A Problem from Hell

"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide is a book by Samantha Power, Professor of Human Rights Practice at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, which explores the U.S.'s understanding of, response to, and inaction on genocides in the 20th century from the Armenian genocide to the "ethnic cleansings" of the Kosovo War. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2003.

Power observes that U.S. policymakers have been consistently reluctant to condemn mass atrocities as genocide or take responsibility for leading an international military intervention. She argues that without significant pressure from the U.S. public, policymakers avoid the term "genocide" altogether. Instead, they appeal to the priority of national interests or argue (without merit, she contends) that a U.S. response would be futile and accelerate violence as a justification for inaction .

Summary

Power begins with an outline of the international response to the Armenian Genocide (Chapter 1), and then describes Raphael Lemkin's efforts to lobby for U.S. action against Nazi atrocities in Europe (Chapter 2). Then she describes further the difficulties of individuals' efforts to convince Americans and other members of the Allied Powers to recognize the Holocaust, which she explains were compounded by the focus on World War II and anti-Semitic indifference (Chapter 3). She continues in Chapter 4 to describe how Lemkin brought genocide to the forefront of foreign policy issues, leading to the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Chapter 5 describes Lemkin's mounting disappointments and multiplying adversaries until his death in 1959, whereupon U.S. Senator William Proxmire and others picked up the torch. She shows how Senator Proxmire and President Ronald Reagan worked to gain support for the ratification of the Genocide Convention (Chapter 7). In the rest of the book, she mainly focuses on individual genocides and the U.S. response in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo.

Awards

• National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction

• Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction

• Raphael Lemkin Award (Institute for the Study of Genocide)

• Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

See also

• Genocide

• Human rights