Academia, Genocide, and Other Things

"So it wasn't just that things interested him because he didn't know from boring-it was the connection his brain made, connections he couldn't help but seek out."
~An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green

(I wanted to make that quote the title, but it wouldn't fit.)

Anyway, I first want to say that I just love how sometimes, my brain makes these lightning fast realizations that completely and totally fascinate me. It's what I love about college. In high school, I think my brain only got me really super excited like once or twice a year. In college, if I do all my reading and homework, it can happen several times a week.

Like now, for instance. I have a paper due in my Human Rights class in about a week and I am EXCEEDINGLY behind on my reading, so I'm catching up so as to write a good paper. I just picked up "A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide" by Samantha Power.

It's quite a read. And I'm only on like page 20. So far, Power has talked about the Turkish slaughter of Armenians and the international reaction to it. This was back in 1921, before genocide was even a word.

So my paper topic is thus: If you could advise the Clinton Administration on the situation in Rwanda a few years ago, what would you tell them? Go into Rwanda, damn the consequences, save the lives? Or stay out. Play it safe.

I had no idea how to answer (and I still don't) but upon reading Power's book, I realized that my entire question was wrong. I was looking at it like the choices were either
1. Enter Rwanda with force because it's the right thing to do to save the lives that we were no doubt capable of saving
OR
2. Stay out (and here's the important part) BECAUSE IF WE ENTER WE WILL BE DRAINING AMERICAN RESOURCES AND POTENTIALLY INVOLVING OURSELVES IN A WORLD CRISIS THAT IS NOT OUR OWN(I was thinking along the lines of another Viet Nam, or Iraq [although Clinton admittedly would not have known about Iraq yet].)

The problem with that, as Power points out, is that when looking at genocide (a word coined to describe the WWII Holocaust) the arguments should not be so self centered. It doesn't matter what AMERICA wins or loses. Intervene to save lives, or, and here is it, stay out TO UPHOLD INTERNATIONAL LAWS that protect sovereignty within a nation's own borders.

That maintaining sovereignty seems like it would be easy to brush away if what the nation in question was doing was perceived as wrong. But (and this ties into my anthropology class, which I totally dig), who are we to define what is WRONG? Americans as a group tend to see cultural phenomena purely from within American context. In order to correctly assess a situation, it has to be looked at from WITHIN the society being questioned.

This is not to say that genocide is ever acceptable, it simply needs to be understood in contextual terms before any extreme action is taken.

Okay...my mind is still firing so I'm going to go read more before I fall asleep. If you want to borrow the book, I will bring it back with me for the summer. Not quite summer reading, but once I'm done with this semester, I won't need it for a class text anymore.

Love to all!