"A Problem from Hell" Quotes

“The United Staes had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred,”
― Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide

“People have explained U.S. failures to respond to specific genocides by claiming that the United States didn’t know what was happening, that it knew but didn’t care, or that regardless of what it knew, there was nothing useful to be done. I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“If anybody had the grounds to anticipate systematic brutality, it seems logical that it would be those most immediately endangered.Yet those with the most at stake are in fact often the least prone to recognize their peril.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“Those who argued that the number of Cambodians killed was in the hundreds of thousands or those who tried to generate press coverage of the horrors did so assuming that establishing the facts would empower the United States and other Western governments to act. Normally, in a time of genocide, op-ed writers, policymakers, and reporters root for a distinct outcome or urge a specific U.S. military, economic, legal, humanitarian, or diplomatic response. Implicit indeed in many cables and news articles, and explicit in most editorials, is an underlying message, a sort of “if I were czar, I would do X or Y.” But in the first three years of KR rule, even the Americans most concerned about Cambodia—Twining, Quinn, and Becker among them—internalized the constraints of the day and the system. They knew that drawing attention to the slaughter in Cambodia would have reminded America of its past sins, reopened wounds that had not yet healed at home, and invited questions about what the United States planned to do to curb the terror. They were neither surprised nor agitated by U.S. apathy. They accepted U.S. noninvolvement as an established background condition. Once U.S. troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, Americans deemed all of Southeast Asia unspeakable, unwatchable, and from a policy perspective, unfixable. “There could have been two genocides in Cambodia and nobody would have cared,” remembers Morton Abramowitz, who at the time was an Asia specialist at the Pentagon and in 1978 became U.S. ambassador to Thailand. During the Khmer Rouge period, he remembers, “people just wanted to forget about the place. They wanted it off the radar.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“To paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Allies’ response to the Holocaust, although many people thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe they were dead.18”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“And here it was 1988, and in Proxmire's words, the Congress had gone sound to sleep: 'We should take a special international prize for gross hypocrisy. The Senate resoundingly passes the ratification of the Genocide Treaty. We thereby tell the world that we recognize this terrible crime. Then what do we do about it? We do nothing about it. We speak loudly but carry no stick at all.”
― Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide

“There are times when the best medication and therapist simply can’t help a soldier suffering from this new generation of peacekeeping injury. The anger, the rage, the hurt, and the cold loneliness that separates you from your family, friends, and society’s normal daily routine are so powerful that the option of destroying yourself is both real and attractive.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?” Lemkin asked. “This is most inconsistent.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“Even as Talaat attempted to burnish his image, he could not help but blame the Armenians for their own fate. “I admit that we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces,” he wrote, but “the responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“Until we put honor and duty first, and are willing to risk something in order to achieve righteousness both for ourselves and for others, we shall accomplish nothing;”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“amount to nothing whatever if they are mere methods of giving a sentimental but ineffective and safe outlet to the emotion of those engaged in them.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“When Taimour was hit by a bullet in the left shoulder, he began to stagger toward the man who shot him, reaching out with his hands. He remembered the look in the soldier's eyes. 'He was about to cry,' Taimour said three years later.”
― Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide

“And here it was 1988, and in Proxmire's words, the Congress had gone sound to sleep: 'We should take a special international prize for gross hypocrisy. The Senate resoundingly passes the ratification of the Genocide Treaty. We thereby tell the world that we recognize this terrible crime. Then what do we do about it? We do nothing about it. We speak loudly but carry not stick at all.”
― Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide

“I was chilled by the promise of protection that had drawn a child out of a basement and onto an exposed Sarajevan playground.”
― Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide