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.

[lightreads]

I have not. Thanks!

[norah]

He digs into some of the nuance of genocide from the aftermath on the ground in Rwanda.

I just, there's not a lot written about the people who don't. There's Zimbardo, and Kristian Williams has some great books on torture/policing and the impact on individuals of existing within power structures that allow or encourage evil, but what you're asking is more like, what makes Paul Rusesabagina That Guy who does what he does? We understand the literal moral gravity of these things - like, under what circumstances the average individual's morals will be pulled downward, but not whatever forces there are that might act against it.

If you find anything like that BY GOD I WANT TO READ IT.

[lightreads]

Right, exactly. I'm up to my eyeballs in stuff on the toxic effects of systemic evil, or just systemic indifference. I can think of work on the effects of dissenter voices, but it's in other contexts -- juries with one hold-out, that sort of thing. But nothing on the personal psychology of, well, counter crimes against humanity. Hrm, hrm.

[norah]

Have pinged my friend who studies this stuff with the question, maybe he will know? Copied you at LGI at gmail, that's right, innit?

[lightreads]

eolianbeck at gmail -- the other was taken.