6.01.2005

another good book

A good companion piece to the Jeffrey Sachs book that I plugged a while back is Samantha Power's pullitzer prize winning book A Problem from Hell: America in the age of Genocide. It charts both the many cases of genocide in the twentieth century and the evolution of American foreign policy vis a vis genocide, which has essentially been to complain a lot.
The End of Poverty and A Problem from Hell combine to do a pretty good job of showing how incredibly fucked up human beings are. I am pretty much unequivocally in the Pax Americana camp at this point. For all those parents of soldiers who would flip out if we sent their kids to, god forbid, stop a genocide, I say Get OVER IT! That's the job they signed up for, and I'm sure the soldiers would rather risk their lives for a noble cause than to secure the pocketbooks of CEO's.
The Armenians, the Jews, the Tutsis AND the Hutus (they alternately slaughtered each other), the Cambodians, the Kurds, the Bosnians.....sorry bout ya, can't piss off Mr. and Mrs. Apple-pie. They might vote for the other guy next time.

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