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On 20 April 2016, after hearing harrowing testimony coming from victims, the UK House of Commons unanimously adopted a resolution declaring "That this House believes that Christians, Yazidis, and other ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq and Syria are suffering genocide at the hands of Daesh; and calls on the Government to make an immediate referral to the UN Security Council [SC] with a view to conferring jurisdiction upon the International Criminal Court [ICC] so that perpetrators can be brought to justice" (HC Hansard 20 April 2016 columns 957-1000).
Most entries to the Eurovision song contest are frothy pop tunes, but this year’s contribution from Ukraine addresses Stalin’s deportation of the entire Tatar population of Crimea in May 1944. It may seem an odd choice, but is actually very timely if we dig a little into the history of mass repression and inter-ethnic tensions in the region. Almost a quarter of a million Tatars, an ethnically Turkic people indigenous to the Crimea, were moved en masse to Soviet Central Asia as a collective punishment for perceived collaboration with the Nazis.
On 12 November 2015 the Ukrainian Parliament took the bold step of recognizing the destruction of the Crimean Tatar nation by the Soviet Army in 1944 as a genocide. The surviving Crimean Tatars hope that this long overdue action will shine an expository light on a genocide that has been kept hidden for decades and is still not recognized by Russia.
In the space of less than a week, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights issued two lengthy judgments relating to the crime of genocide. The 17-judge Grand Chamber is the most authoritative formation of the European Court, and in recent years the Court has found itself compelled to address a range of issues relating to the prevention and punishment of international crimes.
The Armenian genocide and the Holocaust took place decades ago, but the novelist William Faulkner was right when he said that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It had been hoped that “Never again!” might be more than a slogan, but in April 1994, the Rwandan genocide began and was soon in full cry.
Late last year, North Korea grabbed headlines after government-sponsored hackers infiltrated Sony and exposed the private correspondence of its executives. The more significant news that many may have missed, however, was the symbolic and long overdue UN resolution condemning the crimes against humanity North Korean committed against its own people.
I had the great pleasure of knowing Dana while I was a student at Vermont College. She is a woman of many talents and a thought-provoking speaker. Her novel, Like Water on Stone, was a labor of love that started, I think, while she was at Vermont College and continued on after she'd completed the program. I cheered when I heard it had been acquired, not simply because a fellow VCFA'er had placed a story but because this book brings a rich form of diversity to not only kidlit but literature overall.
Basic Premise: It's 1914. Shahen dreams of moving to New York where part of his family has already immigrated. His father, initially, stands in his son's way. He loves their life in Armenia. And then the Ottoman empire, in decline, goes to war. Religion suddenly matters, and not in a good way. Much of Shahen's family, Christians, including his parents and older brothers, are murdered by troops. Shahen and two of his sisters flee across the mountains to safety and, eventually, a new life in America.
The story was inspired by Walrath's own family story of immigration.
There are a variety of interesting elements to take away from this piece. The most hard-hitting is that this is a story of genocide. How does a kidlit writer tackle such hard stuff and not overwhelm her reader? Walrath chose to write her story in verse, her reasoning being, the material is so graphic, so emotionally full, by painting with thinner strokes, it is possible to share and yet not overwhelm a younger audience. Not once did I ever feel words were missing, nor did I feel as if I couldn't keep reading. It's a masterful use of a writer's tool. In so doing, Walrath exposes her audience to the concept that genocide is, very unfortunately, a recurring theme in human history, and opens the story of for debate by leaving the reader wondering: why? Why do we as humans tend toward annihilation of others? It's a contemporary topic.
Further, the novel is told from alternating POVs. It was truly fascinating to both read and see POV change by changing poetic structure. It's yet another tool to add to the toolbox.
For other great reads, you don't even need to get out your galoshes, just spring over to Barrie Summy's website. Happy reading!
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While nascent talk of the Holocaust was in the air when I was growing up in New York City, we did not learn about it in school, even in lessons about World War II or the waves of immigration to America’s shores. There were no public memorials or museums to the murdered millions, and the genocide of European Jewry was subsumed under talk of “the war.”
My father was a somber man who arrived here from Poland after the war and, like many survivors, kept to himself, trying his best to block out the past. Growing up, my connection to my father’s lost world consisted of names mentioned in hushed tones and photographs retrieved from hidden boxes.
But as I grew older, I watched with great interest, more than a little curiosity, and a good deal of relief as it became more acceptable to talk about “our” tragedy. By the 1980s, lessons about the genocide of European Jewry became de rigueur in high schools through the nation. In the following decade, people could flock to a hulking museum in our nation’s capital that told the story for all who cared to listen.
The Holocaust became a universal moral touchstone that called upon us to defend our common humanity against the capacity for evil. But today, on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January, the lesson we Jews seem to draw from our history is that those outside the tribe cannot be trusted.
In the wake of the recent terrorist attack on a kosher food store in Paris, and as anti-Semitism rises in France and elsewhere, these fears seem understandable. I know these kinds of fears well. Even in the relative comfort of his postwar existence, my father had a recurring nightmare that he was being chased by German shepherds.
But when such fears lead to catastrophic thinking, they harden our hearts to the suffering of others and contribute, paradoxically, to a sense of Holocaust fatigue among many Jewish Americans — particularly younger ones.
“I’m sick of the Holocaust as a shorthand for ‘we suffered more than you, so we should get the piece of cake with the rosette on it,’” a 20-something columnist wrote in the Forward. Peter Beinart in The Crisis of Zionism argues that the growing emphasis on the Holocaust in American life beginning in the 1960s and 1970s marked the end of Jewish universalism.
“Liberalism was out,” Beinart wrote. “Tribalism was in.”
Beinart and others are partly right: Holocaust trauma is too readily exploited. But historically, Holocaust commemoration efforts have been more than simply exercises in tribalism. They often emerged from an urge to acknowledge and alleviate human suffering writ large.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish legal scholar and Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide” and fought to have the concept recognized by the United Nations, exemplified this impulse. So did the mobilization of the Holocaust second generation. Descendants of survivors, empowered by the progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s, coaxed our parents to share their stories. The Holocaust consciousness we helped build was part of a larger search for self-expression and human rights.
Today, many Holocaust commemoration activities reflect this universal spirit as well, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s efforts to promote awareness of genocide in Sudan and elsewhere. Jewish-American donors provided the bulk of the funds for a memorial to the more than two million Cambodians murdered during the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge, an acknowledgement of a shared tragic history.
These and other efforts to remember the suffering of others should be applauded, but they must be more than window dressing. They should also spur our own collective soul-searching. Committing funds for projects in places where Jews have few political or emotional investments, such as Cambodia or Sudan, is relatively easy. Subjecting our own deeply felt loyalties to Israel to scrutiny is a much more difficult, but no less important, task.
The truth is that at times our privileges may in fact be implicated in the suffering of others in the Palestinian territories, where life is brutal and frequently too short. A sense of hopelessness prevails among both Israelis and Palestinians, fueling acts of desperation and violence in the Middle East and beyond.
A chorus of leaders on both sides is promoting a politics of fear, declaring I cannot be my brother’s keeper when my brother is out to murder me. But on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, let us honor the memory of the parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, and all of the unknown others we have lost by resisting such talk and redoubling our efforts to seek peace.
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait includes "The Summer of Our Discontent" in which he wrote about moderates who, opposed to segregation, were friends of the Civil Rights Movement. But, King wrote, these moderates were less enthused about the breadth of the movement's call for equality to jobs, housing, education, and social mobility, which he called a Revolution.
Rather than condemn them, he sought to understand their reluctance. He wrote:*
They [the moderates] are evidence that the Revolution is now ripping into roots. For too long the depth of racism in American life as been underestimated. The surgery to extract it is necessarily complex and detailed. As a beginning it is important to X-ray our history and reveal the full extent of the disease. The strands of prejudice towards Negroes are tightly wound around the American character. The prejudice has been nourished by the doctrine of race inferiority. Yet to focus upon the Negro alone as the "inferior race" of American myth is to miss the broader dimensions of the evil.
Here's the next paragraph. There is a lot to say about the ideas in this paragraph, but my point in sharing it is the last line, which I am emphasizing with bold italics:
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.
I'm sharing King's words today--the day after the US celebrates Martin Luther King Day--because I would like people to think about what he said in those two paragraphs. I want you to think about it each day as you work with children or teens and the books you use with them.
How many of the books on your shelf exalt the experiences of Native peoples in ways that incorrectly cast us as inferior people? Is it hard for you to look critically at those books because they require you to examine a previously unexamined allegiance to a view of American character that has not looked critically at what King called its evil dimensions?
__________ *I am reading Why We Can't Wait as an ebook and cannot provide page numbers for the excerpts above. Why We Can't Wait was first published by Beacon Press in 1963.
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“In the end,” says Goethe, “we are creatures of our own making.” Although offered as a sign of optimism, this insight seems to highlight the underlying problem of human wrongdoing. After all, in the long sweep of human history, nothing is more evident and palpable than the unending litany of spectacular crimes. Most spectacularly of all, these properly codified public wrongs include genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity.
After Nuremberg, after the Holocaust, one might have expected a far-reaching change in human conduct, a welcome reduction of egregious harms occasioned by both new knowledge and new law. Yet, let us look around us at the present moment. The views are not encouraging. Look at Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo. Let us try to figure out the presumptively democratic but also riotous ethos sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. Not to be forgotten, there is present-day Iran. Today, its faith-based leaders openly declare a determinedly genocidal intent against Israel. Let us also consider Cambodia, Argentina, Rwanda, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia.
War and genocide are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes, war is simply the optimal means by which an intended genocide can be most efficiently carried out. How has an entire species, miscarried from the start, scandalized its own creation? Are we all potential murderers of those who live beside us?
What about slavery? In every form and permutation, this “natural” crime continues to grow, insidiously but without evident disguise, in Mali and Mauritania, and in other more conspicuous places. Shall we recall the murderous diamond mines of Sierra Leone and Liberia? And let us not forget the ever-widening radius of human child trafficking, an ancient and medieval practice, now especially visible in Nigeria and Benin.
Where is civilization? These devastating crimes are still far-flung and robust. Paradoxically, they are flourishing even now, in the “developed” and thoroughly “modern” 21st century.
For as long as we can identify the tangled skeins of world history, the corpse has been in fashion. Today, on several continents, whole nations of corpses are the rage. As for the international community, it stands by as it has so often, incredulously, with self-righteous indignation, sheepish, yet also arrogant, simultaneously calculating and lamenting its own self-reinforcing impotence.
Why? The answer has several intersecting levels, and several overlapping layers of pertinent meaning. At one level, certainly the one most familiar to political scientists and legal scholars, the basic problem lies in the changing embrace of power politics. Representing a transformation of traditional political realism, the relentless deification of states has finally reduced billions of prospective individuals to barely residual specks of significance.
In such an world, wherein the “self-determination of peoples” is a weighty value, sanguinary executions of the innocent must always be expected and applauded. Moreover, such executions, sometimes a thinly disguised or expressly secular form of religious “sacrifice,” are heralded defiantly as “sacred.” To prevent terrorism, genocide, and crimes against humanity, nation-states must first be shorn of their presumed sacredness.
Before even this can happen, however, individuals must first be allowed to discover alternative and equally attractive sources of belonging. Somehow, humanity must finally conquer the continuing incapacity of individual persons to draw true, vital, and existential meaning from within themselves.
Although generally unseen, the core problem we face on earth is the universal and omnivorous power of the herd in human affairs. This power is based upon individual submission. Ultimately, the problem of international criminality is always one of distraught and unfulfilled individuals. Ever fearful of having to draw meaning from their own inwardness, most human beings, like a moth to a flame, will draw closer and closer to the nearest collectivity.
Whatever the gripping claims of the moment, the herd spawns contrived hatreds of dissimilarity that can make even mass murder seem warm, welcome, and reasonable. Fostering a persistent refrain of “us” versus “them,” it encourages each submissive member to ceremoniously celebrate the death of “outsiders.”
The overriding task, then, must be to discover the way back to ourselves as persons. Understood in terms of the contemporary prevention of genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity, we are thus commanded to look beyond ordinary politics, and toward a determinedly worldwide actualization of authentic persons.
At its source, the unrecognized but critical human task is to migrate from the Kingdom of the Herd, to the Kingdom of the Self. In succeeding with this very nuanced and unambiguously grand movement, one must first want to live in the second kingdom. We must fix the fragmented and fractionated world at its most elementary individual source. Then, after so many millennia of brutishness and exclusion, we could do whatever is needed to enable our fellow human beings to find sufficient comfort and reassurance outside the segregating and always-potentially murderous herd.
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. He was born in Zürich, Switzerland. Dr. Beres is Professor of Political Science at Purdue. He is a frequent contributor to OUPblog.
If you are interested in this subject and want to learn more, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies is the first book to subject both genocide and the young discipline it has spawned to systematic, in-depth investigation. Thirty-four renowned experts study genocide through the ages by taking regional, thematic, and disciplinary-specific approaches. The work is multi-disciplinary, featuring the work of historians, anthropologists, lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers.
After the judge’s ruling Monday in Guatemala City, the crowd outside erupted into cheers and set off fireworks. The unthinkable had happened: Judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez had cleared the way for retired General Efraín Ríos Montt, who between 1982 and 1983 had overseen the darkest years of that nation’s 36-year long armed conflict, would stand trial for genocide. In that conflict (1960-1996), more than 150,000 Guatemalans died, the majority at the hands of their own government, which used their lives to prosecute a ferocious counterinsurgency war against a group of Marxist guerrillas who had hoped to bring a Sandinista-style socialist regime to Guatemala. For many, General Ríos Montt represented the face of this war, because it was during his short terms as president between March 1982 and August 1983 (he both came to power and was expelled in military coup d’états), that the Guatemalan army undertook the most bloody operation of the war, a violent scorched-earth campaign that not only nearly eliminated the guerrillas military operation, but which also killed many thousands of civilians, the vast majority of them Maya “Indians.” Now, some thirty years later, Ríos Montt will be prosecuted along with his former chief of intelligence, Mauricio Rodriguez Sánchez, for genocide and crimes against humanity. Specifically, he will be charged with ordering the killings of more than 1,700 Maya Ixil people in a series of massacres that the Army conducted in the northern part of the country in 1982.
The axiom “justice delayed is justice denied” notwithstanding, the prosecution of fatally misguided leaders and despots such as Serbia’s Radovan Karadžić or Hutu leader Beatrice Munyenyezi is not unusual in the early 21st century. Trials such as these are designed to serve the cause of justice, of course, but they are also instrumental in helping a traumatized society create a coherent narrative and build a collective historical memory around what happened in its recent past. What is unusual about the case against Ríos Montt is that almost no one foresaw the day when such a trial would ever take place in Guatemala. In large part, this stems from Guatemala’s long-standing culture of impunity, where few people, from common criminals all the way up to corrupt businessmen and military officers, are held accountable for their crimes; generally speaking, the rule of law there simply does not rule. Beyond that, Ríos Montt’s continued influence in the country—among other things, he established and headed a powerful political party, the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco in the 1989, and he run an unsuccessful campaign for president as recently as 2003—further mitigated against expectations for his prosecution. His daughter, Zury Ríos Montt (who is married to former US Congressman Jerry Weller) is a rising and powerful young politician; her support for her father is so absolute that she stormed out of the courtroom yesterday before the judge could finalize his pronouncement. But most of all, the prosecution of Ríos Montt seemed most unlikely because, in the strange paradox of power that sometimes comes with authoritarian regimes, there were, and still continue to be, some Guatemalans who continue to respect him, remembering his bloody rule as a time when one could walk the streets of the capital safely and when the “raging wolves” of communism were kept at bay.
Adding to the complexity of this case is that fact that, at the time he served as chief of state in the early 1980s, (although called “President,” he did not actually hold this title, having taken power in a coup), Ríos Montt was a newly born again Christian, a member of a neo-Pentecostal denomination called the Church of the Word (Verbo). Fresh from the rush of his conversion, Ríos Montt addressed the nation weekly during his term of office, offering what people called his “Sunday sermons,”—discourses in which he drifted freely from topics ranging from his desire to defeat the “subversion,” to advice on wholesome family living, to his particular vision of a “New Guatemala” where all peoples would live together as one (a jab at the unassimilated Maya), in compliant obedience to a benign government that served the general good. Ríos Montt’s dream of a New Guatemala was in many ways as elusive as quicksilver, and in his sermons, he made no mention of the carnage going on in the countryside. The sacrifice of the Maya people and other “subversives” was not at all too high a price to pay, in his estimation, for the New Guatemala.
But the elegance, even the peaceability of his language, along with his strong affiliation with the Church of the Word (his closes advisors were church leaders, not his fellow generals) in that moment made Ríos Montt the darling of the emergent leaders of the Christian Right in the United States who were coming of age during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. For them, as for the Reagan administration, Ríos Montt seemed to have emerged out of nowhere from the turmoil of the Central American crisis of the early 1980s as an anti-communist Christian soldier and ally. It seemed unthinkable to them that the same man who, with one hand, reached out to called for honesty and familial devotion from his people, would order the killing of his own people with his other. And so it seems to some Guatemalans even today. Yet the strong and irrefutable body of evidence that produced yesterday’s ruling tells a very different, and much more tragic story.
Happy 2012! We're looking forward to another year filled with literary wonder. So far, 2012 has found us rekindling our Indiespensable relationship with Algonquin Books. Algonquin, an independent (and Southern!) publisher, is beloved by authors, readers, and booksellers alike for their hand-picked gems that other houses might overlook. We had the perfect opportunity to work [...]
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By Andrew S. Natsios
For more than two centuries, Sudan has attracted an unusual level of attention beyond its own borders. This international interest converged in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century as four independent forces met.
First, there is the rebellion in Darfur, which has generated greater international concern than any other recent humanitarian crisis. This long-neglected western region has been intermittently at war since the 1980s and claimed the lives of 300,000 Darfuris in its most recent phase. The rebellion beginning in 2002 led to an ongoing humanitarian emergency, costing Western governments
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Here on earth, tragedy and disappointment seemingly afflict every life that is consecrated to serious thought. This is especially true in matters of world politics where every self-styled blogger is now an “expert” and where any careful search for deeper meanings is bound to fall upon deaf ears. Nonetheless, if we wish to better understand war, terror and genocide, we must finally be willing to search beyond the endlessly clichéd babble of politicians, professors and pundits.
How, then, shall we survive, both as a civilization, and also as a species? This is not, by any means, a silly question. Rather, although almost never addressed meaningfully, it remains the question of supreme importance and urgency.
To venture purposefully toward an answer, we must acknowledge that the outer worlds of politics and statecraft are inevitably a reflection of our innermost private selves. More precisely, it is only within the opaque mysteries of individual human mortality – mysteries focused on the timeless and universal preoccupation with personal power over death – that we can ultimately discover the core truths of our collective survival.
These truths will be sobering. The standard assumption that we shall obviously endure as a species is simply not supported by science. Virtually every species (more than ninety-nine percent, to be more exact) that once walked or crawled on this increasingly-broken planet has already become extinct. The dinosaurs, once absolute rulers of the earth, have left us only their crushed bones as mementoes.
Nor should we draw any reasonable hope from myriad private and collective human accomplishments. From an evolutionary perspective, intellect and intelligence are plainly overrated. The bacteria, who lack both, have been around a great deal longer than we have. Their future survival, too, is plainly more secure.
Though gleefully unacknowledged, especially in schools and universities, there remains a palpably yawning gap between humankind’s technical understandings, and its passions. Cruelty, undimmed and undiminished, continues to wear a distinctly human face.
More than we care to admit, education and enlightenment have too-little bearing on the human prospect. Surely, we understand, steadily expanding technologies of mega-destruction have done nothing to make us more responsible stewards of the earth. Instead, with an utterly unhindered arrogance, entire nations and peoples continue to revel in every conceivable form of barbarism and extermination.
Exeunt omnes?
What, exactly, is wrong with us? Somehow, shameless human bloodletting persists even while the most predatory of other animals manage to live together in less murderous habitats. There is also endless killing among these “lower” animals, but it is mostly survival driven. Almost never is it aimlessly destructive, wanton, or merely gratuitous.
Paradoxically, some essential truths remain both evident and well hidden. As a species, whether openly or quietly, we too-often take a conspicuous delight in the pain and suffering of others. In German, my own first language (I am Swiss born), there is even a precise name for it. Scholars and writers call it “Schadenfreude.”
What sort of species can tolerate or venerate such a hideous source of pleasure? And to what extent, if any, is this venal quality related to our steadily-diminishing prospects for survival?
“Our unconscious,” wrote Freud, “does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal.” What we ordinarily describe as heroism may in some cases be no more than denial. Still, an expanded acceptance of personal mor
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In difficult times like today, people need a vision or ideology that gives them hope for the future. Unfortunately, groups often adopt destructive visions, which identify other groups as enemies who supposedly stand in the way of creating a better future. A constructive, shared vision, which joins groups, reduces the chance of hostility and violence in a society.
A serious failure of the Obama administration has been not to offer, and help people embrace, such a vision. Policies by themselves, such as health care and limited regulation of the financial system, even if beneficial, don’t necessarily do this. A constructive vision or ideology must combine an inspiring vision of social arrangements, of the relations between individuals and groups and the nature of society, and actions that aim to fulfill the vision. A community that includes all groups, recreating a moral America, and rebuilding connections to the rest of the world could be elements of such a vision.
In difficult times, people need security, connection to each other, a feeling of effectiveness, and an understanding of the world and their place in it. Being part of a community can help fulfill these needs. The work programs of the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression provided people with livelihood. But they also gave them dignity and told them that they were part of the national community.
Community means accepting and embracing differences among us. Especially important among the influences that lead groups of people to turn against each other is drawing a line between us and them, and seeing the other in a negative light. The words and actions of Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln propagated acceptance of the other even after extreme violence. The U.S. is a hugely varied country, and for every one of us, there can be many of “them.” But others’ differentness can enrich us. People travel to distant places just to glimpse at other people and their lives. As much research shows, real contact, deep engagement, working for shared goals across races, religions, classes, and political beliefs helps to overcome prejudice, helps us to see our shared humanity. Engaging with each other’s differentness here at home can connect us to each other–and increase our satisfaction in life.
Creating a vision—and reality—of community also requires addressing the huge financial inequality in America. Research shows that during periods of greater inequality in income, people are less satisfied. This is true of liberals; perhaps surprisingly, to a lesser degree, it is also true of conservatives. Inequality presumably reduces people’s feeling of community. The financial crisis provided an opportunity to begin to address inequality, to use laws, policies, and public opinion to limit compensation in financial institutions and corporations. Roosevelt had to fight for his programs. This time there has not been enough “political will,” that is, commitment and courage, to do this
Good connection to the rest of the world also increases our experience of community—and our security. For many decades, the United States was greatly respected and admired. Now, as I travel around the world in the course of my work on preventing violence between groups and promoting reconciliation, most of the people I talk to are highly critical of us. But my sense is that many yearn to again trust and respect us.
In his Cairo speech, as President Obama reached out to the Muslim world, he offered an image of connection between countries and peoples. But words alone are not enough, and there has been little follow up. He also continued with policies of the Bush administration, such as extraordinary rendition, handing over suspected terrorists to other countries for interrogation using torture. We Americans believe we are a moral people; both for
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A few hours after the 9/11 attacks, speaking on our local public radio station in Western Massachusetts, struggling with my tears and my voice, I said that this horrible attack can help us understand people’s suffering around the world, and be a tool for us to unite with others to create a better world. Others also said similar things. But that is not how events progressed.
Our response to that attack led to three wars we are still fighting, including the war on terror. How we fight these wars and what we do to bring them to an end will shape our sense of ourselves as a moral people, our connections to the rest of the world, our wealth and power as a nation, and our physical security. What can we do to reduce hostility toward us, strengthen our alliances, and regain our moral leadership in the world?
One of the basic principles of human conduct is reciprocity. As one party strikes out at another, the other, if it can, usually responds with force. Often the response is more than what is required for self-defense. It is punitive, taking revenge, teaching the other a lesson. But the first party takes this as aggression, and responds with more violence. Israelis and Palestinians for many years engaged in mutual and often escalating retaliation, sometimes reciprocating immediately, sometimes, the Palestinians especially, the weaker party, waiting for the right opportunity.
Many young Muslims, and even non-Muslims converting to Islam, have been “radicalized” by our drone attacks, and our forces killing civilians in the course of fighting. The would-be Times Square bomber has talked to people about his distress and anger about such violence against Muslims. While we kill some who plan to attack us, especially as we harm innocent others, more turn against us.
Of course, we must protect ourselves. But positive actions are also reciprocated—not always, but often, especially if the intention for the action is perceived as positive. Non-violent reactions and practices must be part of effective self-defense. Respect is one of them. Many Muslims were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and we should have specifically included them in our public mourning. Many Arab and Muslim countries reached out to us afterwards, even Iran, and we should have responded more than we did to their sympathy and support. Effective reaching out is more challenging now, and after the mid-term elections the world might see reaching out by President Obama as acting out of weakness. But the U.S. is still the great power, and both the administration and members of Congress ought to reach out to the Muslim world.
But even as we show respect and work on good connections, we ought to stop supporting repressive Muslim regimes. That has been one of the grievances against us. An important source of Al-Qaeda has been Egyptian terrorists, who fought against a secular repressive Egyptian regime. Then as Al-Qaeda was organized by the Mujahideen, who fought against and defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, they turned from such “near enemies” against the far enemy, the United States, which supported these repressive regimes.
Another important matter is dialogue between parties. Dialogue can be abused, used simply to gain time, or as a show to pacify third parties, or can even be a fraud as in Afghanistan where an “impostor” played the role of a Taliban leader in dialogue with the government . The Bush administration strongly opposed dialogue with terrorists—but then with money and other inducements got Sunnis in Iraq, who have been attacking us, to work with us. In persistent dialogue, in contrast to the very occasional negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the parties can develop relationships, gain trust, and then become ready to resolve practical matters.
To resolve our wars, we cannot simply bomb and shoot. We must also
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In difficult times people need a vision of a better future to give them hope. The U.S. is experiencing difficult times. The majority of people are poorer and many are out of work, the political system is frozen and corrupted by lobbyists and institutions that have gone awry, and there are constant changes in the world that create uncertainty. We are also at war, and face the danger of attack. While pluralism – the openness and public space to express varied ideas, and for all groups in society to have access to the public domain – is important for a free society, the cacophony of shrill voices creates confusion and makes it difficult for constructive visions and policies to emerge.
In times like these, subgroups of a society – racial, ethnic, religious or political – often turn against other groups. Members of one group, often the largest or dominant group, blame others for the difficulties of life. Often, their ideology is destructive. Instead of addressing the source of societal problems, such visions frequently focus on enhanced national power, racial superiority, or a utopian degree of social equality in the society or in the world. They identify enemies that supposedly stand in the way of the fulfillment of the vision. The group turns against and engages in increasingly harmful, and eventually violent, actions against this enemy.
In response to intensely difficult conditions, destructive ideologies and movements have shaped life in many nations. In Germany the ideology stressed racial superiority, expansion, and submission to a leader. Jews and gypsies were regarded as racially inferior, Slavs both inferior and in the way of expansion. In Cambodia the vision was of total social equality, with everyone judged incapable of contributing to or living in such a society, whether the former elite, educated people or minorities as enemies. In the former Yugoslavia, for the Serbs, it was renewed nationalism, with other groups, especially Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo as enemies. In Argentina, people stood against communism and in defense of faith and order. Everyone considered left-leaning – even people working to improve the lives of poor people – became enemies. In Rwanda “Hutu power” over the Tutsi minority, became the guiding ideology. While significant societal change is usually shaped by a number of influences, such ideologies had important roles in creating hostility and violence, ending in mass killing or genocide.
In the U.S. so far, in spite of our increasingly dysfunctional political life and shrill political rhetoric, there is no comparable destructive ideology. While we have many divisions, and ignore the harm to civilians outside the country in the wars we fight, the rights of different groups inside the country have increasingly come to be respected, especially in the last half century. However, many have turned against the current administration, and to some extent, against government in general. They affirm core American values of freedom and individuality, but in the service of tearing down, without a vision of what to create. This is one half of an ideology, the against part, without a clear aim, a for part.
Such rebellion seems to be supported, and perhaps instigated, by people in the background who finance it, and by politicized media. It thrives on people’s genuine and understandable distress, the result of the frustration of material needs, but even more, the frustration of a variety of psychological needs, uncertainty, and fear. Joining ideological groups and movements helps fulfill needs for security, community, and a feeling of effectiveness at a time when people feel powerless.
We need a constructive vision, words joined
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Images of people about to die surface repeatedly in the news and their appearance raises questions: What equips an image to deliver the news; how much does the public need to know to make sense of what they see; and what do these images contribute to historical memory? These images call on us to rethink both journalism and its public response, and in so doing they suggest both an alternative voice in the news – a subjunctive voice of the visual that pushes the ‘as if’ of news over its ‘as is’ dimensions – and an alternative mode of public engagement with journalism – an engagement fueled not by reason and understanding but by imagination and emotion.
In About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Barbie Zelizer suggests that a different kind of news relay, producing a different kind of public response, has settled into our information environment.
Barbie Zelizer is Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of several collections and the author of Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye,Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory, and most recently About to Die: How News Images Move the Public.
If you’d like to learn more, you can watch Zelizer’s lecture from this December at McNally Jackson Books.
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When people hear the word “genocide,” most think–surely something like that can’t happen in today’s world. But unfortunately it has and it does. Jane Springer has written a book for young adults about genocide, and it is one that I recommend all teens read. Let’s have a new generation of people who CAN’T say, “Surely, that kind of thing doesn’t happen in today’s world,” because we have educated them that it does, and we have proven that education is the key in stopping this kind of brutality.
Springer’s book is short and to the point–perfect for teen readers. It is divided into seven chapters with titles such as: “Today’s Genocide,” “A History of Mass Violence,” “Responding to Genocide,” and my favorite chapter, “Preventing Genocide.” One of the most useful parts of the book is in the back. There’s a table titled, “Genocides Through History.” On this table, readers will discover the first genocide back in 146 BC all the way up to the Darfur/Sudan genocide in 2003. (The book’s copyright is 2006.) Besides the names and dates, the table also tells readers the name of the victims and how many, the perpetrators (who led the genocide), the method of killing, whether or not there was any sexual violence, and the legal trials that were a result of the genocide.
When students read a book like this, we want them to be outraged. We want them to be called into action to fight for the rights of the minority and abused. We want them to understand how genocide happens and how to prevent it. Students can begin on this journey when a teacher or parent hands them a book like Genocide by Jane Springer.
“A refugee’s life is never an easy one, but it’s especially tough on young people who are robbed of what should be the most formative, promising, and exciting years of their lives. At a time when they should be full of hopes and dreams for the future, they are instead faced with the harsh reality of displacement and privation. . .”
–United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
What I like about this book for middle grade readers is that it gives a voice to the war that students are always hearing about on television–especially in political news lately since the Obama administration is working to get troops out of Iraq. Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees isn’t about soldiers or political agendas or terrorists or presidents–it’s about the innocent victims of any war–children. I also like that this book, like last Monday’s book: Our New Home: Immigrant Children Speak , let’s the children’s voices be heard. The children and teens are telling their own stories.
In Children of War by Deborah Ellis, the author also gives some background to readers before each child’s essay/story, so that readers can understand important issues in the child’s story. For example, in the first story in the book from Hibba, 16, it is important for readers to understand that Islam is divided into different groups just like the Christian religion is (Catholic, Protestant, etc). Two of the Islam groups are Sunni and Shia. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim. In Hibba’s case, her mother is Sunni. Her father is Shia, and they are applying to live in the United States. Readers learn all of this information from Ellis’s introduction. Then, you hear Hibba’s story in her own words–about fleeing to Jordan, about her father being kidnapped and killed, about applying for asylum in the United States. Powerful stuff–especially for middle grade readers.
Here’s a quote from R, 18, that I think says a lot to children and adults. R. is an Iraqi Kurdish teenager living in Canada. He says: “When Canadian kids–the ones who have always been here and have a good life–start complaining to me about the little things that bother them, I just think, ‘You have no idea.’ ” And he lets you know what it’s like for him to be a refugee in his own words. Again–powerful stuff.
Books like Children of War by Deborah Ellis need to be shared with children of all ages. It takes education and understanding to solve these problems that war has created, to break down racial barriers, and to have sympathy/empathy for other people. These are stories of survival from the youngest victims. They can give anyone strength and hope.
Why War is Never a Good Idea by Alice Walker and illustrated by Stefano Vitale is a poem put to life in a picture book with beautiful, rich illustrations. This powerful text shows children the affects of war and the innocent bystanders from frogs to children to mothers to villagers who are the victims of war. Here’s a small verse from the book:
Though War has a mind of its own/War never knows/Who/It is going/To hit./ Picture a donkey/Peacefully/Sniffing a pile/Of Straw/
This is a book that could upset children, but it is a book to share with them. If they have questions about war or why their moms or dads are away in the service or why their village is being destroyed by soldiers, this book can help start a dialogue. It’s PERFECT for homeschooling, churches, small counseling groups. We can help children around the world who are victims of war when we educate everyone about the affects of war–this book can help do this!
Alice Walker is the author of The Color Purple and is an activist. She has written other books for children such as: There is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me, Langston Hughes: American Poet, and Finding the Green Stone.
Here she is in an interview on WNYC radio, reading a section of this book. Very powerful–only about two minutes long, so please take time to watch:
What some children go through in our world is unbelievable, scary, tragic. It is hard for some of us, especially in the United States and Canada, to imagine how life can be like this–how people can kill one another over religion and race, how people can be so greedy to kill for land or cash crops. But it happens, and children are affected every day.
I found this book, Gervelie’s Journey: A Refugee Diary, at our local library, and I recommend it to everyone. Teachers–share it with your students; parents–share it with your children. It tells the story of Gervelie, who was born in the Republic of Congo and lived in a nice house in Brazzaville, until her family had to flee to safety when fighting broke out in 1997. First, she moved around Africa with her dad, then her mom, and then her grandmother. But whenever she seemed to settle in a new place, trouble started again. In 2001, when fighting occurred in the Ivory Coast, she and her dad fled to Europe. When they finally arrived in England, her dad asked for asylum. In England, Gervelie has been in three different cities, finally settling in Norwich, England.
This book is POWERFUL because it is told in first person–in Gervelie’s words. When the fighting first broke out in Brazzaville, she was 2 years old. When she finally landed at a home with her dad in Norwich, England, she was 9 years old. Can you imagine all of this war, fighting, moving and so on happening to you when you were between the ages of 2 and 9? Can you imagine not seeing or talking to your mom? What about leaving your home and not being able to go back for fear of being killed? All of this has happened to Gervelie.
The other thing that makes this book so powerful is the way that June Allan’s illustrations are mixed with actual photographs of Gervelie and war-torn Africa. Putting a real face with a true story is something that kids and adults WON’T forget.
When you are talking to kids about giving to others or starting service learning projects in your school or home or church, think about sharing books like Gervelie’s Journey because they will help children understand whom they are working for.
Before I share a story from the trenches, I would like to announce the winner of last week’s book giveaway of the memoir, When Ties Break, by Margaret Norton. And the winner is. . .Sandy Young! Congratulations, Sandy. If you didn’t win this book and are interested in reading a memoir about loss, grief, recovery, strength, and stopping abuse, then please go to Tate’s website to purchase it!
The story from the trenches is one that I read yesterday in church. We have a visiting priest, Rev. Fr. Tony Fevlo, from Africa, who will speak to us next week about his work in St. Joseph SMA Parish in Plateau State, Nigeria. He is currently raising money to build a new church in his parish that will accommodate 1500 people. The existing church is too small and also has structural damage, including cracks in the walls and a leaking roof. This is a wonderful mission, of course, but this is not the actual story I want to share with you today.
He shared the turmoil that happens around him with inter-religious clashes between Muslims and Christians. Every time, I hear stories like this I think: This is happening in the 21st century????? It is. In January 2010, 33 of Father Tony’s parishioners lost their property or had their houses burned. One of his parishioners was reportedly butchered to death and asked to renounce his faith before he died. Much of Father Tony’s finances for his church are currently going to these families to help them rebuild–since they are homeless.
The trouble didn’t stop there. In March 2010, Father Tony and his parishioners woke up to the news of a massacre of over 500 children, women, and elderly people living in the village of Dogonahawa (25 km from Father Tony Fevlo’s parish). The massacre was led by the Hausa/Fulani Muslims. Father Tony said: “Since the March 7th massacre, we live under constant fear in K/Vom and can hardly have a peaceful night’s rest.”
As I sat in church yesterday reading his words and thinking about the donation they were going to collect next Sunday, I wondered how I could get my stepson involved in this. And then when we walked out of church, Father Tony had actually posted pictures of his church and parishioners, and I knew this was the way. When Logan can see something concrete, he can then think about giving some money from his piggy bank to this cause. This also got me thinking that there has to be books out there that help us, as parents and teachers, teach children about giving and having sympathy for others–especially those less fortunate.
I found these two books that could be of some help. I am so thankful that there are people in the world like Father Tony Fevlo and that he shares his story with us. It makes me strive to be more giving, less materialistic–although I struggle–and I hope it will also help me to influence my children to be the same way.
Yesterday, I wrote about one of my favorite books of all time, Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza (pictured here.) If you haven’t read about her amazing story of survival during the Rwandan genocides, check out yesterday’s post or the book Left to Tell.
Today, I wanted to let you know about her charity: The Left To Tell Charitable Fund, which is controlled by her publisher, Hay House, Inc. The mission of the charitable fund is to help Rwandan orphans with educational needs, providing scholarships for school-age children. Education is important to Immaculee, and both of her parents, killed during the genocide, were educators. Scholarships buy things such as materials, clothes, and food, and they can also pay for school fees. A scholarship for a college student in Rwanda is $1000; for an elementary student, it costs $500. On the website, it gives an example of a $5000 donation being able to help 10 elementary students go to school in Rwanda.
As we know, and as the authors discuss in my other favorite book–Half the Sky–education is the best way to fight the problems going on in the world. When students are educated, they are less likely to get married and pregnant young, continue old traditions for no reason, or join violent gangs. Education is the long-term solution. The Left to Tell Charitable Fund is mostly funded through a percentage of sales for Immaculee’s book–Left to Tell. So, when you purchase a copy of this book for yourself or as a gift, you are helping the children in Rwanda. Other sources come from the sale of the Left to Tell bracelets (which young people would love to wear!), private donations, and Immaculee’s speaking engagements. I love charities where you can buy gifts for the loved ones in your lives, and proceeds go to help someone else. They are the truly the gifts that keep on giving.
If you are interested in learning more about this charity, please visit this link.
The theme of my blog is, of course, read these books and use them. And in this case, you can purchase a copy and really do good in the world–so can teens. Tomorrow, I plan to write about how we can help people in the world even when we don’t have any extra money to donate. It’s a tough economy, but money isn’t the only way to help.
A book about the Rwandan genocide for children ages 9 to 12:
