āA Problem from Hellā: America and the Age of Genocide ā Samantha Power
Page xi: āThey issued an unprecedented ultimatum, in which they threatened massive air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs if they resumed their bombardment of Sarajevo or continued what Clinton described as the āmurder of innocents.āā ā> How does bombing someone prevent their bombing someone else? How does murdering more innocents prevent the murder of innocents?
Page xv: āThe 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.ā ā> Yup. I would say they offered some aid in Armenia (and maybe other places later), but definitely nothing so strong as condemnation.
Page xvi: āPeople have explained U.S. failures to respond to specific genocides by claiming that the United States didnāt know what was happening, that it knew but didnāt care, or that regardless of what it knew, there was nothing useful to be done. I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.ā ā> We know why. Also, donāt try to pin this on the average American. Some rando from Iowa isnāt going to stop a genocide single-handedly. There needs to be state awareness and activism for it to stop, not just from the general American populace. Donāt make it our faults when itās the governmentās fault.
Page xviii: āIt is in the realm of domestic politics that the battle to stop genocide is lost. American political leaders interpret society-wide silence as an indicator of public indifference. They reason that they will incur no costs if the United States remains uninvolved but will face steep risks if they engage. Potential sources of influenceālawmakers on Capitol Hill, editorial boards, non-governmental groups, and ordinary constituentsādo not generate political pressure sufficient to change the calculus of Americaās leaders.ā ā> This makes me so fucking mad. The government just chooses to not listen to its constituents, even when they are being loud and clear. They still say that thereās not enough pressure on them to act. Bullshit. This is also why I stopped being āobjectiveā toward the end of my journalism days. You canāt exist in this world and not have opinions, and if you donāt assert your opinions when it comes to human rights and saving peopleās lives, then youāre a piece of shit. Simple as that.
Page xix: āWilliam Proxmire, the quixotic U.S. senator from Wisconsin, picked up where Lemkin left off and delivered 3,211 speeches on the Senate floor urging ratification of the UN treaty. After nineteen years of daily soliloquies, Proxmire did manage to get the Senate to accept the genocide convention, but the U.S. ratification was so laden with caveats that it carried next to no force.ā ā> Sounds about right
Page xxi: She mentions how the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall gets two million visitor a year, and Iāve always thought it was interesting and kind of annoying how the Jewish Holocaust always gets so much attention and no other atrocities do. How did that tragedy manage to erase all the other genocides? How do people claim ānever againā and support Holocaust education and museum visits but fail to care about anything else? I think the Holocaust of the 1940s is hugely important for history education, obviously, but itās a tragedy that goes beyond just then, and itās a disservice to not talk about those other things.
Page xxi: āBut the forward-looking, consoling refrain of ānever again,ā a testament to Americaās can-do spirit, never grappled with the fact that the country had done nothing, practically or politically, to prepare itself to respond to genocide. The commitment proved hollow in the face of actual slaughter.ā ā> Exactly! Itās all just empty platitudes.
Page 2: I know this book focuses on the 20th century, but you really canāt bring up the Armenian genocide without mentioning the previous decades of violence and killing, things like the Hamidian massacres.
Page 5: āSir Edward Grey, for one, cautioned that Britain lacked ādirect knowledgeā of massacres. He urged that āthe massacres were not all on one sideā and warned that denunciation would likely be futile.ā ā> Are you fucking kidding me!?
Page 8: āMorgenthau had to remind himself that one of the prerogatives of sovereignty was that states and statesmen could do as they pleased within their own borders. āTechnically,ā he noted to himself,ā I had no right to interfere. According to the cold-blooded legalities of the situation, the treatment of Turkish subjects by the Turkish government was purely a domestic affair; unless it directly affected American lives and American interests, it was outside the concern of the American Government.ā The ambassador found this maddening.ā ā> And this is why no one ever intervenes.
Page 11: āāMass meetings on behalf of the Armenians amount to nothing whatever if they are mere methods of giving a sentimental but ineffective and safe outlet to the emotion of those engaged in them. Indeed they amount to less than nothing.āā ā> Indeed, Theodore Roosevelt, indeed.
Page 13: āBut he expressed understanding for Turkeyās security concerns. āI could see that [the Armeniansā] well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government and the fact that the territory which they inhabited was within the zone of military operations constituted grounds more or less justifiable for compelling them to depart their homes,ā Secretary Lansing wrote in November 1916.ā ā> Excuse me!? Disloyalty because theyāve been murdered for decades and living on a war zone because theyāve been constantly attacked and assaulted by the government! Jesus Christ!
Page 17: I still want to know way more about Operation Nemesis. In detail.
Page 21: I should find a good biography of Raphael Lemkin. His childhood sounds pretty interesting.
Page 21: āHe had a knack for languages, and having already mastered Polish, German, Russian, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, he began to study philology, the evolution of language. He planned next to learn Arabic and Sanskrit.ā ā> Dang. Impressive.
Page 28: āRoosevelt said he recognized the danger to groups but saw difficulties adopting such a law at the present. He assured Lemkin Ā that the United States would issue a warning to the Nazis and urged patience. Lemkin was livid. āāPatienceā is a good word to be used when one expects an appointment, a budgetary allocation or the building of a road,ā he noted. āBut when the rope is already around the neck of the victim and strangulation is imminent, isnāt the word āpatienceā an insult to reason and nature?āā ā> One hundred percent agree.
Page 32: āIn late 1942 Karski escaped carrying hundreds of documents on miniature microfilm contained in the shaft of a key.ā ā> What does this mean. How does it work.
Page 35: āTo paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Alliesā response to the Holocaust, although many people thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe they were dead.ā ā> What.
Page 36: āThe vast majority of people simply did not believe what they read; the notion of getting attacked for being (rather than doing) was too discomfiting and too foreign to process readily. A plot for outright annihilation had never been seen and therefore could not be imagined.ā ā> But why? It happened just twenty-five years ago in Armenia. How could everyone who was alive and aware of that massacre not realize it was a similar scale of atrocity? Iāll never understand that. If you have no knowledge of something, then sure, I get it. But people knew. They knew.
Page 39: Why were they called Allied and Axis countries in World War II? Why Axis?
Page 39: āThe reviewer claimed that almost every one of the nine charges Lemkin made against the Nazis could be made against the Allies. āOf course,ā the reviewer wrote, āthere is this substantial difference: that the Nazis shamelessly displayed their intentionally planned misdeeds, while the western Allies stumble into illegal practices and cover them with humanitarian or other formulas.āā ā> I definitely donāt disagree with this. His premise in saying that the Allies were as bad as the Nazis is flawed for sure, but governments have sneakily covered up all sorts of bad things so they definitely canāt be looked as some beacon of goodness.
Page 42: So if this was the first time the word āgenocideā was used, then whatās the history of other words with the suffix ā-cideā like āfratricideā or āmatricideā? Itās honestly kind of shocking to me that no one had come up with āgenocideā before Lemkin.
Page 43: āThey also recognized that it would be unwise and undesirable to make Hitlerās crimes the future standard for moving outsiders to act. Statesmen and citizens needed to learn from the past without letting it paralyze them. They had to respond to mass atrocity long before the carnage had reached the scale of the Holocaust.ā ā> True.
Page 51: āThe entrenched and somewhat impenetrable UN of today was then unimaginable.ā ā> Lol bitch what? Clearly she worked for the UN to say some shit like this.
Page 56: āLemkin knew he grated on peopleās nerves. Often, before entering a room, he would pause outside and make a pledge to himself not to bring up genocide and instead allow the conversation to drift from art to philosophy to literature, subjects in which he was fluent. If he could bring himself to hold his tongue, he told himself, eventually his companion would be better disposed to his campaign.ā ā> Lol. Heās right, though. This is probably a better strategy.
Page 60: āThe man who for so long had insisted on imposing himself upon journalists now waved them off, pleading, āLet me sit here alone.ā He had been victorious at last, and the relief and grief overwhelmed him.ā ā> Aww.
Page 65: āThe early U.S. leadership on the genocide treaty largely evaporated in the months and years that followed.ā ā> Wow shocking. /s
Page 66: āYears alter, when the Khmer Rouge, the Iraqi government, and the Bosnian Serbs began eradicating minority groups, those who opposed a U.S. response often ignored the genocide conventionās terms and denied genocide was under way, claiming the number of dead or the percentage of the group eliminated was too small.ā ā> Oh for fuckās sake.
Page 67: āSome suggested that U.S. ratification would license critics of the United States to investigate the eradication of Native American tribes in the nineteenth century.ā ā> There it is. Although I donāt see what the problem with this is. It would be a symbolic trial anyway, since none of the people who were around in the nineteenth century are still around now. You could maybe somehow put certain agencies of the government on trial, but even then it would still be largely symbolic.
Page 69: Nah fam, killing people for their political background is not even remotely the same as killing people for their ethnic background.
Page 69: āThe core American objections to the treaty, of course, had little to do with the text, which was no vaguer than any other law that had not yet been interpreted in a courtroom. Rather, American opposition was rooted in a traditional hostility toward any infringement on U.S. sovereignty, which was only amplified by the red scare of the 1950s.ā ā> Boom, yup.
Page 70: āAfter his troops had liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, Eisenhower had fired off a cable to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall denouncing the Nazi savagery: āWe are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,ā Eisenhower said, reflecting on the piles of corpses. āNow, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.āā ā> I mean, I guess. But you donāt have to fight a war all around the world, only in the parts where the Nazis are.
Page 73: I feel like I should read the Diary of Anne Frank again. Itās been a while, and I would definitely read it from a different viewpoint now.
Page 78: āLemkin had coined the word āgenocide.ā He had helped draft a treaty designed to outlaw it. And he had seen the law rejected by the worldās most powerful nation. Seven people attended Lemkinās funeral.ā ā> Thatās it, in spite of all he was and did? Damn.
Page 83: āOne State Department official met a junior officialās appeal for action by asking, āDo you know of any official whose career has been advanced because he spoke out for human rights?āā ā> Oooph. Brutal, but true, sadly.
Page 92: āBut the United States had backed a loser. Lon Nol was pro-American, but like many U.S.-sponsored dictators of the period, he was also corrupt, repressive, and incompetent.ā ā> Lol. Sounds about right for U.S.-backed.
Page 93: āUnder the leadership of Saloth Sar, who later assumed the pseudonym Pol Potā ā> I donāt know anything about Pol Pot or Cambodia anyway, but I especially didnāt know Pol Pot wasnāt his real name.
Page 103: āIn the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam, Americans doubted whether any truth existed in politics.ā ā> Fair. Even though truth doesnāt exist in politics anyway and never has.
Page 110: āThe Cambodians with the gravest stories to tell were, by definition, dear or still trapped inside the country.ā ā> Yes and thatās exactly the point, to cut off all communication and travel outside the country.
Page 112: āIn September 1977 Pol Pot said in Phnom Penh that āonly the smallest possible numberā out of the ā1 or 2 percentā of Cambodians who opposed the revolution had been āeradicated.ā Conceding some killings gave the KR a greater credibility than if they had denied atrocities outright, and many observers were taken in by these concessions.ā ā> Lol yeah because that makes it way better. Hey, āobservers,ā are you even listening to yourself? Itās still 1-2 percent of people being slaughtered for no apparent reason.
Page 112: āAnother factor that blunted understanding of the evil of the regime was that many Cambodians died of starvation and malnutrition, which outsiders associated with ānaturalā economic and climatic forces. This probably helped obscure the human causes of the disaster.ā ā> Jesus Christ. These things are done intentionally too!!
Page 113: I find all these reports disbelieving refugees and survivors to be so baffling, because, like, of course they didnāt see the massacres? How would they have survived if they were part of the massacres and executions? Theyāre refugees because they managed to flee before they could be killed. So no kidding they wonāt have eyewitness accounts of the murders taking place. They either left before they happened, or, well, they fucking died. I highly doubt that many of them escaped from the actual scenes of the killings. They would have fled much earlier than that point.
Page 113-114: āOf course, the dead had not lived to tell their tales, and the living, the refugees, could describe only the abuses they had suffered, which were often ālesserā crimes, or those that they had witnessed but could not substantiate.ā ā> Yes exactly what Iām saying!!
Page 119: āBullets were too precious and had to be spared; the handles of farming implements were preferred.ā ā> I mean, I get it. Bullets would be expensive.
Page 121: āBut 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.ā ā> How would you get photos like that though? Thereās no way you could get photos of the killings as they actually happened. It would have to be things like the pile of bones or human remains somewhere, which would be more secret for sure.
Page 126: āHe made a logical argument about why the KR could never kill on the scale suggested: āThere is no reason for the [KR] to reduce the population or to maintain it at its current level,ā he wrote, āsince todayās population of 8 million is well below the potential of the country, which needs more than 20 million.āā ā> I donāt know this would ever possibly convince anyone.
Page 129: Jack Anderson was one of the real ones.
Page 135: āTwo political dissidents in the Soviet Union were then being celebrated, their imprisonment denounced.ā ā> Who?
Page 139: I definitely want to know how Elizabeth Becker got an interview with Pol Pot and what her impressions of it were.
Page 146: āWhich was the lesser evil, a regime that had slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians or a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union that had flagrantly violated an international border and that now occupied a neighboring state?ā ā> Are you fucking kidding me? Which one is the lesser evil? Really?
Page 155: āThe lobby slammed U.S. efforts to denaturalize and deport Nazi collaborators and war criminals living in the United States. It claimed that ratification of the genocide convention would allow missionaries to be tried before an international tribunal for genocide āon grounds that to convert cannibals in Africa to Christianity is to destroy a culture.āā ā> Well yeah. This is true. Missionaries suck.
Page 159: āStill, he believed the United States should not remain aloof from the international framework. It was the only major power that had not ratified the convention.ā ā> This happens all the time that the U.S. is the only country to not do something, and I feel like if youāre the only party not doing a thing that is universally agreed upon as being a good thing, then youāre probably the villain in the story. Not sure why thatās not clear to people. Thatās how it works in every superhero story, every major conflict in literature ever, really.
Page 161: āIn one interview Reagan claimed that the German soldiers were āvictimsā of the Nazis ājust as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.āā ā> Lol yikes, old man.
Page 164: āThe reservation held that before the United States could be called as a party to any case before the ICJ, the president would have to consent to the courtās jurisdiction. Only the United States would decide whether it would appear before the World Court. It was the equivalent of requiring an accused murderer to give his consent before he could be tried.ā ā> Yeah what the fuck is this bullshit.
Page 168: āIt passed only after Strom Thurmond (R.āS. Car.), a longtime opponent of the convention, gave up on his insistence that the death penalty be required. Thurmond dropped his objection only in exchange for the confirmation of Republican judges whose appointments had been stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.ā ā> What a sleazeball.
Page 174: āThe Kurdish fighters adopted the name peshmenga, or āthose who face death.ā They have tended to face death alone. Western nations that have allied with them have betrayed them whenever a more strategically profitable prospect has emerged. The Kurds thus like to say that they āhave no friends but the mountains.āā ā> This makes me so angry and sad.
Page 177: āThey thought little of the poorly trained teenagers being hurled into battle.ā ā> This sounds about right.
Page 179: I just canāt help but be so critical of this book when sheās talking about U.S. actions and responses but she also has been a part of the U.S. government. I have to take it with a grain of salt. I know itās largely negative and blaming the U.S. for not doing more, but I still feel like sheās not including more context of American hypocrisy in general.
Page 188: āThe planes flew low enough for the petrified Kurds to take note of the markings, which were those of the Iraqi air force. Many families tumbled into primitive air-raid shelters they had built outside their homes. When the gasses seeped through the cracks, they poured out into the streets in a panic. There they found friends and family members frozen in time like a modern version of Pompeii: slumped a few yards behind a baby carriage, caught permanently holding the hand of a loved one or shielding a child from the poisoned air, or calmly collapsed behind a car steering wheel.ā ā> Holy shit. Is that what this gas does?
Page 191: āThe Kurds, like many recent victims of genocide, fall into a class of what genocide scholar Helen Fein calls āimplicated victims.ā Although most of the victims of genocide are apolitical civilians, the political or military leaders of a national, ethnic, or religious group often make decisions (to claim basic rights, to stage protests, to launch military revolt, or even to plot terrorist attacks) that give perpetrators an excuse for crackdown and bystanders an excuse to look away.ā ā> Yup. And this is the problem. It creates enemies, even when among those āenemiesā are perfectly innocent people who are simply the victim of false news reports and propaganda about their people.
Page 193: I still find it so ridiculous that so many countries and conventions are against chemical warfare because itās brutal or horrifying or whatever. Like, hello? All wars and weapons are like that? So why is chemical warfare absolutely terrible and must be banned but other types of warfare is a-okay no problem with it comes to how you choose to slaughter people?
Page 205: āGalbraith had named the law the āPrevention of Genocide Act,ā a title that he thought would resonate. āI wanted a title that would call attention to the crimes taking place and rally support for the legislation,ā Galbraith recalls. He also wanted to make it less likely that senators would in fact read the bill. If he had called the measure the āIraqi Sanctions Act,ā he knew U.S. business lobbies would read and scuttle it.ā ā> This is so fucked up. Our system is so fucked up.
Page 205: āBut this most recent offensive involved chemical weapons, which killed in a more grisly way than machine guns and captured the imagination of U.S. lawmakers.ā ā> But itās still killing! What the fuck. This has never made any sense to me.
Page 206: āChemical weapons, by contrast, were cheap and said to take a garage and a little high school chemistry to make. They were the poor manās nuke.ā ā> Ah so this is why they were banned. Because there is no money that can be exchanged between parties to make one or both of them rich under the auspices of war.
Page 211: āIraqās defense minister, General Adman Khairallah, was more revealing in his statements. Iraq was entitled to defend itself with āwhatever means is available.ā When confronting āone who wants to kill you at the heart of your land,ā he asked, āwill you throw roses on him and flower?ā Combatants and civilians looked alike: āThey all wear the Kurdish costume, and so you canāt distinguish between one who carries a weapon and one who does not.āā ā> This is fucking sinister.
Page 220: āFirst, the Reagan White House could not accept that years of investment in Iraq would not create a kinder, gentler dictator. āThey were sure they were going to convert Saddam Hussein and make him āmy fair lady,āā says David Korn, the former State Department Middle East specialist.ā ā> Loool what the fuck.
Page 226: āU.S. politicians were notoriously captive to special interests.ā ā> Lol duh.
Page 235: I always knew there was some shady shit going on between Iraq and the United States in the 80s, which is why the mid-2000s invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein always seemed suspicious to me. I just never really knew why, and these chapters provide a little more context to it all.
Page 241: āThe entrance to the ravaged town of Halabja is marked by a statue of a father dying as he tries to shield his two sons from the gas attack.ā ā> Damn.
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