Genocide again
“American foreign policy is a case of historical amnesia. Why haven’t we ever stopped torture or genocide? The answer is embarrassingly simple: We haven’t wanted to.” - Samantha Power, author of "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide"
Sorry to end the week on something so uplifting as genocide, but David Batstone's article from this week's edition of SojoMail on how the Bushtapo is still spinning its wheels on the Sudanese genocide has me feeling pretty raw. Having just read a haunting book on the Rwanda genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch, I just can't fathom how an entire nation - let alone the entire world - stands by and watches genocide happen. (For those even remotely interested in the story of the Rwandan genocide, or those really just looking for a great read about humanity in all its evil and good, Gourevitch's book will blow you away. Hands down it's the best thing I've read in years. There's a brief intro to his book that I'll put below.)
We always seem to say "never again" after horriffic atrocities: The Holocaust, Rwanda...but as we're seeing in the Sudan, history seems to repeat itself in rather gruesome manners. I wish to think it's like what Wangari Maathai says (see two posts below): one person can't stop a genocide, but we do what we can to try. And if that means talking about it, learning about it, facing up to the suffering, looking at the bodies square in the eye, and holding everyone accountable for letting things like this happen, well then maybe we break open a little more of our humanity in the process, and manage inch by inch to getting closer to saying first as individuals and then as a world community "never again," and actually meaning it.
Here's the intro from Philip Gourevitch's book. Have a great weekend.
Intro from "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families"
Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the Spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech - performed largely by machete - it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least 800,000 people were killed in just 100 days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Sorry to end the week on something so uplifting as genocide, but David Batstone's article from this week's edition of SojoMail on how the Bushtapo is still spinning its wheels on the Sudanese genocide has me feeling pretty raw. Having just read a haunting book on the Rwanda genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch, I just can't fathom how an entire nation - let alone the entire world - stands by and watches genocide happen. (For those even remotely interested in the story of the Rwandan genocide, or those really just looking for a great read about humanity in all its evil and good, Gourevitch's book will blow you away. Hands down it's the best thing I've read in years. There's a brief intro to his book that I'll put below.)
We always seem to say "never again" after horriffic atrocities: The Holocaust, Rwanda...but as we're seeing in the Sudan, history seems to repeat itself in rather gruesome manners. I wish to think it's like what Wangari Maathai says (see two posts below): one person can't stop a genocide, but we do what we can to try. And if that means talking about it, learning about it, facing up to the suffering, looking at the bodies square in the eye, and holding everyone accountable for letting things like this happen, well then maybe we break open a little more of our humanity in the process, and manage inch by inch to getting closer to saying first as individuals and then as a world community "never again," and actually meaning it.
Here's the intro from Philip Gourevitch's book. Have a great weekend.
Intro from "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families"
Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the Spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech - performed largely by machete - it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least 800,000 people were killed in just 100 days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
posted by MikeJ at
5:51 PM
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