A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

A Problem from Hell gives an indepth historic account of America's role (or lack thereof) in preventing, halting, and punishing genocide in the twentieth century. Well researched, Power brings to light many previously unknown or little known facts and issues in America's foreign policy decisions regarding genocide. This is an area in which America's responses have been severely lacking, and this book truly demonstrates this. Power's style of writing makes for enjoyable read (as much as a book on genocide can be). Highly informative, this will get your blood flowing.

I feel compelled to offer a view of this book that does not come from either an Armenian or Turkish perspective. Speaking as a generic American reader, I found it highly compelling and extremely persuasive. Power is a writer of great skill who knows how to let the facts speak for themselves, and who values the power of understatement--always a welcome quality when dealing with such a difficult subject. She has exhaustively researched the material, and then shaped into a narrative that's hard to put down.
In between the savagery and horror there are unexpected moments of comedy--for instance a priceless scene of Raphael Lemkin, the single-minded anti-genocide crusader, approaching a young lady at a casino. "She told him she was of Indian descent, born in Chile. Lemkin saw his opening: He informed her that his work on mass slaughter would be of particular interest to her because of the destruction of the Incas and the Aztecs. This was one pickup line the young woman had probably never heard before. She soon departed."
Lemkin--a Polish Jew who barely escaped the Holocaust--is only one of the unexpected heroes who parade through the pages of "A Problem from Hell." Others include Teddy Roosevelt, who unsuccessfully urged his successor, Woodrow Wilson, to intervene to protect the Armenians from Turkish slaughter; Peter Galbraith, the former Senate aid and US ambassador to Croatia, who tried to alert the world about the Iraqi and Bosnian genocides; Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the commander of UN forces in Rwanda who was so anguished about his inability to stop the slaughter that he found solace in the bottle; and Bob Dole, who as Senate Majority Leader pushed a reluctant Bill Clinton to intervene in Bosnia.
Some will no doubt bristle at Power's message--that the US has a duty to stop genocide anywhere in the world. But if we don't do it, who will? She makes a powerful point that we have often paid a price for ignoring genocide, as for instance in the case of Saddam Hussein's atrocities against the Kurds in the late 1980s.
This is a book that will change a lot of people's thinking about the role of human rights in American foreign policy. I only hope it will change our policy too.

It should be the easiest subject to have universal agreement on; Genocide is reprehensible and cannot be defended. The reality is of course much different for our species is the only one that kills, tortures, and maims its members without cause. Differences in religion, the desire to control land, natural resources, or hunger for power are not reasons to kill entire groups. The title of the book is, "A Problem From Hell", and it is an outstanding work by Samantha Power. She is not only a competent historian she spent years in the midst of one of the more recent examples of what could also be called, a problem of human nature. This Nation's Congress took 40 years to ratify the treaty on Genocide. It seems some Southern Congressmen were worried about culpability from Jim Crow that was still alive and well, others for the millions of Native Americans slaughtered because they were in our way.
She specifically covers the massacre of Armenians by Turkey, Hitler's murder of the Jews, Pol Pot's slaughter of Cambodians, Saddam Hussein gassing minorities in Iraq, the 1994 murder of 800,000 people in Rwanda, and most recently the Serb Nationalist's bid to join the roster of those who kill almost for sport. The mass killing is not sport however the individual conduct of the sadists who enjoy inventive killing is hard to read.
In 1915 The United States was not in a position to impose on Turkey. It is now 2002 and The United States deems Turkey an ally, a country that has refused to admit any Genocide took place. The United States has a congress that killed a vote condemning the Turkish Government because hours before the vote President Clinton, a lame duck President asked them too. It is a sad commentary that our congress lacks the moral fiber of men like Henry Morgenthau our Ambassador to Turkey while they were killing, a man who was denouncing what he called, "Race Murder", while trying to gain the attention of his government.
The Holocaust is well documented and some of the participants were punished, but it and Armenia are events that are 50 and 100 years old, and blurred by time. They are still better remembered than millions of Native Americans slaughtered, and millions, who were bought, sold, enslaved, and murdered because they were black.
In the 1970's 2,000,000 were killed in Cambodia, the 1980's brought Saddam Hussein and his slaughter of The Kurds, and then in 1994, the world watched Rwanda, 800,00 dead, and then the former Yugoslavia, they are still counting the missing. In 2001 on September 11th on a comparably small scale we experienced the murder of our citizens only because they were Americans.
Largely because of what was Yugoslavia a new international treaty was created to establish a body to constantly deal with the crimes discussed. The treaty requires 60 nations ratify the document for it to become reality. When this book was written 43 had signed, about 10 days ago 66 was reached. The United States is not a party to this effort.
When I started this book it was easy to deal with U.S. conduct simplistically. At the end of the book the same issues became very gray. As the world stands today any intervention will require The United States. This has nothing to do with misplaced national pride it's reality. We had Special Forces in Afghanistan 48 hours after The World Trade Center was hit. We can monitor any piece of ground on the planet with either satellites, manned or unmanned aircraft capable of real time intelligence gathering within hours of deciding to deploy them. Our military is without peer in both individual capability and technological superiority. So what should we do?
The Rwandan Genocide took place in approximately 100 days, 8,000 murdered per day. The only effective response would have been a unilateral move by The United States into Rwanda. The United Nations would take 100 days to agree on the shape of the table to meet at. What would be our reason for violating another sovereign nation? Genocide seems to be a very good reason. But now back to reality. How many confirmed deaths justify military intervention, what threshold needs to be met for our country to commit forces and lose lives of our soldiers? And it may be unpopular to state but there needs to be more than philosophical outrage to act. What is Rwanda to The U.S.? The reality is virtually nothing. Iraq threatened our economy intervention was an easy call. A U.N. sanctioned operation; it took 5 months to start, had severe limitations, and left Iraq a viable threat.
The conclusion I came to after reading and thinking about the book is that the closest one can get to a stated policy would be something like what follows. The United States decides that we are going to be the world's police force. No other country can do it, so we will. Economic sanctions will be forced upon the offending country to pay the bill, because the citizenry of this nation will not. This will necessitate our not being involved in any treaty that exposes us to any liability or sanction other than those we place on ourselves. The other extreme is we act only when it is in the interest of our country to do so The Rwandas of the world are ignored, and we protect our interests or punish those responsible for September 11th like attacks.
I enjoyed this book, and I share the author's anger and frustration. There is no record on effective international cooperation, and there is no way The United States will become a police force. It is true a Serb official killed himself 2 weeks ago to avoid being deported and tried, and the Dutch Government resigned last week over their inaction during Srebrenica. Neither action saved a single life.
Genocide will stop when humans evolve further, not before.

When I saw there were 99 reviews of this book I thought there is no need for me to add a 100th, but I did decide to read the reviews. I myself decided to read this book because it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for General Non-fiction. I was surprised to see all the heat about the Armenian massacre, since I never previously realized that there was a school of thought which says it did not happen. I read The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, by Franz Werfel, finsihing it on Jan. 2, 1944, and have ever since accepted as factual the events which served as the basis of that book. I was and am willing to read an objective book on the Armenian massacre if there is such. All the heat displayed by the pro-Turkish reviewers of this book would have been better expended by their telling us exactly what objective scholarly work should be read to show that the facts are other than as Ms. Power depicts them in this book. (I would have e-mailed such reviewers directly and asked, but most of them are anonymous. If any read this, I am not anonymous and can be e-mailed and I invite them to do so.) I myself thought the book had a lot of things which deserve study and attention. Sure, there are atrocious massacres which the author does not discuss: Stalin, the Red Chinese, and I gather East Timor. Whether they fit into the definition of genocide is a question: obviously the Communist crimes were aimed at a group, but the Genocide Convention talks about "a national, ethnical, racial or religious" group and the kulaks and Mao's victims may not fit that categorization (is that why Communist Russia so readily ratified the Convention?). But the book is almost 600 pages now, and if every atrocity approaching genocide were included the book would be even longer. So I submit the book is full of information and much of it makes sense, though it is ironic that the current president has given as a reason for war events in the 1980s when Saddam gassed "his own people". If we can go to war over past genocide any time we feel like it, then our reasons for war at the time of our choosing will be greatly expanded. While one need not agree with everything Ms. Powers says, I think that what she says deserves thoughtful consideration. I am glad I read this book.

A well balanced, and candid look into American Policy, as it pertains to the issue of Genocide with all of its nuances, and Geoplolitical angles of referance. A must read for anyone remotely interested in crimes against humanity, starting with the first Genocide of the of the Twentieth Century The Armenian Genocide onto Ruwanda. Bravo!!!!

Ms Power's book is truly remarkable in its treatement of the moral failings, the hypocrisy and oportunistic nature of the United States reactions to genocidal activities in the Twentieth Century. Indeed, as a Super power --today the Hyper power-- the United States has the capacity, unprecedented since the period of Pax Romana, to influence and control, as we are now witnessing, events anywhere on the planet. It is unfortunate therefore that Samantha has, it seems, lacked the moral fortitude to include, in her outstanding treatment of this important issue, the indifference of the United States concerning the case of the Palestinian people. Indeed, their tragic treatment since the creation of Israel, in 1948 --including deliberate disposession, displacement, dehumanization, deculturation, humiliation, with as objective the Judaization of their land --fits perfectly the definition of Genocide as contained in the Genocide Convention, of 9 December 1948, and its interpretation by Raphael Lemkin, its distinguished progenitor.
If Ms. Power's omission is due to the political sensitivity of the issue is she not deserving of the same criticism as that she has rightfully laid at the feet of the United States establishment? Her book would have indeed been deserving of more praise had she had the courage to confront the unconscionable human tragedy in Palestine.

The current issue of NYRB contains an essay by Samantha Power distilled from the book. The book is mentioned about half-way through the text and based on the quality of the essay I was convinced to buy the book. Now, half-way through the book, which is excellent, I am on the hunt for more information about the hero of the Problem from Hell, Raphael Lemkin. His story is the conscience of the little we have done as a nation to sustain international human rights and prevent the state from destroying its own or those of another state. This part of the book that describes Lemkin and his relentless effort is one of the most moving and uplifting statements I have ever read. It sets an unparalled example of committment to an idea that is the best part of human nature. The commentary on the United States failure to accept the idea and make it an integral part of foreign policy applies to all of us: citizens and leaders alike. I have reason to doubt my own moral fortitude, but not that of the author who has laid before us a legal brief that documents a deliberate policy of inaction by our country. The arguement of political reality or political expediency is a dark cloak spread to cover greed, indifference and lack of political will. Hopefully, we can correct this course and not be a future accomplice to genocide.

Samantha Power would perfectly understand why, after reading her book, it's quite likely that we will come away with a pessimistic and somewhat fatalistic view. The thrust of her book's argument is that our government and leaders, through ignorance, denial, policy vacuum, or a lack of political will, have stood idly by and allowed crimes against humanity to take place. As we read the descriptions of the massacres she uses to make her point, we may believe that as citizens we are in a better position to express moral outrage. Power cuts right through this view and disabuses us of any right to stand on the moral high ground. In her recent interview about the book in "The Atlantic" she said "isolationism is not just ideological in this country, it is the way people live their lives. [We] live lives isolated from people abroad."
There are some exceptions of course and her book chronicles the stories of some of these advocates for the people or "screamers" as she calls them. Official inaction and paralysis spans the decades. The book goes back as far as 1915 when the Turks butchered about 1 million Armenians. The Holocaust comes next and then the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia, followed by Iraq's massacre of the Kurds, Rwanda, and Bosnia. There is a wealth of research involved based on recently declassified materials and numerous interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors. She is relentless with her facts and as decades passed and genocides continued and administration after administration protested that they didn't know, Power's steady spotlight on evidence to the contrary makes a lie out of so much of what we've been told publicly. There are many reasons; from the purely political "national interests" arguments, to the more subtle explanations that affected individual policy makers. For instance, when do you enter a conflict if it's your view that it's A PROBLEM FROM HELL? Warren Christopher supposedly made this comment about Bosnia. If you apply even the most basic management principles for resolving an issue - that of first "owning" the problem - it seems that many of our policy makers failed the grade. Power makes it clear that a huge amount of denial exists.
Power offers prescriptions for policy change and recommendations for preventing genocides and they don't all involve military action. She is also very much aware of how September 11th has changed US foreign policy priorities. Nevertheless we have both the moral authority and the neccessary resources to prevent genocides and Power says that "the one lesson from the last half century is that if it's not the U.S.'s problem, it's nobody's problem." This book is a compelling argument for the truth of that statement but it's less than optimistic tone still leaves us wondering, will anything change?

This is a heartbreakingly painful book to read. It took me almost a month to get through it because I simply couldnÕt stand to read more than a small bit at a time. Yes, there are heroes and heroines here -- people who strove again and again to save victims of genocide. But if youÕre anything like me, when you finish "A Problem From Hell" you will know far more about how monstrously human beings can behave than you want to believe. "Evil" seems too mild a word to describe it. And you will also see what in some ways is even worse -- the ease with which "good" people can ignore mass murder.
Nevertheless, as difficult as it is to read, this is an important, extremely well-researched, and clearly and concisely-written book, and IÕd recommend it highly (even urgently) to anyone who has an interest in American foreign policy. And even those who think they don't.
At the end of World War II, the world swore that "never again" would we stand by while millions were slaughtered. Samantha Power deals with selected post-war examples of times when the world failed to live up to that promise -- in Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, it would be easy to add several more to her list. In fact, sheÕs been criticized -- from both the right and left -- for some examples she left out of the analysis. However, I feel strongly that her focus on the four late twentieth century genocides makes this a better book than it otherwise would have been. The limited number of examples allows Power to explore deeply both the differences and the similarities between these genocides.
The differences are important because so often that is what both the press and the government focus on. We misinterpreted the genocide in Cambodia because the Khmer Rouge was not murdering members of an ethnic group, but political and class enemies. Saddam Hussein targeted an ethnic group -- the Kurds -- but the Kurds were rebelling against the government at that time, so it was possible to view the situation as more an overly harsh attempt to put down a rebellion than as a genocide.
But, as Power shows, focusing on how each example was different from the Holocaust was less a misunderstanding than it was an excuse for inaction. There are plenty of other excuses. We canÕt be sure if the victimsÕ stories are accurate. We see the victims fight back and think they are just as guilty as the perpetrators. We are worried that acting may create more problems than it solves. But mostly it just comes down to this: most Americans are not very interested in what goes on outside our country and no politician has ever been voted out of office for failing to intervene abroad. Under those circumstances, only the best and the bravest will stand up.
And intervention does not necessarily mean military intervention (although that certainly canÕt be ruled out). One of the most interesting conclusions of PowerÕs book is that the world is hampered in responding to signs of genocide because we think that noticing that it is taking place will require us to act militarily. Not wanting to go to war, we pretend that the genocide is not taking place. But, as Power quite convincingly argues, there are many indications that by taking early strong stands against a country murdering its own citizens, we can stop it. When we refuse to even condemn the killing, we only encourage the thugs in power to go farther.
This book raises issues that as citizens and moral human beings we all should be grappling with.

Finally! Someone gets it right! Power presents not only an insightful analysis of the issue of genocide, but superbly weaves all the various elements that are involved in the practice of genocide - including the origin of the term genocide - to depict a complete conceptual portrait of it. I hope the message of Power's book - that genocides can be averted - reaches the ears of members of Congress and those in the Executive Branch who are charged with shaping U.S. foreign policy.