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A review by maxstone98
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
4.0
Great book on genocide, covering several genocides (starting with the Armenian genocide 100 years ago) in detail, plus a lot of material on how international law developed in this space, with a particular focus on the American response. Not all the way to "page turner" but an interesting and accessible book about a tough topic. I learned a ton.
My one reservation about the book concerns the extent to which the genocides were genuinely knowable significantly in advance of when they were known / treated seriously / responded to by the US and the rest of the international community. The book generally takes the stance that our response (mostly government response but also media response) could have been materially faster and more perceptive, and the book cites dozens or hundreds of communications that were prescient or even just describing the on-the-ground reality which did not generate much of a response.
Ideally of course they would have been responded to, but governments are big complicated operations (international organizations like the UN as well) and I can't help but wonder, for each one of these (in retrospect) very informative communications, how many tens or hundreds or thousands of other communications were sent, understated or hyperbolic, biased or unbiased, accurate or inaccurate, etc. Obviously one wants to do as good a job as possible recognizing what is going on quickly and hence responding faster and more effectively, but I'm sympathetic to the notion that there is an email existing that predicts every possible event, and it is a very difficult task to figure out which ones are accurate and super-meaningful in advance, and easy to look backward and say "see, here's an email that warned of exactly what happened, why was it ignored".
On the other hand, Samantha Power is smart, expert on the topic, and knows 1000 times as much as I do about how government agencies and international agencies actually work, so it seems likely that concern is wrong.
My one reservation about the book concerns the extent to which the genocides were genuinely knowable significantly in advance of when they were known / treated seriously / responded to by the US and the rest of the international community. The book generally takes the stance that our response (mostly government response but also media response) could have been materially faster and more perceptive, and the book cites dozens or hundreds of communications that were prescient or even just describing the on-the-ground reality which did not generate much of a response.
Ideally of course they would have been responded to, but governments are big complicated operations (international organizations like the UN as well) and I can't help but wonder, for each one of these (in retrospect) very informative communications, how many tens or hundreds or thousands of other communications were sent, understated or hyperbolic, biased or unbiased, accurate or inaccurate, etc. Obviously one wants to do as good a job as possible recognizing what is going on quickly and hence responding faster and more effectively, but I'm sympathetic to the notion that there is an email existing that predicts every possible event, and it is a very difficult task to figure out which ones are accurate and super-meaningful in advance, and easy to look backward and say "see, here's an email that warned of exactly what happened, why was it ignored".
On the other hand, Samantha Power is smart, expert on the topic, and knows 1000 times as much as I do about how government agencies and international agencies actually work, so it seems likely that concern is wrong.