A Problem From Hell

- Blurb -

This is a shattering history of the last hundred years of genocide that itemizes in authoritative, persuasive manner exactly what the West knew when and what it chose to do, and what not to do, in the light of that knowledge. The United States has never in its history intervened to stop genocide and has in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred. In this interrogation of the last century of American history and foreign policy, Samantha Power draws upon declassified documents, private papers, unprecedented interviews and her own reporting from the modern killing fields to tell the'story of American indifference and American courage in the face of man's inhumanity to man. Tackling the argument That'successive US leaders from Wilson to Bush were unaware of genocidal horrors as they were occurring - against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Kurds, Rwandans, Bosnians - during the past century, Samantha Power seeks to establish precisely how much was known and when, and proposes that much human misery and tragedy could readily have been averted. It becomes clear that the failure to intervene was usually caused not by ignorance or impotence, but by considered political inaction. Several heroic figures did work to oppose and expose ethnic cleansing as it took place, but the quiet majority of American politicians chose to do nothing, as did the American public. The author aims to make a powerful case for why America, as both sole superpower and global citizen, must make such indifference a thing of the past.