A review by mark_lm
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

4.0

This Pulitzer Prize winning book is mainly a political history of the US response to the principal acts of genocide in the 20th century; the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, Saddam Hussein’s attack against the Iraqi Kurds, the Serbian attack against the Bosnian Muslims, the Rwandan Hutu attack against the Tutsis, and finally the specific events in Srebrenica and Kosovo. An overall summary would be that in almost all cases the United States did nothing, actively avoided doing anything, and in at least several cases made things worse e.g., when we demanded that UN peacekeeping forces be removed from Rwanda during the genocide. But there is much more here, of course, including explanations of why it is so difficult to interfere in an ongoing genocide, analyses of the various types of sophistry used to explain one’s failure to aid the persecuted, an excellent biographical discussion of the work of Raphael Lemkin (that I found more insightful than an actual biography of Raphael Lemkin that I have read), and, lest we abandon all hope, encouraging discussions of those who tried to help e.g., Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, Former Ambassador to Croatia and Diplomat Peter Galbraith, and Canadian Major General of UNAMIR Roméo Dallaire.

The author was a war correspondent and one of Obama’s ambassadors to the UN. She is now the head of AID for President Biden. I don’t know anything about her except the contents of this book; it suggests that she is unusually well qualified.

Also, I enjoyed the quote from David Rieff, that based on our subsequent actions the slogan Never again! might be best defined as Never again would Germans be permitted to kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.