A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power

[lightreads]

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Grinding, grueling, exhausting account of a series of genocides and the United States's response – or generally lack thereof.

Other people have criticized this book at length for failing to address the ways the United States was actively complicit in genocidal violence through support of its perpetrators. The criticism is accurate, though I think it's a product of the focus of this book very specifically on passive complicity.

I had read excerpts of this over the years, and I'm glad I finally sat down and went through all of it, cover-to-cover. But this is a first generation book, and now I want the fifth generation, or the seventh generation, if you know what I mean. Because Power spends a lot of time documenting American disinterest in mass death, and some time talking about the reasons, but the reasons are very . . . cerebral. This economic interest, that political exigency, a few general comments about racism.

This book made me think a lot about pain, and being the observer of it. I mean, most of us catch glimpses of indescribable anguish out of the corners of our eyes all the time, but we've developed defensive emotional blinders. But once in a while, someone looks at the newspaper headline that ten thousand other people read and forgot, and that one person is seared. Irrevocably changed just by knowing that five thousand people halfway around the world were "disappeared." I've known some people like that, and worked with them. One of them was the first person to make me read excerpts of this book.

I want the book about those people. And the contextual, psychological, physiological, etc. differences between them and the rest of us. And the book that takes a deeper, more honest look at the psychology of passive complicity, not just its economic logic. Because Power wrote mostly about when and where and who, and left me pretty messed up over why.




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Comments

[norah]

Have you read anything by Philip Gourevitch? Not exactly what you're talking about here, but closer.

[avendya]

I picked up this book based on your review, and yes, you're absolutely right about it. I am glad I read it, but there are so many things that I now have questions about -- for instance, in the Rwanda section, she lists all the early warning signs, but doesn't put those in any kind of context. Do warnings like that always indicate imminent genocide, or are there situations that have sparked such warnings that didn't result in mass death? If so, what steps were taken there that were not taken elsewhere?

I'm also a little dubious on Powers' view of America as people that can and should act to respond to threats to humanity -- possibly I'm biased by coming into politics in 2008 or so, but: we let Americans die all the time for preventable reasons. (Health care comes to mind.) It's certainly not genocide, but: when people don't do anything when people they see & encounter on a regular basis are dying, why is she at all optimistic that Americans will save strangers' lives?

But I am very glad I read it -- as someone brought up in the 90s (better yet, in a Republican household), I knew next to nothing about the Khmer Rouge. I didn't even know much about Bosnia -- save that it was a war -- until I spent some time on Wikipedia a couple years ago.