Confronting Evil Quotes

“At its root, genocide happens because we choose to see a people rather than individual people and then we choose to kill those people in large numbers and over an extended period of time.”
― James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide

“Three times more peace agreements were negotiated and signed during the first decade of the post-Cold War era (1990–2000) than in the previous three decades combined. At the United Nations (UN), more peace operations were mounted in the decade of the 1990s than in the previous four decades combined.25 In spite of these global peace dividends, we witnessed in the 1990s some of the most egregious cases of civilian populations being “done to death.” Although fewer borders were violated, more people were. In 1994, in Rwanda, more than 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered by Hutu extremists in the space of just 100 days. Three hundred and thirty-three and a third murders occurred per hour. Five and a half lives terminated every minute, a rate of death nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust.”
― James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide

“Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us—neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.”
― James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide

“In short, self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection—or compassionate action.”
― James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide