Genocide - How "Never again!" became "Again and again"
If any single event had the potential to change forever the human condition, the Holocaust was surely the most likely candidate. Alas, as we have seen, but need ever to be reminded, that potential has still to be fulfilled. Much has been written and said on the topic, but perhaps the most pointed exploration of what happened, most notably, in Rwanda was provided by the PBS broadcast - THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL: How the west ignored warnings of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide and turned its back on the victims.
The website contains many horrific, but useful resources. One that impressed me was the piece, "Never Again," by Samantha Powers (Director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University) in The Atlantic magazine in 2001.
Against the background of fity years of undeniable progress in the area of human rights around the world, Powers tries to account for the persistence of "one ugly, deadly and recurrent reality":
'Genocide has occurred so often and so uncontested in the last fifty years that an epithet more apt in describing recent events than the oft-chanted "Never Again" is in fact "Again and Again."'
She mounts an equal-opportunity, bipartisan critique of American presidents over the previous 20 years - leaders who did next to nothing in the face of genocide:
"Irrespective of the political affiliation of the President at the time, the major genocides of the post-war era -- Cambodia (Carter), northern Iraq (Reagan, Bush), Bosnia (Bush, Clinton) and Rwanda (Clinton) -- have yielded virtually no American action and few stern words. American leaders have not merely refrained from sending GIs to combat genocide; when it came to atrocities in Cambodia, Iraq and Rwanda, the United States also refrained from condemning the crimes or imposing economic sanctions; and, again in Rwanda, the United States refused to authorize the deployment of a multinational U.N. force, and also squabbled over who would foot the bill for American transport vehicles."
Many of the excuses made by U.S.leaders for not acting to prevent, limit or otherwise deal with the wholesale slaughter of innocents, involve US, that's right, YOU and ME. In other words, these presidents imply, time and time again, that their hands were tied by OUR unwillingness to pay the price of intervention! The same readiness to pay attention to citizenry who were against other interventions (like the Iraq War, for example) were not nearly so apparent! In any case, Powers makes a good case that ordinary Americans were NOT nearly so isolationist as these guys made out. But for that, and other insights, you'll have to read the whole article here.
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