A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (P.S.)
by Samantha Power
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Book Summary Information
Author: Samantha PowerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-01
ISBN: 0061120146
Number of pages: 688
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (P.S.)
Book Review: Good to have read, not really good to read.
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a good book to *have read*, but I submit that it is not an enjoyable book *to read*. It's the sort of book that will certainly come up in conversation -- not least when someone tells me that two groups have "thousand-year-old hatreds" and "won't stop killing each other until everyone is dead."
It's a systematic study of U.S.-government reaction to genocide, from the Turkish massacre of Armenians after World War I until the Serbs' genocide in Kosovo. Every time, U.S. reaction is distressingly identical; Samantha Power's map of that reaction follows a schema from The Rhetoric of Reaction. There's the "perversity" argument, namely that if we try to intervene we'll certainly cause other problems that we couldn't anticipate; the futility argument, namely that we can't help anyway (those pesky Balkan countries with their "ancient hatreds"; those pesky Tutsi and Hutu with their "ancient hatreds"; etc.); and the jeopardy argument, which refuses to put us in danger in the first place.
Before World War II, we could add to these the belief that what a nation does within its own borders is its own business. If the Turks wanted to massacre the Armenians, we had no right to stop them from doing so. It took the Holocaust to guilt Western nations into opening up their borders and admitting that a every human being has a right to prosecute crimes against humanity. It took Raphael Lemkin, in particular -- a man whose family had all gone to the gas chamber -- to give us the word "genocide." He was one of those cranks who irritate everyone around him and die penniless, but make life better for the whole world after his death.
Or perhaps not. The distressing story throughout Power's book is that, despite Western governments' solemn pledge to "never forget," they always do forget. Intervening to prevent genocide is not good politics, or so the leaders say. But we've all watched how America fights wars: voters might initially resist, but they rally around the flag just as soon as guns start firing. The White House is a bully pulpit; if our leaders actually cared to end genocide, they could make it happen. Most just don't have the will. Samantha Power is particularly bitter in her portrait of Bill Clinton -- a weak, famously "triangulating" leader who only intervened in Bosnia after taking endless beatings on the subject from, among other people, Bob Dole. Dole is one of the heroes in "A Problem From Hell"; Power makes me wonder whether I had the man all wrong.
Her book is a sequence of tributes to her heroes, like Dole and Lemkin. There were enough genocides in the 20th century (Turkey, Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo) that she has enough heroes to go around. Generally they all fail, in the face of an immobile U.S. government. But try her heroes must. Among them is William Proxmire, who gave more than 3,000 speeches in support of the Genocide Convention before the Senate passed it (gelded) in 1986.
Each of the six genocide chapters, corresponding to the six 20th-century massacres, follows exactly the same structure. One part of each chapter explains how futility, perversity, and jeopardy apply to that particular case; another part introduces the people who foresaw the coming slaughter; and another patiently dismantles the government's reasons for not intervening. Structurally, it's more of a compendium than a gripping novel. But there's room for that. There will certainly be room for it on your shelf the next time the U.S. government refuses to protect the innocent.
Summary of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (P.S.)
In her award-winning interrogation of the last century of American history, Samantha Power-a former Balkan war correspondent and founding executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy-asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policy makers, access to newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power provides the answer in "A Problem from Hell," a groundbreaking work that tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act.
During the three years (1993-1996) Samantha Power spent covering the grisly events in Bosnia and Srebrenica, she became increasingly frustrated with how little the United States was willing to do to counteract the genocide occurring there. After much research, she discovered a pattern: "The United 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," she writes in this impressive book. Debunking the notion that U.S. leaders were unaware of the horrors as they were occurring against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, and Bosnians during the past century, Power discusses how much was known and when, and argues that much human suffering could have been alleviated through a greater effort by the U.S. She does not claim that the U.S. alone could have prevented such horrors, but does make a convincing case that even a modest effort would have had significant impact. Based on declassified information, private papers, and interviews with more than 300 American policymakers, Power makes it clear that a lack of political will was the most significant factor for this failure to intervene. Some courageous U.S. leaders did work to combat and call attention to ethnic cleansing as it occurred, but the vast majority of politicians and diplomats ignored the issue, as did the American public, leading Power to note that "no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on." This powerful book is a call to make such indifference a thing of the past. --Shawn Carkonen
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