A shattering history of the last hundred years of genocidal war which won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction 2003.‘The United States has never in its history intervened to stop genocide and has in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.’In this convincing and definitive interrogation of the last century of American history and foreign policy, Samantha Power draws upon declassified documents, private papers, unprecedented interviews and her own reporting from the modern killing fields to tell the story of American indifference and American courage in the face of man's inhumanity to man.Tackling the argument that successive US leaders were unaware of genocidal horrors as they were occurring – against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Kurds, Rwandans, Bosnians – Samantha Power seeks to establish precisely how much was known and when, and claims that much human misery and tragedy could readily have been averted. It is clear that the failure to intervene was usually caused not by ignorance or impotence, but by considered political inaction. Several heroic figures did work to oppose and expose ethnic cleansing as it took place, but the majority of American politicians chose always to do nothing, as did the American public: Power notes that ‘no US president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.’ This riveting book makes a powerful case for why America, as both sole superpower and global citizen, must make such indifference a thing of the past.
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Samantha Power. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
“A Problem from Hell” America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 “Race Murder”
Chapter 2 “A Crime Without a Name”
Chapter 3 The Crime With a Name
Chapter 4 Lemkin’s Law
Chapter 5 “A Most Lethal Pair of Foes”
Approved and proposed for signature and ratification or accession by General Assembly resolution 260 A (III) of 9 December 1948 Entry into Force 12 January 1951, in Accordance with Article XIII
Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4
Article 5
Article 6
Article 7
Article 8
Article 9
Chapter 6 Cambodia: “Helpless Giant”
Chapter 7 Speaking Loudly and Looking for a Stick
Chapter 8 Iraq: “Human Rights and Chemical Weapons Use Aside”
Chapter 9 Bosnia: “No More than Witnesses at a Funeral”
Chapter 10 Rwanda: “Mostly in a Listening Mode”
Chapter 11 Srebrenica: “Getting Creamed”
Chapter 12 Kosovo: A Dog and a Fight
Chapter 13 Lemkin’s Courtroom Legacy
Chapter 14 Conclusion
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Awards and Accolades
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction 2003
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Even when the diplomats, journalists, and relief workers no longer assumed the Cambodians were exaggerating, it was another step entirely for them to move along the continuum toward understanding. One need only recall the exchange during World War II between Polish witness Jan Karski and U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter in which Frankfurter told the eyewitness, “I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has spoken of the difference between “information” and “knowledge.” In Cambodia observers had initially resisted certifying the refugee accounts even as “information.” The words were available, describing death marches, roadside executions, and the murder of the rich, the intellectuals, and even office assistants. But the first photos were not smuggled out of Cambodia until April 1977, and they depicted harsh, forced labor conditions but not the systematic elimination of whole ethnic groups and classes.91 With the country sealed tight, statesmen and citizens could take shelter in the fog of plausible deniability. But even once they accepted the information, the moral implications of that information did not really sink in. For those back in Washington, 10,000 miles from the refugee camps at the Thai border, it would take years to promote the raw, unconfirmed data to the status of knowledge.
