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A review by vlodko62
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
4.0
This book is not for the faint-at-heart. And it's best read when one has the stomach for human tragedy. That said, this is one of the most important books I've read in a very long time. The author, Samantha Power, is the current US Ambassador to the United Nations.
This is a clear-eyed and impassioned view of some of the 20th Century's most horrific events - those that have cleared the definition of genocide in international law. That story is in itself a tragedy of unspeakable proportions.
The book is doubly tragic by framing its narrative around the quixotic figures who did what they could against evil - Raphael Lemkin, who fought tirelessly to get the UN Genocide Convention adopted, and died penniless and broken. Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), who stood on the floor of the US Senate every day that it was in session and spoke out to get the US to ratify the Convention (over 3,000 speeches). State Department field officers who put their careers on the line - sometimes destroying those careers entirely - by speaking out about the killings in Cambodia or the genocide against the Kurds in Iraq in the late 1980s. The generals who led UN peacekeeping missions and who were marginalized for demanding the troops and the rules of engagement that would allow them to stop the killing.
Thank you, Raphael Lemkin. Thank you Peter Galbraith. Thank you Romeo Dallaire. Thank you General Wesley Clark. Thank you Richard Holbrooke. I'll end with a quote from Holbrooke: "If we had bombed those f**kers, as I recommended, Srebrenica would not have happened."
This is a clear-eyed and impassioned view of some of the 20th Century's most horrific events - those that have cleared the definition of genocide in international law. That story is in itself a tragedy of unspeakable proportions.
The book is doubly tragic by framing its narrative around the quixotic figures who did what they could against evil - Raphael Lemkin, who fought tirelessly to get the UN Genocide Convention adopted, and died penniless and broken. Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), who stood on the floor of the US Senate every day that it was in session and spoke out to get the US to ratify the Convention (over 3,000 speeches). State Department field officers who put their careers on the line - sometimes destroying those careers entirely - by speaking out about the killings in Cambodia or the genocide against the Kurds in Iraq in the late 1980s. The generals who led UN peacekeeping missions and who were marginalized for demanding the troops and the rules of engagement that would allow them to stop the killing.
Thank you, Raphael Lemkin. Thank you Peter Galbraith. Thank you Romeo Dallaire. Thank you General Wesley Clark. Thank you Richard Holbrooke. I'll end with a quote from Holbrooke: "If we had bombed those f**kers, as I recommended, Srebrenica would not have happened."