, after Reagan's disastrous visit to Bitburg did he push for the passage of the genocide conventions, although in a qualified form to protect the US against genocide charges.
Sadly, even the Holocaust, even Cambodia are insufficient to arouse the conscience of the US. Power documents a studied avoidance by our political leaders, that discounts evidence of genocide, that equivocates on calling these crimes "genocide", that fails to use even US diplomatic and economic influence against genocide, and is unwilling to risk American lives to save the lives of the thousands who died in the successive genocides she chronicles in Kurdish Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. By and large, Power chalks this up to a determination that American interests were not directly involved, resulting in the moral equivocations to justify inaction.
The latter part of the book chronicles what can happen when the US does act, as it finally did in Kosovo. Goaded by political opposition, the Clinton administration authorized US involvement with NATO bombings and subsequent peace-keeping efforts that brought an end to the Milosevic regime's efforts to exterminate or "cleanse" the land of Albanians in Kosovo. And subsequently it supported the seizure of Milosevic and many other war criminals to be tried for genocide at the Hague. Very belatedly Rafael Lemkin's dream is realized.
The book ends in 2002, just after 9/11. Since then we have witnessed genocide in the South Sudan, and a current ominous situation in the Central African Republic. Samantha Power is now US ambassador to the United Nations and a senior official in the Obama administration. It will be interesting to see whether Power can change from the inside the culture of inaction she decried from the outside.
She begins with the life of Rafael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who became fascinated at the crimes against humanity wrought by the Turks against Armenians in World War 1. Fleeing Poland when he recognizes the same patterns in the Third Reich, he suffered the loss of most of his family and became a lifelong advocate against these crimes, to which he gave the term "genocide". His crowning achievement was to participate in the drafting of the UN conventions against genocide.
And so we come to the US response. Lemkin died in 1959 without seeing the US ratify these conventions, which would have done so much to strengthen the world's response to genocide. We see the bloody regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the war-weary non-response of the US. Ultimately, our former enemies, the Vietnamese brought down this bloody regime and exposed their crimes. Only in 1985, after Reagan's disastrous visit to Bitburg did he push for the passage of the genocide conventions, although in a qualified form to protect the US against genocide charges.
Sadly, even the Holocaust, even Cambodia are insufficient to arouse the conscience of the US. Power documents a studied avoidance by our political leaders, that discounts evidence of genocide, that equivocates on calling these crimes "genocide", that fails to use even US diplomatic and economic influence against genocide, and is unwilling to risk American lives to save the lives of the thousands who died in the successive genocides she chronicles in Kurdish Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. By and large, Power chalks this up to a determination that American interests were not directly involved, resulting in the moral equivocations to justify inaction.
The latter part of the book chronicles what can happen when the US does act, as it finally did in Kosovo. Goaded by political opposition, the Clinton administration authorized US involvement with NATO bombings and subsequent peace-keeping efforts that brought an end to the Milosevic regime's efforts to exterminate or "cleanse" the land of Albanians in Kosovo. And subsequently it supported the seizure of Milosevic and many other war criminals to be tried for genocide at the Hague. Very belatedly Rafael Lemkin's dream is realized.
The book ends in 2002, just after 9/11. Since then we have witnessed genocide in the South Sudan, and a current ominous situation in the Central African Republic. Samantha Power is now US ambassador to the United Nations and a senior official in the Obama administration. It will be interesting to see whether Power can change from the inside the culture of inaction she decried from the outside.
July 31, 2016
This book does a good job of documenting some of the genocides in the 20th century but offers little insight into how they could have been prevented or how our current systems failed. There is larger missing problem which is never addressed in this book, which is how we can respond more quickly and positively in the future.
There is no examination of international law as it exists today, how it works and does not work. There is no mention of Russia and China's role on the security council and how that impacts actions or lack of actions taken regarding genocides. There is no mention of the limitations of the Hague. I was very disappointed in this book as it was touted as offering insight into a very complex problem. Perhaps I expected too much, but the synopsis seemed to offer what wasn't found in the text. Reports by NGO's like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch offer better insight into much of the politics, diplomacy and dynamics surrounding these complex situations.
In the final analysis this appears to be largely a history book told from the prospective of a journalist documenting the events but adding little context or insight into the politics surrounding the events.
There is no examination of international law as it exists today, how it works and does not work. There is no mention of Russia and China's role on the security council and how that impacts actions or lack of actions taken regarding genocides. There is no mention of the limitations of the Hague. I was very disappointed in this book as it was touted as offering insight into a very complex problem. Perhaps I expected too much, but the synopsis seemed to offer what wasn't found in the text. Reports by NGO's like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch offer better insight into much of the politics, diplomacy and dynamics surrounding these complex situations.
In the final analysis this appears to be largely a history book told from the prospective of a journalist documenting the events but adding little context or insight into the politics surrounding the events.
Read
January 22, 2022Samantha Power held high offices in recent administrations, and wrote a memoir on her time in government. This book, on genocides all through the 20th century, is informative and deeply disturbing--especially after I visited Cambodia, site of one of the worst genocides.
July 27, 2018
In this forcefully argued book, Samantha Power urges the United States to place humanitarian objectives at the centre of its foreign policy agenda, and warns against narrowly defined conceptions of the US "national interest" which have often served to prevent the United States from intervening whilst genocides have taken place. It is well-argued, extremely well-documented, and Power attempts to engage with the strongest arguments against her position. One exception to this is that she does not really grapple with the question of whether it is right for the West to bypass the UN Security Council (if necessary) when carrying out a military intervention. Thus, while her section on Kosovo addressed many of the arguments levelled against that controversial intervention, the legal aspect was not addressed.
For a book which won the Pulitzer Prize and earned plaudits from across the political spectrum, it is noticeably radical. Like Noam Chomsky, Power accuses the United States government - or rather many individuals within it - of repeatedly being complicit in genocide due to concern for US economic and strategic interests, as well as US lives, outweighing concern for hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. For example, when criticising the US for its failure to prevent Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Kurds, she writes that "U.S. patience would have worn thin far sooner if not for American farming, manufacturing and geopolitical interests in Iraq".
Comparisons between Samantha Power and Noam Chomsky may appear to be far-fetched; after all, Chomsky is a dissident while Power was the US Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013-2017. Yet, Power herself - while criticizing what she perceives to be Chomsky's reflexive anti-Americanism - endorses his core framework in a , Hegemony or Survival:
This explains why some on the US right opposed her appointment as Obama's UN Ambassador. The similarities between her views and Noam Chomsky's were noted more than once by right-wing columnists. Moreover, on questioning before the appointment, repeatedly disavow things she had written about the United States being an "empire", and on the need for “a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored or permitted by the United States.�
Of course, this isn't to say that her book was endorsed by the Chomskyite left. Far from it. When the late Howard Zinn, who was another darling of the anti-imperialist left, (before going on to criticise her) that "Samantha Power has done extraordinary work in chronicling the genocides of our time, and in exposing how the Western powers were complicit by their inaction", Edward Herman (who was an occasional co-author of Chomsky's) a ferocious response to him, calling Power a member of the "cruise missile left" and accusing her of ignoring genocides and other atrocities that the US had not merely been indifferent to, but had actively condoned, supported or carried out.
While it is true that the Vietnam War did not get much attention, Power does acknowledge that the US bombing of Cambodia helped to lead to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. And, contrary to Herman's assertion, the US-backed Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 does get a mention, albeit a brief one. That said, it is true that there is no mention of the genocide committed in Guatemala, backed by the US, while the genocide in East Timor (again, condoned by the US) is only briefly mentioned by Power.
In other words, those on the Chomskyite left bitterly complain that Power focuses on genocides committed by "them", but not by "us". Or, to put it another way, Power focuses on the US Government's sins of omission as opposed to their sins of commission. Despite this, around the time of this book's publication, Power did talk of "crimes committed, sponsored or permitted by the United States". Moreover, those who identify as members of the "anti-imperialist" left do the exact opposite to what they accuse Power of doing. As she writes in the aforementioned 2004 review: "For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. America, the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those categorized as oppressed receive scant mention."
In my submission, we can bypass this debate by acknowledging that both Power and Chomsky have something to offer citizens of Western countries who support a humane and ethical foreign policy that is less beholden to economic, strategic and special interests. In some cases, this may require military intervention. In others, it may not. A Problem From Hell is not the final word on how US foreign policy should be conducted, but it is an extremely valuable contribution to the debate, and should be judged on its own merits; neither its supposed omissions nor Power's actions in her subsequent career at the heart of the US Government are valid reasons to dimiss the book as it stands.
For a book which won the Pulitzer Prize and earned plaudits from across the political spectrum, it is noticeably radical. Like Noam Chomsky, Power accuses the United States government - or rather many individuals within it - of repeatedly being complicit in genocide due to concern for US economic and strategic interests, as well as US lives, outweighing concern for hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. For example, when criticising the US for its failure to prevent Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Kurds, she writes that "U.S. patience would have worn thin far sooner if not for American farming, manufacturing and geopolitical interests in Iraq".
Comparisons between Samantha Power and Noam Chomsky may appear to be far-fetched; after all, Chomsky is a dissident while Power was the US Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013-2017. Yet, Power herself - while criticizing what she perceives to be Chomsky's reflexive anti-Americanism - endorses his core framework in a , Hegemony or Survival:
...it is essential to demand, as Chomsky does, that a country with the might of the United States stop being so selective in applying its principles... he is right to demand that officials in Washington devote themselves more zealously to strengthening international institutions, curbing arms flows and advancing human rights.
This explains why some on the US right opposed her appointment as Obama's UN Ambassador. The similarities between her views and Noam Chomsky's were noted more than once by right-wing columnists. Moreover, on questioning before the appointment, repeatedly disavow things she had written about the United States being an "empire", and on the need for “a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored or permitted by the United States.�
Of course, this isn't to say that her book was endorsed by the Chomskyite left. Far from it. When the late Howard Zinn, who was another darling of the anti-imperialist left, (before going on to criticise her) that "Samantha Power has done extraordinary work in chronicling the genocides of our time, and in exposing how the Western powers were complicit by their inaction", Edward Herman (who was an occasional co-author of Chomsky's) a ferocious response to him, calling Power a member of the "cruise missile left" and accusing her of ignoring genocides and other atrocities that the US had not merely been indifferent to, but had actively condoned, supported or carried out.
While it is true that the Vietnam War did not get much attention, Power does acknowledge that the US bombing of Cambodia helped to lead to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. And, contrary to Herman's assertion, the US-backed Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 does get a mention, albeit a brief one. That said, it is true that there is no mention of the genocide committed in Guatemala, backed by the US, while the genocide in East Timor (again, condoned by the US) is only briefly mentioned by Power.
In other words, those on the Chomskyite left bitterly complain that Power focuses on genocides committed by "them", but not by "us". Or, to put it another way, Power focuses on the US Government's sins of omission as opposed to their sins of commission. Despite this, around the time of this book's publication, Power did talk of "crimes committed, sponsored or permitted by the United States". Moreover, those who identify as members of the "anti-imperialist" left do the exact opposite to what they accuse Power of doing. As she writes in the aforementioned 2004 review: "For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. America, the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those categorized as oppressed receive scant mention."
In my submission, we can bypass this debate by acknowledging that both Power and Chomsky have something to offer citizens of Western countries who support a humane and ethical foreign policy that is less beholden to economic, strategic and special interests. In some cases, this may require military intervention. In others, it may not. A Problem From Hell is not the final word on how US foreign policy should be conducted, but it is an extremely valuable contribution to the debate, and should be judged on its own merits; neither its supposed omissions nor Power's actions in her subsequent career at the heart of the US Government are valid reasons to dimiss the book as it stands.
April 17, 2017
Výnimočná a výnimočne dôležitá kniha. Detailný príbeh vzniku konceptu genocídy, medzinárodnej intervencie a príbeh genocíd 20. storočia (Arméni, Kambodža, Rwanda, Bosna, Kosovo) a americkej reakcie a nereakcie na ne.
Ak vás trápia otázky, prečo "niekto niečo" neurobil v Rwande alebo Sarajeve, tak tu je nepríjemná odpoveď: nemáme žiadnu jednoduchú odpoveď typu "nebola tam ropa" alebo "mocným na životoch nezáleží", ale vždy je to komplikovaný výsledok činnosti alebo nečinnosti množstva rôznych úradníkov a politikov s veľmi rôznymi názormi na to, čo sa vlastne deje a čo sa s tým dá alebo nedá urobiť.
Z definície sa autorka venuje oblastiam, kde západ nezasiahol a udiali sa hrozné veci, nie tým, kde zasiahol a udiali sa tiež - autorka sa snaží neustále vysvetľovať aj argumenty proti zásahom, ale vzhľadom na výber najväčších zverstiev modernej doby je to nakoniec 500 strán argumentov za americké humanitárne intervencie. Bez ohľadu na to, čo si o nich myslíte, mimoriadne dielo.
Pulitzerova cena za non-fiction 2003, 10 rokov po napísaní sa autorka stala veľvyslankyňou USA pri OSN.
Ak vás trápia otázky, prečo "niekto niečo" neurobil v Rwande alebo Sarajeve, tak tu je nepríjemná odpoveď: nemáme žiadnu jednoduchú odpoveď typu "nebola tam ropa" alebo "mocným na životoch nezáleží", ale vždy je to komplikovaný výsledok činnosti alebo nečinnosti množstva rôznych úradníkov a politikov s veľmi rôznymi názormi na to, čo sa vlastne deje a čo sa s tým dá alebo nedá urobiť.
Z definície sa autorka venuje oblastiam, kde západ nezasiahol a udiali sa hrozné veci, nie tým, kde zasiahol a udiali sa tiež - autorka sa snaží neustále vysvetľovať aj argumenty proti zásahom, ale vzhľadom na výber najväčších zverstiev modernej doby je to nakoniec 500 strán argumentov za americké humanitárne intervencie. Bez ohľadu na to, čo si o nich myslíte, mimoriadne dielo.
Pulitzerova cena za non-fiction 2003, 10 rokov po napísaní sa autorka stala veľvyslankyňou USA pri OSN.
April 2, 2023
Very interesting and compelling book. I think there are genuinely difficult questions about the degree to which the US should intervene in the affairs of other countries, but if there’s ever a time where the answer to that question is obvious, it is around genocide. The idea that counties should have dominion over the affairs of their own people should never extend to the right to murder innocent people. I would definitely recommend this as an excellent overview about the international response to various instances of genocide. Very upsetting but very important.
July 6, 2020
A seminal work with a lot of deep background and direct quotes.
"America's interests" - this term perversely presents itself all over the place where, "America is the vanguard of Liberty everywhere" should have been present. It is also explained well how much of this inaction had zero political consequences.
These are hard choices to make. Because there is no way to know in advance how it's going to turn out. But it doesn't mean no action is an option. - This is basically the gist of the message that is conveyed time and again.
It's interesting to note the biases and how ambivalent or indifferent the US Political Apparatus (with its 'American Interests' driven agenda) or UN (with its toothless, peacekeeping missions) deals with conflicts in different regions. How inspite of all this, emotional, revolutionary bureaucrats turned the tide, roused attention and tried to bring justice/peace (more often the second one than the first one).
"America's interests" - this term perversely presents itself all over the place where, "America is the vanguard of Liberty everywhere" should have been present. It is also explained well how much of this inaction had zero political consequences.
These are hard choices to make. Because there is no way to know in advance how it's going to turn out. But it doesn't mean no action is an option. - This is basically the gist of the message that is conveyed time and again.
It's interesting to note the biases and how ambivalent or indifferent the US Political Apparatus (with its 'American Interests' driven agenda) or UN (with its toothless, peacekeeping missions) deals with conflicts in different regions. How inspite of all this, emotional, revolutionary bureaucrats turned the tide, roused attention and tried to bring justice/peace (more often the second one than the first one).
January 15, 2015
Тільки лінивий не сміявся над риторикою глибокої стурбованості, серйозного занепокоєння і постійної тривоги, до якої вдається міжнародна спільнота замість того, щоб завдати хоч якусь користь. Втім, багатьом із нас ні з чим порівнювати - скажімо, я не відстежувала реакцію цієї спільноти на інші трагедії. Тож для перспективи я з інтересом прочитала «A Problem from Hell� Саманти Пауер - тієї Саманти Пауер, яку ми всі ніжно любимо, постпредставниці США.
Свою кар'єру Саманта Пауер починала як журналістка під час Боснійської війни. Вона зблизька спостерігала за етнічними чистками - серби послідовно винищували боснійське мусульманське населення - але найбільший акт геноциду, що розгорнувся після захоплення безпечної зони у Сребрениці, проґавила, бо не могла собі такого й уявити. Коли вбивства іще тривали, знайомий журналіст спитав її,чи справді серби вбили вже тисячу мусульман, вона сказала, що то напевно неправда. То справді була неправда: насправді ж вбито було 7 тисяч.
Так вона й зацікавилася реакціями офіційної Америки на геноциди - і на вірменський (власне, то ще й до появи слова «геноцид»), і на новіші, вже після Голокосту (Руанда, винищення курдів у Іраку, Камбоджа, серби проти боснійських мусульман і проти албанців у Косово).
Отже, спойлер: ми можемо переставати сміятися над міжнародним глибоким занепокоєнням, для нас зробили швидше і більше, ніж робили для багатьох інших країн у значно страшніших ситуаціях. У порівнянні з тим, як зазвичай буває, у нас все геть ок - і ситуація краща, й реакція швидша.
Отже, загальна картина така: Америка ніколи не втручалася в перебіг подій, щоб запобігти геноциду, і навіть вкрай рідко його засуджувала в процесі (й однією з останніх ратифікувала конвенцію ООН із запобігання геноциду). Часті заклики «Ніколи більше» перетворилися, за словами одного журналіста, на констатацію «німці ніколи більше не убиватимуть євреїв у Європі у 1940ві». Решта вільні робити, що їм заманеться.
На бездіяльність є кілька причин, і її виправдовують на кілька повторюваних способів. Американським політикам, журналістам і широкому загалу бракує уяви, щоб уявити собі насильство у такому масштабі, й вони натомість до останнього вірять у традиційну дипломатію і переговори. Вони вважають, що цивільне населення, яке не провокує насильства, заціліє, тож спонукають до перемир'їв і жертвують гроші на правозахисні організації. Крім того, своя сорочка ближче до тіла, широкий загал завжди у внутрішніх потребах зацікавлений більше, ніж у зовнішніх, тож невтручання зазвичай не несе з собою жодних ризиків, а втручання - несе. Щоб зменшити й без того малі ризики від невтручання, дипломати починають подавати насильство за кордоном як двостороннє, а не як односторонню агресію чи геноцид (в Боснії подавали конфлікт як «задавнений» і «безвихідий», а представник ООН Акаші навіть звинуватив мусульман, яких в той момент заривали в братські могили, у провокаціях). Крім того, всі звикли перевіряти інформацію з кількох незалежних джерел, що, очевидно, неможливо у випадку свідчень, скажімо, біженців, тож серйозність становища мінімізують, наголошуючи на фрагментарності даних. Це загальники, далі Пауер конкретно розглядає кожен окремий випадок (чому не втручатися здавалося тактично розумнішим, хто виступав за втручання, як змінювалося зображення в медіа і т.д.)
Коротше кажучи, у порівнянні з масштабними тупняками або свідомим заплюющуванням очей, які відбувалися навколо останніх кількох геноцидів, міжнародна спільнота в нашому випадку просто неймовірно швидко знаходить сателітні фото російських частин під нашим кордоном і т.д. Тож чтиво неймовірно депресивне, але конкретно в нашому випадку вселяє надію, що нас не налаштовані кидати напризволяще - якщо вони в принципі кидали напризволяще людей у суттєво гіршому становищі.
Свою кар'єру Саманта Пауер починала як журналістка під час Боснійської війни. Вона зблизька спостерігала за етнічними чистками - серби послідовно винищували боснійське мусульманське населення - але найбільший акт геноциду, що розгорнувся після захоплення безпечної зони у Сребрениці, проґавила, бо не могла собі такого й уявити. Коли вбивства іще тривали, знайомий журналіст спитав її,чи справді серби вбили вже тисячу мусульман, вона сказала, що то напевно неправда. То справді була неправда: насправді ж вбито було 7 тисяч.
Так вона й зацікавилася реакціями офіційної Америки на геноциди - і на вірменський (власне, то ще й до появи слова «геноцид»), і на новіші, вже після Голокосту (Руанда, винищення курдів у Іраку, Камбоджа, серби проти боснійських мусульман і проти албанців у Косово).
Отже, спойлер: ми можемо переставати сміятися над міжнародним глибоким занепокоєнням, для нас зробили швидше і більше, ніж робили для багатьох інших країн у значно страшніших ситуаціях. У порівнянні з тим, як зазвичай буває, у нас все геть ок - і ситуація краща, й реакція швидша.
Отже, загальна картина така: Америка ніколи не втручалася в перебіг подій, щоб запобігти геноциду, і навіть вкрай рідко його засуджувала в процесі (й однією з останніх ратифікувала конвенцію ООН із запобігання геноциду). Часті заклики «Ніколи більше» перетворилися, за словами одного журналіста, на констатацію «німці ніколи більше не убиватимуть євреїв у Європі у 1940ві». Решта вільні робити, що їм заманеться.
На бездіяльність є кілька причин, і її виправдовують на кілька повторюваних способів. Американським політикам, журналістам і широкому загалу бракує уяви, щоб уявити собі насильство у такому масштабі, й вони натомість до останнього вірять у традиційну дипломатію і переговори. Вони вважають, що цивільне населення, яке не провокує насильства, заціліє, тож спонукають до перемир'їв і жертвують гроші на правозахисні організації. Крім того, своя сорочка ближче до тіла, широкий загал завжди у внутрішніх потребах зацікавлений більше, ніж у зовнішніх, тож невтручання зазвичай не несе з собою жодних ризиків, а втручання - несе. Щоб зменшити й без того малі ризики від невтручання, дипломати починають подавати насильство за кордоном як двостороннє, а не як односторонню агресію чи геноцид (в Боснії подавали конфлікт як «задавнений» і «безвихідий», а представник ООН Акаші навіть звинуватив мусульман, яких в той момент заривали в братські могили, у провокаціях). Крім того, всі звикли перевіряти інформацію з кількох незалежних джерел, що, очевидно, неможливо у випадку свідчень, скажімо, біженців, тож серйозність становища мінімізують, наголошуючи на фрагментарності даних. Це загальники, далі Пауер конкретно розглядає кожен окремий випадок (чому не втручатися здавалося тактично розумнішим, хто виступав за втручання, як змінювалося зображення в медіа і т.д.)
Коротше кажучи, у порівнянні з масштабними тупняками або свідомим заплюющуванням очей, які відбувалися навколо останніх кількох геноцидів, міжнародна спільнота в нашому випадку просто неймовірно швидко знаходить сателітні фото російських частин під нашим кордоном і т.д. Тож чтиво неймовірно депресивне, але конкретно в нашому випадку вселяє надію, що нас не налаштовані кидати напризволяще - якщо вони в принципі кидали напризволяще людей у суттєво гіршому становищі.
November 13, 2023
� “It is the realm of domestic politics that the battle to stop genocide is lost. American political leaders interpret society-wide silence as an indicator of public indifference. They reason that they will incur no costs if the United States remains uninvolved but will face steep risks if they engage.�
� Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
The Holocaust is one of the most tragic events in human history. It claimed the lives of six million Jews between 1933 and 1945. In addition to Jews, the Nazis killed millions of other marginalized people, including 3.3 million Soviet prisoners, 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, Romani, people with disabilities, political opponents, criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals. Germany has erected memorials outside the Treblinka extermination camp and the Dachau concentration camp that read “NEVER AGAIN� in five languages. “Never again� is a phrase that has become associated with the lessons of the Holocaust. While originally adopted by Holocaust survivors, the phrase has been adopted as the world’s pledge to “never again� permit massacres or genocide. Tragically, “never again� seems to happen again and again.
In her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, former US ambassador to the United Nations and founding executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Samantha Power explores the world’s response to genocide over the past fifty years. While some of the blame for the world’s failures falls on the United Nations and NATO, Power focuses on American leaders who vow “never again,� yet repeatedly fail to stop genocide. Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Raphael Lemkin award (Institute for the Study of Genocide), and other awards, A Problem from Hell draws upon exclusive interviews with top policymakers, declassified documents, and reporting from the killing fields to show how the United States has repeatedly turned its back on genocide. Prior to Bosnia, “the Unted States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.�
The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than is generally assumed and had even prepared war crimes indictments against Adolf Hitler and his top Nazi commanders. The author introduces the reader to Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and lawyer, who warned about Hitler’s intentions in the 1930s. He moved to Washington D.C. in 1942, speaking more than one hundred times in my state of North Carolina alone. Lemkin not only wanted to let the free world know of the atrocities, he wanted to prevent future atrocities, the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation, ethnical, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. Lemkin coined the word “genocide� to describe such atrocities, made from the ancient Greek word genos (race or tribe) and the Latin cide (killing).
Before the Holocaust, the Ottoman Empire killed between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923. However, the author focuses on those acts of genocide that occurred between 1975 and 2001—acts that the world, and especially the United States, did little to stop. The first act of genocide she covers is Cambodia. In a period of just 3 years, 8 months and 20 days, the Khmer Rouge, under its leader Pol Pot, killed an estimated 2 million intellectuals, business leaders, doctors, Vietnamese, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims. In 1975, domestic turmoil in the United States surrounding the Vietnam War meant that any form of U.S. military to address the Cambodian genocide was not feasible.
Next, Power covers Iraq and the Anfal campaign of extermination against the Kurds of northern Iraq. Ali Hassan al-Majid (also called “Chemical Ali�), a cousin of President Saddam Hussein, was the overlord of the Kurdish genocide. Between 1987 and 1989, the Iraqi government carried out the summary execution of many tens of thousands of non-combatants, including large numbers of women and children. They engaged in the widespread use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve agent Sarin. They also demolished some 2,000 villages, including schools, mosques, wells, and electricity substations, forcing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers. The absence of any international outcry over this act of mass murder, despite Kurdish efforts to press the matter with the United Nations and Western governments, emboldened Baghdad to believe that it could get away with an even larger operation without any adverse reaction.
In 1994, the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority, and 2 million refugees fled Rwanda. The genocide spread throughout the country with shocking speed and brutality, as ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the Hutu Power government to take up arms against their neighbors. In many cases, machetes were the weapon of choice. Despite overwhelming evidence of genocide and knowledge as to its perpetrators, United States officials decided against taking a leading role in confronting the slaughter in Rwanda. Rather, US officials confined themselves to public statements, diplomatic measures, initiatives for a ceasefire, and attempts to contact the government perpetrating the killing. However, the US did use its influence at the United Nations to discourage a robust UN response.
In April 1992, the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Over the next several years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, perpetrated atrocious crimes against Bosnian Muslims and Croatian civilians, resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 people by 1995. Many Bosnian Muslims were driven into concentration camps, where women and girls were systematically gang-raped and other civilians were tortured, starved and murdered.
In July 1995, the Serbs engaged in the genocide of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from the so-called safe area of Srebrenica. An estimated 23,000 women, children and elderly people were put on buses and driven to Muslim-controlled territory, while 8,000 men of military age were detained and slaughtered. Srebrenica fell without a single shot being fired by United Nations forces. The Serbs also engaged in the killing of Albanians in Kosovo. There is enough evidence to conclude that probably around 10,000 Kosovar Albanians were killed by Serbian forces. For over four years, the United States refused to take the lead in trying to end the violence and conflict. Only in the summer of 1995 did the United States finally take on a leadership role to end the war in Bosnia.
These acts of genocide occurred during four consecutive United States presidencies—Jimmy Carter, Ronal Reagan, George Bush Sr, and Bill Clinton. Two democrats and two Republicans—an equal opportunity failure by the United States government. Samantha Power’s focus is on the world’s response (or should I say failure) to respond to these atrocities, including the United States. Heck—it took the United States forty years to sign the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide! What makes the failures of the United States to act in each of these cases even more difficult to understand is the willingness of the government to make ill-advised incursions into Vietnam, Iraq (under George W. Bush) and Afghanistan. While Power provides information for the reader to understand what transpired, the reader need not be concerned that they are going to be immersed in all the gory details. This book deserves special recognition. If I could give it six stars, I would. This is as close to a “must read� recommendation as I will ever get.
� Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
The Holocaust is one of the most tragic events in human history. It claimed the lives of six million Jews between 1933 and 1945. In addition to Jews, the Nazis killed millions of other marginalized people, including 3.3 million Soviet prisoners, 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, Romani, people with disabilities, political opponents, criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals. Germany has erected memorials outside the Treblinka extermination camp and the Dachau concentration camp that read “NEVER AGAIN� in five languages. “Never again� is a phrase that has become associated with the lessons of the Holocaust. While originally adopted by Holocaust survivors, the phrase has been adopted as the world’s pledge to “never again� permit massacres or genocide. Tragically, “never again� seems to happen again and again.
In her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, former US ambassador to the United Nations and founding executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Samantha Power explores the world’s response to genocide over the past fifty years. While some of the blame for the world’s failures falls on the United Nations and NATO, Power focuses on American leaders who vow “never again,� yet repeatedly fail to stop genocide. Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Raphael Lemkin award (Institute for the Study of Genocide), and other awards, A Problem from Hell draws upon exclusive interviews with top policymakers, declassified documents, and reporting from the killing fields to show how the United States has repeatedly turned its back on genocide. Prior to Bosnia, “the Unted States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.�
The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than is generally assumed and had even prepared war crimes indictments against Adolf Hitler and his top Nazi commanders. The author introduces the reader to Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and lawyer, who warned about Hitler’s intentions in the 1930s. He moved to Washington D.C. in 1942, speaking more than one hundred times in my state of North Carolina alone. Lemkin not only wanted to let the free world know of the atrocities, he wanted to prevent future atrocities, the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation, ethnical, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. Lemkin coined the word “genocide� to describe such atrocities, made from the ancient Greek word genos (race or tribe) and the Latin cide (killing).
Before the Holocaust, the Ottoman Empire killed between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923. However, the author focuses on those acts of genocide that occurred between 1975 and 2001—acts that the world, and especially the United States, did little to stop. The first act of genocide she covers is Cambodia. In a period of just 3 years, 8 months and 20 days, the Khmer Rouge, under its leader Pol Pot, killed an estimated 2 million intellectuals, business leaders, doctors, Vietnamese, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims. In 1975, domestic turmoil in the United States surrounding the Vietnam War meant that any form of U.S. military to address the Cambodian genocide was not feasible.
Next, Power covers Iraq and the Anfal campaign of extermination against the Kurds of northern Iraq. Ali Hassan al-Majid (also called “Chemical Ali�), a cousin of President Saddam Hussein, was the overlord of the Kurdish genocide. Between 1987 and 1989, the Iraqi government carried out the summary execution of many tens of thousands of non-combatants, including large numbers of women and children. They engaged in the widespread use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve agent Sarin. They also demolished some 2,000 villages, including schools, mosques, wells, and electricity substations, forcing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers. The absence of any international outcry over this act of mass murder, despite Kurdish efforts to press the matter with the United Nations and Western governments, emboldened Baghdad to believe that it could get away with an even larger operation without any adverse reaction.
In 1994, the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority, and 2 million refugees fled Rwanda. The genocide spread throughout the country with shocking speed and brutality, as ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the Hutu Power government to take up arms against their neighbors. In many cases, machetes were the weapon of choice. Despite overwhelming evidence of genocide and knowledge as to its perpetrators, United States officials decided against taking a leading role in confronting the slaughter in Rwanda. Rather, US officials confined themselves to public statements, diplomatic measures, initiatives for a ceasefire, and attempts to contact the government perpetrating the killing. However, the US did use its influence at the United Nations to discourage a robust UN response.
In April 1992, the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Over the next several years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, perpetrated atrocious crimes against Bosnian Muslims and Croatian civilians, resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 people by 1995. Many Bosnian Muslims were driven into concentration camps, where women and girls were systematically gang-raped and other civilians were tortured, starved and murdered.
In July 1995, the Serbs engaged in the genocide of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from the so-called safe area of Srebrenica. An estimated 23,000 women, children and elderly people were put on buses and driven to Muslim-controlled territory, while 8,000 men of military age were detained and slaughtered. Srebrenica fell without a single shot being fired by United Nations forces. The Serbs also engaged in the killing of Albanians in Kosovo. There is enough evidence to conclude that probably around 10,000 Kosovar Albanians were killed by Serbian forces. For over four years, the United States refused to take the lead in trying to end the violence and conflict. Only in the summer of 1995 did the United States finally take on a leadership role to end the war in Bosnia.
These acts of genocide occurred during four consecutive United States presidencies—Jimmy Carter, Ronal Reagan, George Bush Sr, and Bill Clinton. Two democrats and two Republicans—an equal opportunity failure by the United States government. Samantha Power’s focus is on the world’s response (or should I say failure) to respond to these atrocities, including the United States. Heck—it took the United States forty years to sign the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide! What makes the failures of the United States to act in each of these cases even more difficult to understand is the willingness of the government to make ill-advised incursions into Vietnam, Iraq (under George W. Bush) and Afghanistan. While Power provides information for the reader to understand what transpired, the reader need not be concerned that they are going to be immersed in all the gory details. This book deserves special recognition. If I could give it six stars, I would. This is as close to a “must read� recommendation as I will ever get.
August 7, 2008
Every American should read this book twice! It is exceptionally well written, well researched, and unbelievably compelling. It explains the history of America's place in international law and polics from the Armenian genocide of WWI to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. It tells the compelling personal stories of those involved on the international stage, and behind the scenes. This book is exceptionally well balanced. It neither praises nor villifies the United States. Rather, its purpose is to inform the American public about American foreign policy, and to help non-Americans understand why America takes the actions - or inactions that it does. Every American should read this book!
March 5, 2020
Actually more like a 4.5, but I rounded up because it's a book I think that many people (but especially Americans) should read.
It's been a long time since I've read such a well constructed, well argued, and thoroughly damning analysis of US foreign policy. Samantha Power lays out an accessible, data-rich take on the history of genocide in the 20th-century, focused on American foreign policy decisions, or more frequently the lack thereof. The book is structured chronologically, beginning with the Armenian genocide, progressing through the Holocaust and Raphael Lemkin's creation of the word "genocide" and his tireless work to get the United Nations to pass a convention on genocide, then through the genocides of the Cambodians, Kurdish, Bosnian muslims, Rwandans, and Kosovar Albanians. With the exception of the chapter on the Armenians, which is unfortunately brief, Power breaks down the historical events, and specifically the stages of American reaction to them. She does an excellent job of not lumping together these different situations into one simplistic series of cause and effect. Rather she takes into account the various historical and cultural complexities, and how they combined to produce similar inaction on the part of the US. Her overall thesis is that America's continuous inaction in the face of genocide is not a failure of their foreign policy strategy, but rather the way it is intended to work. She also doesn't lay out a simplistic hindsight vision that the US would have absolutely been able to prevent genocide in every case, but she does argue that the calculations policymakers took into account had little to do with that possibility one way or the other. And when they were doubtful about whether or not they could have affected things positively, it often had more to do with a desire to stay uninvolved, rather than an honest analysis of the situation.
Rather than try to explain in a paragraph what Power's lays out in 500+ pages, I'll leave you a particularly blunt and straightforward quote from her conclusion:
It's been a long time since I've read such a well constructed, well argued, and thoroughly damning analysis of US foreign policy. Samantha Power lays out an accessible, data-rich take on the history of genocide in the 20th-century, focused on American foreign policy decisions, or more frequently the lack thereof. The book is structured chronologically, beginning with the Armenian genocide, progressing through the Holocaust and Raphael Lemkin's creation of the word "genocide" and his tireless work to get the United Nations to pass a convention on genocide, then through the genocides of the Cambodians, Kurdish, Bosnian muslims, Rwandans, and Kosovar Albanians. With the exception of the chapter on the Armenians, which is unfortunately brief, Power breaks down the historical events, and specifically the stages of American reaction to them. She does an excellent job of not lumping together these different situations into one simplistic series of cause and effect. Rather she takes into account the various historical and cultural complexities, and how they combined to produce similar inaction on the part of the US. Her overall thesis is that America's continuous inaction in the face of genocide is not a failure of their foreign policy strategy, but rather the way it is intended to work. She also doesn't lay out a simplistic hindsight vision that the US would have absolutely been able to prevent genocide in every case, but she does argue that the calculations policymakers took into account had little to do with that possibility one way or the other. And when they were doubtful about whether or not they could have affected things positively, it often had more to do with a desire to stay uninvolved, rather than an honest analysis of the situation.
Rather than try to explain in a paragraph what Power's lays out in 500+ pages, I'll leave you a particularly blunt and straightforward quote from her conclusion:
The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it. The U.S. policies crafted in response to each case of genocide examined in this book were not the accidental products of neglect. They were concrete choices made by this country's most influential decisionmakers after unspoken and explicit weighing of costs and benefits
December 13, 2012
Samantha Power's excellent history of American responses to genocide in the 20th-century is a very enlightening and very depressing story of moral failure. It follows the story of genocide from the slaughter of Armenians in 1915 through the Jewish Holocaust 30 years later, and on to the Khmer-Rouge sponsored killing fields in Cambodia in the late '70s, the mass murder of Iraqi Kurds by Saddam's government in the late '80s, the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides in the early and mid '90s and ending with the massacre of Kosovar Albanians in the late '90s. In almost all cases, the American government sat on its ass and did virtually nothing, despite ample warnings of what was coming, alarm bells rung by observers and survivors about the crime in progress, and lackadaisical attempts to punish perpetrators in the aftermath.
This book is very well-documented and well-researched. It is also pretty depressing. We have put our faith in certain institutions of national and international government to keep the peace, and this book begs the question: when both the United States, and the international peace-keeping organization it helped create, the United Nations, fail to step in when men butcher hundreds of thousands or millions of each other like dogs, was our faith in these institutions well-placed?
The book exposes the litany of excuses that the US government and the UN trotted out for doing nothing, but it raises another question, not so much what could really be done to stop a genocide in progress, but what has to happen in the future to make genocide interdiction happen? What price must we pay to save the lives of our fellow men?
A friend of mine reccommended this book to me while I was doing research for an author who is writing about the feeble American response to the Holocaust going on in Nazi-occupied Europe. I saw with my own eyes State Department cables by the dozens full of excuses as to why we could nothing to rescue Jews from Nazi extermination. It struck me that one of the difficulties which governments have in making the decision to stop genocide is that the goal of governments in regards to the rest of the world is to further its own interests, not to further the interests of all mankind. This is precisely why the United Nations is so often paralyzed: because its individual member nations have a cacophony of clashing interests that rarely coincide.
This is a good thing to keep in mind when considering the problem of how to motivate governments to take steps to halt genocide.
I haven't finished reading it yet (I'm more than 3/4 through), but this is a good book well worth reading.
This book is very well-documented and well-researched. It is also pretty depressing. We have put our faith in certain institutions of national and international government to keep the peace, and this book begs the question: when both the United States, and the international peace-keeping organization it helped create, the United Nations, fail to step in when men butcher hundreds of thousands or millions of each other like dogs, was our faith in these institutions well-placed?
The book exposes the litany of excuses that the US government and the UN trotted out for doing nothing, but it raises another question, not so much what could really be done to stop a genocide in progress, but what has to happen in the future to make genocide interdiction happen? What price must we pay to save the lives of our fellow men?
A friend of mine reccommended this book to me while I was doing research for an author who is writing about the feeble American response to the Holocaust going on in Nazi-occupied Europe. I saw with my own eyes State Department cables by the dozens full of excuses as to why we could nothing to rescue Jews from Nazi extermination. It struck me that one of the difficulties which governments have in making the decision to stop genocide is that the goal of governments in regards to the rest of the world is to further its own interests, not to further the interests of all mankind. This is precisely why the United Nations is so often paralyzed: because its individual member nations have a cacophony of clashing interests that rarely coincide.
This is a good thing to keep in mind when considering the problem of how to motivate governments to take steps to halt genocide.
I haven't finished reading it yet (I'm more than 3/4 through), but this is a good book well worth reading.
February 10, 2016
Genocide did not even exist as a term until Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish Polish lawyer and survivor of the Holocaust, invented the term after the close of World War II. Before that time, Churchill described it as a "crime with no name". The best that was offered was "barbarities" and "vandalisms" which lacked moral authority. It wasn't until 1948 that the UN was finally able to come up with a working definition of "genocide". Genocide was not entered into force as a UN Convention until 1951 and it would be 40 more years before it would be ratified ("with reservations") by the United States.
The twentieth century saw many genocides stack up before there was ever a single person brought to account: Pol-Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Hussein's use of chemical weapon's against the Kurds, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo. The notion that the US could not intervene due to an inability to effect change, the possible risks, or the lack of political will are shown to be grossly inaccurate. Not only is there a moral imperative to face genocide up front but the facts tend to show that appeasing genocidal leaders only leads to more genocide. One genocide leads to another. The victimized populations lead to revenge and greater use of violence and become havens for terrorist organizations.
I wish I could have read an updated version. Written over a decade ago, A Problem From Hell is still incredibly instructive and holds many lessons for future foreign policy in regards to genocide. Since the book was written, there has been the first warrant for a sitting Head-of-State, Omar al-Bashir in Darfur.
The twentieth century saw many genocides stack up before there was ever a single person brought to account: Pol-Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Hussein's use of chemical weapon's against the Kurds, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo. The notion that the US could not intervene due to an inability to effect change, the possible risks, or the lack of political will are shown to be grossly inaccurate. Not only is there a moral imperative to face genocide up front but the facts tend to show that appeasing genocidal leaders only leads to more genocide. One genocide leads to another. The victimized populations lead to revenge and greater use of violence and become havens for terrorist organizations.
I wish I could have read an updated version. Written over a decade ago, A Problem From Hell is still incredibly instructive and holds many lessons for future foreign policy in regards to genocide. Since the book was written, there has been the first warrant for a sitting Head-of-State, Omar al-Bashir in Darfur.
March 29, 2012
This book really consists of two parts. One is a documentation of the birth and evolution of the concept of "genocide" during the 20th century. Power's access to documentation and powerful players in international affairs gives her unique insight into the issue. The chapters on the Armenian genocide in Turkey are especially timely given the still ongoing denial of this historical atrocity.
However, this is all ultimately used in support of an insidious agenda dressed up in humanitarian language. Power is offering up a repackaged Wilsonianism, a call to arms for the liberal hawks. She commits some egregious acts of omission and whitewashing of American complicity in genocidal actions (e.g., Native Americans, Indonesia, Iraq). By the end of the book, the reader is treated to what is essentially a manifesto for what Edward S. Herman called the "cruise-missile left." ()
There is a lot of informative and well-written material on the issue of genocide here, but a good bit of it needs to be read with a skeptical eye and the author's political agenda in mind (though I'd say that could easily apply to any book of this nature).
However, this is all ultimately used in support of an insidious agenda dressed up in humanitarian language. Power is offering up a repackaged Wilsonianism, a call to arms for the liberal hawks. She commits some egregious acts of omission and whitewashing of American complicity in genocidal actions (e.g., Native Americans, Indonesia, Iraq). By the end of the book, the reader is treated to what is essentially a manifesto for what Edward S. Herman called the "cruise-missile left." ()
There is a lot of informative and well-written material on the issue of genocide here, but a good bit of it needs to be read with a skeptical eye and the author's political agenda in mind (though I'd say that could easily apply to any book of this nature).
February 14, 2017
A very very good book indeed and as much as I disagree with interventionism personally I cannot fault Powers well reasoned points of view.
February 2, 2020
It won a Pulitzer for a reason.
August 3, 2008
so again, I'm sucked into a book that angers and saddens me. Samantha Power demonstrates that despite the lofty (but rhetorical) pledge "never again" after the Holocaust, the US gov and state leaders have never ever been willing to prevent or stop any genocide in the twentieth century. the systematic inaction and indifference of the US gov and the UN in the face of the plights of the Kurds, Cambodians, Tutsis, Kosovars and Bosnian Muslims are invariably characteristic when realpolitik remains the lingua franca of Washington and all US presidents. It takes extraordinary individuals like Henry Maugenthau, Raphael Lemkin, Peter Galbraith, Bob Dole, McCloskey to push a polls-obsessed government into action. But apart from unusual supposed "success" story the belated bombing in Srebrenica in 1995 (3 years after Milosevic's vicious "ethnic cleansing" campaign started with more than 200,000 Muslims cherished in despair) and the hyper-cautious aerial bombings in Kosovo in 1999, America has largely sat on the sideline with all sorts of rationalizations of unspeakable inhumanity elsewhere. Not only indifferent like in the case of Rwanda, the US also indirectly supported genocidal regimes like Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge or Saddam. And when thousands of people died unnecessarily, policymakers busied themselves squabbling over if these genocidal acts constituted genocide and justified America's nonintervention by a future quagmire or jeopardy.
However, the most important point Samantha Power brings home to me is that as impossible as it sounds to deter these disasters, these bloodthirsty maniacs are also vulnerable and sensitive to reactions of the international community. It's the passivity and reluctance to act that embolden them to continue their killing spree. even the most symbolic gesture from world leaders can make a difference, but the truth is that those suckers REALLY DON'T FUCKING CARE or bother to condemn these assholes. Half-hearted efforts and fixation with casualties on "our" side often preclude bold actions necessary to provide safety for civilians or bring war criminals to justice. to be honest, the book gives me some hope, not in the remote possibility of humanity of monsters, but in the power of public opinion in urging their leaders to act to prevent massacre, like Clinton in 1995 and 1999.
But apart from all the very well-documented facts and info, there is one thing Power never mentions, China...
However, the most important point Samantha Power brings home to me is that as impossible as it sounds to deter these disasters, these bloodthirsty maniacs are also vulnerable and sensitive to reactions of the international community. It's the passivity and reluctance to act that embolden them to continue their killing spree. even the most symbolic gesture from world leaders can make a difference, but the truth is that those suckers REALLY DON'T FUCKING CARE or bother to condemn these assholes. Half-hearted efforts and fixation with casualties on "our" side often preclude bold actions necessary to provide safety for civilians or bring war criminals to justice. to be honest, the book gives me some hope, not in the remote possibility of humanity of monsters, but in the power of public opinion in urging their leaders to act to prevent massacre, like Clinton in 1995 and 1999.
But apart from all the very well-documented facts and info, there is one thing Power never mentions, China...
July 18, 2016
I've been helping a friend clear out an old two-storey, five-car garage recently acquired by the condominium association she heads. Amongst various items ranging from sex toys to a truck engine were a number of books, this among them. I picked it up and read it not knowing that Samantha Power has gone on to become the U.S. representative to the United Nations. Back when she wrote it she was simply an academic with a background in journalism including work in the former Yugoslavia.
Power's experiences in Bosnia apparently inspired her to write this history of genocide. Beginning with the Armenians during WWI and ending with Kosovo, she traces the evolution of the concept into international law whereby signatory states are ostensibly required to act to prevent such activity. Here she focuses on the United States, a late, a very late signatory (and that with amendments and qualifications), and its history of weaseling out of its obligations under the law by the denial of the obvious.
What I didn't know before reading this book is that the criteria for a judgment of genocide concern the intent to destroy a culture and acts towards that end, acts which do not necessarily involve mass homicide but may include such things as forced sterilization, separation of the sexes, rape and the destruction of cultural institutions such as libraries, museums, temples, schools etc.
One hopes that Ms. Power remains firm in her convictions...
Power's experiences in Bosnia apparently inspired her to write this history of genocide. Beginning with the Armenians during WWI and ending with Kosovo, she traces the evolution of the concept into international law whereby signatory states are ostensibly required to act to prevent such activity. Here she focuses on the United States, a late, a very late signatory (and that with amendments and qualifications), and its history of weaseling out of its obligations under the law by the denial of the obvious.
What I didn't know before reading this book is that the criteria for a judgment of genocide concern the intent to destroy a culture and acts towards that end, acts which do not necessarily involve mass homicide but may include such things as forced sterilization, separation of the sexes, rape and the destruction of cultural institutions such as libraries, museums, temples, schools etc.
One hopes that Ms. Power remains firm in her convictions...
June 27, 2019
Disgusting, selective history of C20 genocide that ignores or minimizes the rôle of the US in facilitating & stoking genocide, both in some of Power's examples & in ones she conveniently omits in order to argue for more imperial intervention from the US. I read this book 16 yrs ago & still viscerally hate it.
January 25, 2010
I tend to get really depressed in the winter, and this year I just thought well.... why not?
August 31, 2020
maybe people are just bad
April 19, 2024
depressingly relevant and ironic given what the author is up to these days
October 5, 2013
Your first reaction to seeing this title is probably “Alex, why on earth would I ever read a 500+ page nonfiction book about genocide? What a downer…� And you’re right. It is a downer. Published in 2002, Samantha Power, a former journalist, human rights activist, and Harvard professor, later a chief foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, and recently appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations -- this book focuses specifically on America’s responses to the genocides of the twentieth century, from Armenia to Kosovo. Summary: the record isn’t pretty, to put it mildly.
I decided to pick up this book after seeing the video of Power’s making the case for U.S. military action in Syria, following the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attack outside Damascus on August 21, which killed over 1,400 Syrians. Given Power’s successful advocacy inside the Obama administration for robust U.S. military intervention in the past � she reportedly in convincing Obama to intervene militarily in Libya in 2011 � I thought this book would be a timely glimpse into Power's point of view as she sought to persuade Obama (and a skeptical U.S. public) to intervene in Syria.
Although U.S. action in Syria hasn't materialized, A Problem From Hell is well worth reading. Clearly written and passionately argued, Power's account is largely an attack on what Anthony Lake described as "a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions." The villains that Power singles out for the harshest criticism are the senior U.S. officials (and presidents) that knew the full extent of the horrific evil being perpetrated in places like Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, but consistently sought to either ignore or excuse it. Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton's first secretary of state, gets particularly brutal treatment in this regard.
Advocates of U.S. intervention in Syria have often tried to draw comparisons to other historical conflicts (Bosnia, for instance). While these types of analogies are highly problematic because of the dramatic differences between the conflicts, what is stunningly similar, throughout the twentieth century right up through Libya and Syria today, are the arguments that the opponents of intervention make. Probably the greatest strength of Power's book is the way she tackles and refutes these common anti-intervention arguments � summarized by economist Albert Hirschmann as “futility� (our actions won't make a difference), “perversity� (intervention will only make things worse for the people we're trying to help), and “jeopardy� (intervention will jeopardize other U.S. foreign policy goals) � head on.
A few other notable examples:
1) There are “no good guys� - In virtually every case, U.S. officials intentionally "accentuate the grayness and moral ambiguity of each crisis," emphasizing "atrocities on all sides" of the conflict, and claiming that there are "no good guys." Since genocides usually occur in the context of war (and civil wars at that), it's easy for officials to defend inaction by claiming that the U.S. doesn't want to "take sides," implying two more or less equivalent opponents. In 1992, George H.W. Bush's administration defended its policy of non-intervention in Bosnia by insisting that there were "no good guys" in Bosnian conflict, even though the Bosnian Muslims were mostly unarmed due to an international arms embargo and were essentially at the mercy of well-equipped Bosnian Serb forces. The Clinton administration continued this line of reasoning; in 1993, Bill Clinton defended the U.S.'s continued policy of inaction in Bosnia with the following statement: "Until these folks get tired of killing each other, bad things will continue to happen." (real quote)
2) We need more proof � A common theme in the U.S. reaction to genocide overseas is a vague admission that something bad might be happening, but an insistence that "more concrete evidence is needed" before the U.S. can commit to taking action (despite often already having overwhelming proof in hand). Power notes the notorious difficulty in obtaining physical evidence of atrocities due to severe lack of access for foreign observers (due to an unstable security situation, ongoing civil wars, xenophobic government policies, etc.), and also criticizes the West's repeated unwillingness to believe the accounts of refugees or opponents of the regime, who are often dismissed as “biased� or exaggerating for political gain.
Power also notes not just an unwillingness to believe such accounts because of their “hearsay� nature, but because we simply cannot believe them. U.S. officials disbelieve accounts of mass slaughter because they usually sound unbelievable. Since the U.S. foreign policy establishment is built to view all parties as “rational actors,� incredulous U.S. officials often have a hard time wrapping their minds around the conclusion that other governments would slaughter their own citizens en masse. They also refuse to believe because of the moral implications for U.S. action should the stories be true. Writes Power: "U.S. officials have been reluctant to imagine the unimaginable because of the implications...they have taken shelter in the fog of plausible deniability. They have used the search for certainty as an excuse for paralysis and postponement."
3) It will cost too much � Opponents of U.S. intervention often cite a high proposed cost, both in terms of U.S. resources and (in the case of military action) in the lives of U.S. service members. Power notes that the Pentagon has consistently and vehemently opposed U.S. military action to prevent or stop genocide in every single case, often even to the extent of exaggerating required troop levels and expected costs. Slippery-slope arguments are frequently employed: any intervention by the U.S., critics warn, will inevitably lead to another Vietnam (or, in contemporary parlance, another Iraq). Better to play it safe and do nothing than take any action and risk getting bogged down in an endless quagmire. But as the late Richard Holbrooke wrote in a 1992 op-ed, "[It] is not a choice between Vietnam and doing nothing...doing nothing now risks a far greater and more costly involvement later."
As Power noted in her September 2013 Syria speech, “there is no risk-free door number two.� Inaction has a heavy cost...though policymakers may prefer these costs, however high they may be, due to the simple fact that they are often longer-term and may not surface until long after that particular administration has left office. In addition, Power warns in her book that "citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism, and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.� This warning, written more than a decade ago, is a warning that surely rings true today when one thinks about long-term consequences for Syria.
Power's overall argument is that it was not lack of knowledge or influence that caused the U.S. to stop genocide throughout the twentieth century, but rather a lack of will. Power's brutal conclusion is that the U.S. record on genocide is not one of "failure," but rather one of success. In nearly every single case, U.S. officials successfully avoided having to taking responsibility or action to stop the massacres. She also faults U.S. society as a whole -- without political pressure, it is virtually impossible to get U.S. officials to do anything to stop genocide. U.S. officials have routinely cited lack of public support for intervention in foreign crises as an excuse for inaction. Power notes, however, the circular relationship leaders have with public opinion -- officials fail to lead by rallying the public's support to intervene to prevent genocide, and then cite lack of public support as grounds for inaction.
Power also acknowledges the difficulty of getting the U.S. public to care about genocide -- however horrific -- when it occurs thousands of miles from U.S. shores and in light of competing priorities. Writing just months after 9/11, Power readily admits that when it comes to choosing between fighting terrorism or preventing genocide in a third world country, it's hard to argue that the U.S. shouldn't devote all available resources towards protecting our own citizens. But she also offers this bit of perspective:
"In 1994 Rwanda, a country of just 8 million, experienced the numerical equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days. On an American scale this would mean 23 million people murdered in three months. When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to its friends around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. When the Tutsi cried out, by contrast, every single country in the world turned away."
Well, you might say, the U.S. can hardly be expected to send in the infantry every time civilians are threatened anywhere in the world by a murderous regime. Our resources are limited, and other countries in those regions should bear some of the burden too. Which is a fair point. But Power's response is that "what is most shocking about America's reaction to [the genocides of the 20th century] is not that the United States refused to deploy U.S. ground forces to combat the atrocities. For much of the century, even the most ardent interventionists did not lobby for U.S. ground invasions. What is most shocking is that U.S. policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime." Indeed, in many cases (such as in the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Saddam Hussein in Iraq) we even actively supported the perpetrators *while the genocides were occurring.*
Some of Power's arguments are less convincing � her early-2000s optimism about the International Criminal Court, for example, hasn't exactly been borne out by events. Regardless, this is a book that will make even the most uber-realist or non-interventionist think hard about what they believe. "How many of us who look back at the genocides of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, do not believe that [advocates of intervention] were right?� Power challenges in her conclusion. “How many of us do not believe that the presidents, senators, bureaucrats, journalists, and ordinary citizens who did nothing, choosing to look away rather than to face hard choices and wrenching moral dilemmas, were wrong?"
I decided to pick up this book after seeing the video of Power’s making the case for U.S. military action in Syria, following the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attack outside Damascus on August 21, which killed over 1,400 Syrians. Given Power’s successful advocacy inside the Obama administration for robust U.S. military intervention in the past � she reportedly in convincing Obama to intervene militarily in Libya in 2011 � I thought this book would be a timely glimpse into Power's point of view as she sought to persuade Obama (and a skeptical U.S. public) to intervene in Syria.
Although U.S. action in Syria hasn't materialized, A Problem From Hell is well worth reading. Clearly written and passionately argued, Power's account is largely an attack on what Anthony Lake described as "a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions." The villains that Power singles out for the harshest criticism are the senior U.S. officials (and presidents) that knew the full extent of the horrific evil being perpetrated in places like Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, but consistently sought to either ignore or excuse it. Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton's first secretary of state, gets particularly brutal treatment in this regard.
Advocates of U.S. intervention in Syria have often tried to draw comparisons to other historical conflicts (Bosnia, for instance). While these types of analogies are highly problematic because of the dramatic differences between the conflicts, what is stunningly similar, throughout the twentieth century right up through Libya and Syria today, are the arguments that the opponents of intervention make. Probably the greatest strength of Power's book is the way she tackles and refutes these common anti-intervention arguments � summarized by economist Albert Hirschmann as “futility� (our actions won't make a difference), “perversity� (intervention will only make things worse for the people we're trying to help), and “jeopardy� (intervention will jeopardize other U.S. foreign policy goals) � head on.
A few other notable examples:
1) There are “no good guys� - In virtually every case, U.S. officials intentionally "accentuate the grayness and moral ambiguity of each crisis," emphasizing "atrocities on all sides" of the conflict, and claiming that there are "no good guys." Since genocides usually occur in the context of war (and civil wars at that), it's easy for officials to defend inaction by claiming that the U.S. doesn't want to "take sides," implying two more or less equivalent opponents. In 1992, George H.W. Bush's administration defended its policy of non-intervention in Bosnia by insisting that there were "no good guys" in Bosnian conflict, even though the Bosnian Muslims were mostly unarmed due to an international arms embargo and were essentially at the mercy of well-equipped Bosnian Serb forces. The Clinton administration continued this line of reasoning; in 1993, Bill Clinton defended the U.S.'s continued policy of inaction in Bosnia with the following statement: "Until these folks get tired of killing each other, bad things will continue to happen." (real quote)
2) We need more proof � A common theme in the U.S. reaction to genocide overseas is a vague admission that something bad might be happening, but an insistence that "more concrete evidence is needed" before the U.S. can commit to taking action (despite often already having overwhelming proof in hand). Power notes the notorious difficulty in obtaining physical evidence of atrocities due to severe lack of access for foreign observers (due to an unstable security situation, ongoing civil wars, xenophobic government policies, etc.), and also criticizes the West's repeated unwillingness to believe the accounts of refugees or opponents of the regime, who are often dismissed as “biased� or exaggerating for political gain.
Power also notes not just an unwillingness to believe such accounts because of their “hearsay� nature, but because we simply cannot believe them. U.S. officials disbelieve accounts of mass slaughter because they usually sound unbelievable. Since the U.S. foreign policy establishment is built to view all parties as “rational actors,� incredulous U.S. officials often have a hard time wrapping their minds around the conclusion that other governments would slaughter their own citizens en masse. They also refuse to believe because of the moral implications for U.S. action should the stories be true. Writes Power: "U.S. officials have been reluctant to imagine the unimaginable because of the implications...they have taken shelter in the fog of plausible deniability. They have used the search for certainty as an excuse for paralysis and postponement."
3) It will cost too much � Opponents of U.S. intervention often cite a high proposed cost, both in terms of U.S. resources and (in the case of military action) in the lives of U.S. service members. Power notes that the Pentagon has consistently and vehemently opposed U.S. military action to prevent or stop genocide in every single case, often even to the extent of exaggerating required troop levels and expected costs. Slippery-slope arguments are frequently employed: any intervention by the U.S., critics warn, will inevitably lead to another Vietnam (or, in contemporary parlance, another Iraq). Better to play it safe and do nothing than take any action and risk getting bogged down in an endless quagmire. But as the late Richard Holbrooke wrote in a 1992 op-ed, "[It] is not a choice between Vietnam and doing nothing...doing nothing now risks a far greater and more costly involvement later."
As Power noted in her September 2013 Syria speech, “there is no risk-free door number two.� Inaction has a heavy cost...though policymakers may prefer these costs, however high they may be, due to the simple fact that they are often longer-term and may not surface until long after that particular administration has left office. In addition, Power warns in her book that "citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism, and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.� This warning, written more than a decade ago, is a warning that surely rings true today when one thinks about long-term consequences for Syria.
Power's overall argument is that it was not lack of knowledge or influence that caused the U.S. to stop genocide throughout the twentieth century, but rather a lack of will. Power's brutal conclusion is that the U.S. record on genocide is not one of "failure," but rather one of success. In nearly every single case, U.S. officials successfully avoided having to taking responsibility or action to stop the massacres. She also faults U.S. society as a whole -- without political pressure, it is virtually impossible to get U.S. officials to do anything to stop genocide. U.S. officials have routinely cited lack of public support for intervention in foreign crises as an excuse for inaction. Power notes, however, the circular relationship leaders have with public opinion -- officials fail to lead by rallying the public's support to intervene to prevent genocide, and then cite lack of public support as grounds for inaction.
Power also acknowledges the difficulty of getting the U.S. public to care about genocide -- however horrific -- when it occurs thousands of miles from U.S. shores and in light of competing priorities. Writing just months after 9/11, Power readily admits that when it comes to choosing between fighting terrorism or preventing genocide in a third world country, it's hard to argue that the U.S. shouldn't devote all available resources towards protecting our own citizens. But she also offers this bit of perspective:
"In 1994 Rwanda, a country of just 8 million, experienced the numerical equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days. On an American scale this would mean 23 million people murdered in three months. When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to its friends around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. When the Tutsi cried out, by contrast, every single country in the world turned away."
Well, you might say, the U.S. can hardly be expected to send in the infantry every time civilians are threatened anywhere in the world by a murderous regime. Our resources are limited, and other countries in those regions should bear some of the burden too. Which is a fair point. But Power's response is that "what is most shocking about America's reaction to [the genocides of the 20th century] is not that the United States refused to deploy U.S. ground forces to combat the atrocities. For much of the century, even the most ardent interventionists did not lobby for U.S. ground invasions. What is most shocking is that U.S. policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime." Indeed, in many cases (such as in the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Saddam Hussein in Iraq) we even actively supported the perpetrators *while the genocides were occurring.*
Some of Power's arguments are less convincing � her early-2000s optimism about the International Criminal Court, for example, hasn't exactly been borne out by events. Regardless, this is a book that will make even the most uber-realist or non-interventionist think hard about what they believe. "How many of us who look back at the genocides of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, do not believe that [advocates of intervention] were right?� Power challenges in her conclusion. “How many of us do not believe that the presidents, senators, bureaucrats, journalists, and ordinary citizens who did nothing, choosing to look away rather than to face hard choices and wrenching moral dilemmas, were wrong?"
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