2002, ISBN: 0465061508

[EAN: 9780465061501], [PU: NY. 2002. Basic Books / Perseus Book Group], Jacket, grey & black hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. pencil marked co… Mehr…

[EAN: 9780465061501], [PU: NY. 2002. Basic Books / Perseus Book Group], Jacket, grey & black hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. pencil marked copy in good cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. faint spot on the foredge, couple of tiny nicks in the top edge. 6 pages in the preface with underlining to couple of lines, pencil marks in margin, rest of contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. minor rubbing at spine top, not torn or price clipped. nice used copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, no remainder markings etc~. fourth printing (#4 in # line). xxi+610p.+about the author. b&w photo illustrations. notes. bibliography. index. world history. world war i. world war ii. political science. sociology. politics. ~ "A PROBLEM FROM HELL" is a pathbreaking interrogation of the last century of American history. Samantha Power poses a question that haunts our nation's past: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to marshal the will and the might to stop genocide? She provides the answer in the form of the suspenseful story of courageous individuals who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act. Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policymakers, access to thousands of pages of newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power shows how those who urged U.S. action were thwarted again and again by ignorance, indifference, and, above all, a failure of imagination. In 1915, when Turkey sent its Armenian population on death marches into the desert, U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau denounced what he called "race murder." Raphael Lemkin, a Polish attorney appalled by the Turkish atrocities, tried to get European statesmen to criminalize the destruction of ethnic and religious groups, but he was dismissed as alarmist. Six years later, Hitler invaded Poland, and Lemkin lost forty~nine family members in the Holocaust. Landing as a refugee on America's shores, Lemkin resolved to devise a word that would convey the evil under way. In 1944, while working for the U.S. War Department, Lernkin invented the term "genocide." But the U.S. response to genocide since the Holocaust has looked very similar to its response before and during it. Pol Pot's murder of two million Cambodians went unchallenged. The United States supplied aid to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein while he gassed his own people. Despite the largest wave of resignations from the U.S. government since Vietnam, Serb nationalists were left alone to herd Bosnian Muslims into concentration camps in Europe. And in 1994 Rwandan Hutu militants exterminated some 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu without even generating high~level protest from Washington. "A Problem from Hell" combines spellbinding history and seasoned political analysis to do more than merely tell the story of U.S. inaction. Power shows how decent Americans inside and outside government looked away from mass murder by convincing themselves that refugees were lying, that intervention would be futile, or that contemporary genocides did not measure up to the crime they said they would "never again" permit. By allowing readers to hear directly from American decision~makers and dissenters, as well as from the victims of genocide, Power reveals just what was known and what might have been done while millions perished., Books<

1993, ISBN: 9780465061501

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 othe… Mehr…

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 Media >, [PU: Basic Books]<