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Monday, January 31, 2005 |
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Never Again...Again Connecting the Dots Never Again...Again It’s a coincidence, of course: the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, coming right after release of the film, "Hotel Rwanda," about the Rwandan genocide, both of which are occurring in the same time frame as the genocide in Darfur. It’s such a coincidence, in fact, that it makes you want to believe in synchronicity, a term invented by Jung and elegantly defined as "a meaningful, but noncausal, connection between an inner and outer event separated by time and space, but, like the Tao, a whole at some level." A simpler definition: a meaningful coincidence. Coincidence or synchronicity, all three events share several things: they all relate to genocide, they all took place without effective intervention from the community of nations, and they all occurred after sadder but wiser world leaders had vowed, "Never again." And, indeed, "Hotel Rwanda," a powerful and moving film, is unsparing in its indictment of the failure of Western countries to stop the slaughter. "If there's a lesson to be learned from ‘Hotel Rwanda,’" wrote Michael J. Kavanagh in Slate, "it's ‘never again.’ Never again will the international community stand by, will the United Nations ignore its moral obligation, will anyone let ethnic problems in Rwanda—or anywhere else—devolve to the point of mass killing." And yet after so many "never agains," it’s happening–again. In the Darfur region of Sudan, Arab militias, backed by the Sudanese government are waging a campaign of murder, rape, destruction and forced starvation against African tribal farmers and their families. Have we learned nothing from the Holocaust, from Armenia, from Rwanda? Well, yes, we have. We’ve learned that it’s damned hard to intervene effectively against evildoers ensconced in countries thousands of miles away and protected by their country’s sovereignty and force of arms. We learned it in Germany, where after recognizing Nazi genocide far too late for what it was–remember, despite our self-congratulatory memories of World War II as the good war, we went to war against Germany, not because they were conquering European countries or bombing Britain, much less because they were killing Jews, but because Germany declared war on us after Pearl Harbor; but I digress–it took us more than three years of all-out war and hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties to defeat Germany, which is what it took to stop the genocide, since Germany kept executing Jews almost until the end. We’re learning it in Iraq. Although, as in Germany, we didn’t go into Iraq to stop genocide, or for any reason connected with human rights, we’ve learned how hard and costly it is to force the government of another country out of power, which is what it would have taken if we had wanted to stop Saddam’s human rights abuses.* But of course, despite the never-agains, no Republican or Democratic administration would have gone to war in Iraq to stop human tights abuses, up to and including genocide, and no American citizenry would have supported such a war. Human rights activist and author Samantha Power is right to say that just because we can’t do everything to stop genocide in a particular country, it doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything. Just because we know that we won’t invade Sudan or Rwanda to stop genocide, it doesn’t mean that we can’t condemn them as genocide perpetrators before the international community, invoke the approbation of the international community, or impose economic and other sanctions. But those things take time, and while the Holocaust took years to unfold, genocide in Rwanda and Darfur took weeks and months. It would be difficult to ascertain the facts and build an international consensus in that time period, let alone for measures like sanctions to begin to bite the offender. And what if the international condemnation and sanctions didn’t work? Is it likely that any American president would back off, saying we’ve done all we can do? Is it likely we’d want him to? It’s a dilemma captured perfectly by the late Washington Post cartoonist Herblock. Back when we recognized the rulers of Taiwan as the government of China**, mainland China--the real China, "Red China" we used to call it--threatened to take over two small islands, Quemoy and Matsu, off the coast of Taiwan. The Eisenhower administration, through Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, told them they’d better not. Whereupon Red China started shelling the islands. It was about that time that Herblock did a cartoon that showed Dulles and Uncle Sam, standing on islands labeled Quemoy and Matsu, and ducking beneath artillery shells flying over them. Beside them was a sign saying, "Stay out of Quemoy and Matsu–Or Else!"; the sign was riddled with bullet holes. Dulles was pointing to the sign and explaining to an angry and perplexed Uncle Sam, "It worked fine, as long as nobody asked, ‘or else what?’" Or else what, indeed. Would we have gone to war, would we go to war today, to protect Taiwan from China? Would we have been prepared–this is not a rhetorical question– to go through a war like the one in Iraq in order to save the Tutsis in Rwanda? Would we have gone through a war to save the Jews of Europe? To save the Darfur Africans? Perhaps, despite our combination of unbounded idealism and unrivaled power, there are fires in the world that even we cannot extinguish once they are burning with full intensity. As it happens, actual firefighters are spending an increasing proportion of their time responding to hazardous materials and rescue calls, and less fighting fires, according to a recent Washington Post article, in large part because, thanks to smoke alarms, sprinkler systems, fire-resistant building material and other such preventive and early-warning innovations, there are fewer fires. Maybe we and other countries should look at that model, and try to dampen combustible ethnic, religious and territorial disputes with aid and diplomatic intervention before they become fires so intense that they can’t be put out. But just as we accept that even the most free-handed attack on the roots of crime, combined with the harshest after-the-fact punishment, won’t ever stamp out all crime, we may need to accept that nothing we as a nation can do will resolve all the conflicts that lead to the kinds of horrific eruptions that we are now seeing in Darfur. The British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin thought there was something uniquely American, writes Simon Schama in the January 31 edition of The New Republic, about the belief that "there were no conflicts that, with the application of enough goodwill, money, and robust determination, could not be resolved. The world, Berlin thought, could not be converted "from what it was to what America wished it would be." [F]or Berlin [Schama writes], it was the beginning of wisdom to accept that there were a multitude of evils that were not open to resolution... Accordingly, the job of statecraft was not to liquidate those differences, for that would seldom happen, but to contain them; to find a space in which the acceptance of irreconcilability would not require mutual annihilation. Berlin’s tragic view of history is at odds with one of America’s most attractive and compelling traits, what Schama describes as "the sunlit intensity of American optimism." But if it’s true, as Fitzgerald wrote, that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function," *** surely we can retain that sunlit optimism without making promises, to others and to ourselves, than we cannot keep. ============== * In fact, one of the less understood implications of the weapons of mass destruction fiasco is that it took an invasion just to find out whether Iraq had weapons of mass destructions and to discover the awful proportions of the human rights abuses Saddam perpetrated. ** Don’t ask why, it’s too complicated and, fifty years later it seems absurd, as in fact it did then. *** Of course, Fitzgerald might not have been right. George Orwell in 1984 described "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them" as "doublethink." 8:04:50 AM  comment []
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