The Daily Background

For a Human Rights class I’m taking, we’re supposed to formulate a question(s) related to human rights each week for class. The following is my third one. You can read my first and second here and here, respectively. Question three is here.

My question is not so much a question in and of itself, but a response to other questions that others have posted over the last two or three days. Several people seem to have asked pretty much the same question: how could the United States and the rest of the world allow this to have happened in the case of the Armenian genocide?

My question is: when has the world ever acted fast enough or at all to prevent genocide?

I’m not being facetious. Many people clearly have an extremely naiive view of intervention when it comes to genocide.

America and “the rest of the world” never intervened in Australian efforts to purge the land of Aborigines, or Japanese activities in Korea in the first half of the 20th century. The world didn’t act “fast enough” to prevent the Holocaust from happening. The world didn’t intervene to stop the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from killing Intervening in pretty much anything in Africa isn’t too popular (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and now African Union troops are left on their own in Darfur, now matter how many “support for AU troops” resolutions pass in the UN). The world didn’t intervene before huge numbers of people died in Bosnia either– and the 1990s was the second time it happened there.

And the United States? Have you people forgotten that the US government has participated in its own genocide? Or perhaps you just weren’t taught to think about things this way in elementary school so it hasn’t crossed your minds?

What do you think happened to the millions of Native Americans who were living in the United States before white people arrived? The systematic oppression and wholesale slaughter of Native Americans is not usually discussed in the context of genocide, at least in the United States. There are now a few hundred thousand. Kids learn about the pilgrims and Thanksgiving each year in kindergarden, but what they aren’t taught is that the tribe which was so generous to their new european friends– was almost completely wiped out by the sons and daughters of those same pilgrims. How’s that for irony?

The man we celebrate every second Monday in October (incidentally the date of our next class) for “discovering” the “new” world, Christopher Columbus had the bright idea to use Native Americans as slaves. And he hauled them back tot he

Was it some coincidence that the millions of Native Americans (estimates range from 1 million to 100 million) already occupying America decided not to have babies anymore once the white people arrived and shrunk to a few hundred thousand by the turn of the 20th century?

The United States government forced Native Americans out of their land, drove them into whatever piece of crap land they didn’t want (at least until the government found out there was oil on their reservations, or some wealthy white landowners started eyeing the property). The US government violated every single treaty it signed with Native American tribes. American soldiers were ordered to spread smallpox through giving infected blankets to Native American children as a sick and twisted “charity.” Instance after instance exists of massacre and slaughter by the US Army in which hundreds of thousands of male, female and child Native Americans perished.

So why didn’t the world intervene then? Well, you might say, times are different now. We have things like the UDHR and the UN, and people are more informed about “what’s going on” these days. Really? How many people know about what’s going on in Sudan right now? Okay, how about Tibet?

This goes back to my original point– I cited example after example of the world not “stepping in”– either too late or not at all. Asking why “the rest of the world” didn’t intervene “this time” (referring to the Armenian genocide) is a question far too simplistic. It’s like asking why “the rest of the world” didn’t celebrate July 4th “this year.”

It is impossible to answer my question about when the world has intervened in time. This is because you can never know what would have happened, had you acted differently. It is possible to speculate all you want, but you never know what might have developed into genocide. Asking why the world community failed to prevent genocide in the case of the Armenian genocide is far too specific a question which does not acknowledge a greater problem. Our time is better spent trying to figure out why preventing genocide doesn’t seem to be a world priority.

Filed under: Human Rights, Z-TDB Blog