Research Catalog

A problem from hell : America and the age of genocide

Title: A problem from hell : America and the age of genocide / Samantha Power.
Author: Power, Samantha
Publication: New York : Basic Books, 2002.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library	HV6322.7 .P69 2002	Off-site

Details

Description

xxi, 610 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"A Problem from Hell" is a path-breaking interrogation of the last century of American history. Samantha Power poses a question that haunts our nation's past: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to marshal the will and the might to stop genocide? She provides the answer in the form of the suspenseful story of courageous individuals who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act. Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policymakers, access to thousands of pages of newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power shows how those who urged U.S. action were thwarted again and again by ignorance, indifference, and, above all, a failure of imagination. In 1915, when Turkey sent its Armenian population on death marches into the desert, U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau denounce what he called "race murder." Raphael Lemkin, a Polish attorney appalled by the Turkish atrocities, tried to get European statesmen to criminalize the destruction of ethnic and religious groups, but he was dismissed as alarmist. Six years later, Hitler invaded Poland and Lemkin lost forty-nine family members in the Holocaust. Landing as a refugee on America's shores, Lemkin resolved to devise a word that would convey the evil under way. In 1944, while working for the U.S. Was Department, Lemkin invented the term "genocide." But the U.S. response to genocide since the Holocaust has looked very similar to its response before and during it. Pol Pot's murder of two million Cambodians went unchallenged. The United State supplied aid to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein while he gassed his own people. Despite the largest wave of resignations from the U.S. government since Vietnam, Serb nationalists were left alone to herd Bosnian Muslims into concentration camps in Europe. And in 1994 Rwandan Hutu militants exterminated some 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu without even generating high-level protest from Washington. "A Problem from Hell" combines spellbinding history and seasoned political analysis to do more than merely tell the story of U.S. inaction. Power shows how decent Americans inside and outside government looked away from mass murder by convincing themselves that refugees were lying, that intervention would be futile, or that contemporary genocides did not measure up to the crime they said they would "never again" permit. By allowing readers to hear directly from American decision-makers and dissenters, as well as from the victims of genocide, Power reveals just what was known and what might have been done while millions perished." -- Jacket

Series Statement

A New Republic book

Subject

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [517]-587) and index.

Contents

"Race murder" -- "A crime without a name" -- The crime with a name -- Lemkin's law -- "A most lethal pair of foes" -- Cambodia : "helpless giant" -- Speaking loudly and looking for a stick -- Iraq : "human rights and chemical weapons use aside" -- Bosnia : "no more than witnesses at a funeral" -- Rwanda : "mostly in a listening mode" -- Srebrenica : "getting creamed" -- Kosovo : a dog and a fight -- Lemkin's courtroom legacy.

ISBN

0465061508
9780465061501
0007172990
9780007172993
9780465061518 (canceled/invalid)
0465061516 (canceled/invalid)
9780465050895 (canceled/invalid)
0465050891 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2001052611
99805362999

OCLC

ocm48221415
48221415
SCSB-1241397

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library