A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide [Hardcover]

Samantha Power (Author)

Book Description

Series: A New Republic book | Publication Date: February 19, 2002

About this book:In 1993, as a 23-year-old correspondent covering the wars in the Balkans, I was initially comforted by the roar of NATO planes flying overhead. President Clinton and other western leaders had sent the planes to monitor the Bosnian war, which had killed almost 200,000 civilians. But it soon became clear that NATO was unwilling to target those engaged in brutal "ethnic cleansing." American statesmen described Bosnia as "a problem from hell," and for three and a half years refused to invest the diplomatic and military capital needed to stop the murder of innocents. In Rwanda, around the same time, some 800,000 Tutsi and opposition Hutu were exterminated in the swiftest killing spree of the twentieth century. Again, the United States failed to intervene. This time U.S. policy-makers avoided labeling events "genocide" and spearheaded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers stationed in Rwanda who might have stopped the massacres underway. Whatever America's commitment to Holocaust remembrance (embodied in the presence of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.), the United States has never intervened to stop genocide. This book is an effort to understand why. While the history of America's response to genocide is not an uplifting one, "A Problem from Hell" tells the stories of countless Americans who took seriously the slogan of "never again" and tried to secure American intervention. Only by understanding the reasons for their small successes and colossal failures can we understand what we as a country, and we as citizens, could have done to stop the most savage crimes of the last century.-Samantha Power

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

During the three years (1993-1996) Samantha Power spent covering the grisly events in Bosnia and Srebrenica, she became increasingly frustrated with how little the United States was willing to do to counteract the genocide occurring there. After much research, she discovered a pattern: "The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred," she writes in this impressive book. Debunking the notion that U.S. leaders were unaware of the horrors as they were occurring against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, and Bosnians during the past century, Power discusses how much was known and when, and argues that much human suffering could have been alleviated through a greater effort by the U.S. She does not claim that the U.S. alone could have prevented such horrors, but does make a convincing case that even a modest effort would have had significant impact. Based on declassified information, private papers, and interviews with more than 300 American policymakers, Power makes it clear that a lack of political will was the most significant factor for this failure to intervene. Some courageous U.S. leaders did work to combat and call attention to ethnic cleansing as it occurred, but the vast majority of politicians and diplomats ignored the issue, as did the American public, leading Power to note that "no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on." This powerful book is a call to make such indifference a thing of the past. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly

Power, a former journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist and now the executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, offers an uncompromising and disturbing examination of 20th-century acts of genocide and U.S responses to them. In clean, unadorned prose, Power revisits the Turkish genocide directed at Armenians in 1915-1916, the Holocaust, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Iraqi attacks on Kurdish populations, Rwanda, and Bosnian "ethnic cleansing," and in doing so, argues that U.S. intervention has been shamefully inadequate. The emotional force of Power's argument is carried by moving, sometimes almost unbearable stories of the victims and survivors of such brutality. Her analysis of U.S. politics what she casts as the State Department's unwritten rule that nonaction is better than action with a PR backlash; the Pentagon's unwillingness to see a moral imperative; an isolationist right; a suspicious left and a population unconcerned with distant nations aims to show how ingrained inertia is, even as she argues that the U.S. must reevaluate the principles it applies to foreign policy choices. In the face of firsthand accounts of genocide, invocations of geopolitical considerations and studied and repeated refusals to accept the reality of genocidal campaigns simply fail to convince, she insists. But Power also sees signs that the fight against genocide has made progress. Prominent among those who made a difference are Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who invented the word genocide and who lobbied the U.N. to make genocide the subject of an international treaty, and Senator William Proxmire, who for 19 years spoke every day on the floor of the U.S. Senate to urge the U.S. to ratify the U.N. treaty inspired by Lemkin's work. This is a well-researched and powerful study that is both a history and a call to action. Photos.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 16 and up
  
• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First Edition. 8th edition (February 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465061508
• ISBN-13: 978-0465061501
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (204 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #250,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for concerned citizens, January 1, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Paperback)

It seems that instances of genocide are increasing as the world becomes a global community. This excellent book undertakes several case studies of genocide and asks why the world's countries, and the US in particular does not respond to prevent such acts against humanity.
If you dont think this book is necessary, see the review by justreviewingit below which calls the Armenian genocide the "Armenian Relocation"; this reviewer is an apologist for Turkish genocide. Holocaust deniers come in all forms and must be confronted with their evil. This book will help you do that
when you hear " Pol Pot wasn't all that bad".

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chastening, October 19, 2003

By 

R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Hardcover)

This powerful and chastening book is a detailed account of American official responses to the recurrent genocides of the 20th century. Power begins with the slaughter of the Armenians by Turkish nationalists in WWI, goes through the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Saddam Hussein's attack on the Kurds, and the disasters that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Much of the book is a detailed analysis of American response to the more recent events, notably Cambodia, Rwanda, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo. For the sake of completeness, I'd like to mention that Power doesn't cover all the genocides of the last century. The massacres in Burundi and the mass killings in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) are barely mentioned.
What did the US do about these atrocities? The short answer is that US policy has been consistently not to do much of anything about these events. This has been true regardless of which party has been in power and regardless of whether administrations have been relatively liberal or conservative. Even worse, there are several examples of American administrations either implicitly (Cambodia) or explicitly (Hussein's Iraq) aiding governments engaged in genocidal activities. The hypocrisy of several administrations is simply startling and has ironic dimensions. Several important policy makers in the first Bush administration disparaged humanitarianism and support for human rights as appropriate responses to Saddam Hussein's genocidal attacks on the Kurds on northern Iraq. Some of these individuals are now prominent in the present Bush administration and use humanitarian arguments to justify the present Iraq policy. This type of hypocrisy is matched only by the behavior of the Clinton administration during the Rwanda and Bosnia crises. This is a shameful record and many chapters make for very depressing reading.
It appears that it is very difficult to mobilize our system to do much about genocidal events. Kosovo is an interesting counter-example. Only when a number of important Clinton administration policy makers and members of Congress, and public opinion were in favor military intervention was it possible for efforts to be made to intervene successfully. When only a few influential figures are in favor of intervention, it is hard to accomplish much. Senator Dole, in probably the most distinguished episode of his long political career, was an outspoken advocate for the Bosnian Muslims. Despite his considerable influence, there was little support for intervention in either his own party or the Clinton administration for appropriate intervention.
A good part of the book is devoted to the efforts of individuals in the US who attempt to persuade our governments to pursue more aggressive policies towards genocides. What is striking is how isolated many of these individuals become. The obessive Polish-American lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide and worked tirelessly for international conventions against genocide,is the archetype of these individuals. At this death, Lemkin was a penniless fringe figure. What progress we have seen, howwver, is due in large part to the efforts of these quixotic people.
Power ends with a short final chapter that contains some actual policy prescriptions. These are generally sensible, even modest, but hard to implement in our political system. This is not an indictment of Power's suggestions but rather of a political system that doesn't place a great deal of value on human life.

98 of 108 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Awesome Work!, January 12, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Paperback)

This outstanding book was difficult to put down, and even more difficult to stop thinking about. Its topic was burdensome, sad, terribly unrelenting and tragic. Samantha Power's thorough research, well documented bibliography, and clean articulate writing style made the reading of such a depressing topic interesting and compelling. This book took me about a month of careful reading to complete and I highly recommend it.

What disturbs me more than the topic of Ms. Power's book, however, is the lengthy and jumbled review below entitled "Scholarship from Hell." The reviewer is engaging in sophistry designed to discredit Ms. Power and mislead. Beginning with the phrase "Armenian Relocation" the reviewer spirals into ten, inarticulate, horribly written and confusing paragraphs whose sole intent is to misdirect and mislead. Notice the use of the phrase "Ottoman-Armenian Conflict" giving the impression of moral equivalence and balance. In paragraph three, he then attempts to discredit Ms. Power - and subsequently her book - by claiming she did not utilize "objective sources" and as having "...a lack of sufficient grounding in history to tackle a subject as sensitive and controversial as the Ottoman-Armenian conflict." There is nothing controversial or sensitive about the Armenian Genocide, and the careful construction of this babble, undermines Ms Power and devalues the awesome bulwark of research she has undertaken and produced, and is intended to mislead the reader by throwing as much junk at the wall as possible and hoping that some of it sticks. Despite the fact that Ms. Power's work is almost seven hundred pages long (with a bibliography as long as a short novel), the reviewer claims that she fails to refer to "objective scholars" in reference to the Armenian Genocide.

References used by Ms Power include numerous newspaper and magazine articles published in 1915 when supposedly this "sensitive" and "controversial" "Ottoman-Armenian conflict" was at its height. The New York Times had very little doubt about what was occurring in Anatolia since in 1915 alone the Times published almost two hundred detailed articles - including dates, numbers of casualties, villages destroyed etc - about the slaughter of innocent Armenian men, women and children by the Ottoman Army.

Ms Power also references Henry Morgenthau the United States Ambassador to Turkey during World War One. It is almost comical to read the lame attempt by the reviewer at discrediting an ambassador of the United States, and the ridiculous suggestion that if you really want to understand Ambassador Morgenthau's memoirs and his "interpretation" of the "controversy regarding the Ottoman-Armenian conflict" that a book by some offbeat writer gives more information than Morgenthau's own words. Apparently his idea of an objective source does not include the memoirs of a U.S. Ambassador - nor the army of diplomats British, French and American - who were strewn all over Anatolia and who wrote voluminous accounts of the well organized genocide.

Other trustworthy objective references made by Ms Power include memoirs written by American and European missionaries, references to memoirs written by Ambassador Viscount Bryce (British Ambassador to the US), the renowned British historian Christopher Walker, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Arnold Toynbee, etc. This is a stellar bibliography. In stark contrast the reviewer offers no contemporary sources for his claim that the Armenian Genocide is controversial, sensitive or can be categorized as merely a "conflict." .

In addition the reviewer says nothing about all the other Genocides covered in the book and whether or not Ms. Power did a trustworthy job of covering them. Thus, presumably, Ms. Power had the "historical grounding" and sophistication to get everything else regarding all the other genocides in these seven hundred pages correct and properly documented except for the Armenian Genocide. Of course this begs the question, if she was sufficiently ungrounded to the point of getting the Armenian Genocide incorrect why should I believe anything that she has to say about the other genocides. And conversely, if her documentation is trustworthy about all the other genocides why should I not believe that she got everything correct and properly documented regarding the Armenian genocide?

The point is Ms. Power got everything correct. Genocide scholars, Holocaust scholars and professors from around the world have hailed her book as a monumental benchmark. The goal of the reviewer is to put forth a carefully worded babbling denial that actually does more than simply deny, and does more than simply babble. The reviewer also seeks to blame the victim, and also shroud the events of 1915-1922 behind a scrim of supposed controversy where there is no controversy. The reviewer's goal is not even to re-write history, but rather to paint a situation that seems so hopelessly confused that one would need a doctorate to figure it out. The Armenian Genocide is neither "controversial" nor is it confusing, nor is it a "sensitive" issue (though I am sure it is a sensitive issue if your grandfather was one of the perpetrators of the crime) nor does one need a doctorate to understand it. The Armenian Genocide was a carefully planned genocide by Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha who used a well-trained Ottoman Army, to murder 1.5 million innocent men, women and children. It had nothing to do with World War One (except to the extent that the War was used as a cover,) it had nothing to do with the Russians, it had nothing to do with "relocation," it was all about hate, power, envy and jealousy - the Armenians were a peaceful people who had lived on their ancestral lands for 2,500 years. In "A Scholarship from Hell" the reviewer's careful rambling use of words attempts to sow confusion where none exists, and bring into question the credibility of Ms Power and her research methods, thus rendering anything she has to say irrelevant.

Ms. Power has written an awesome, trustworthy account of Genocide in the 20th century. It is a heavy, time-consuming read, but it is also one of the best non-fiction books I have read in the last five years.