Philip Gourevitch Quotes
The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, p. 170.
There was reluctance throughout the government to avoid using “the G word.” See {41333}
The Armenians were victims of ethnic cleansing where some were chased out and others killed.
This statement was made before the 2012 Syrian Revolution.
The phrase “Never Again!” originated with Jews after the Holocaust—the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, and was adopted by most civilized countries to apply to genocide. It then was expanded to include other agreed upon weapons of mass destruction like gas and chemical warfare. Kerry was urging the Congress to authorize punitive military action against the Syrian government for using saran gas, and killing thousands of their own people in the Syrian Civil War.
The United States Senate must ratify all treaties before they can become effective. The Senate has been very reluctant to ratify treaties where the U. S. government or any of its citizens could come under the jurisdiction of any legal entity which did not abide by all the rights citizens are guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution. As a result, we do not recognize the World Court and the Treaty of Rome for example. The latter is the one that gives the World Court jurisdiction over a high level official who commits war crimes even in his own country. The result is that many dictators who do not want to be constrained by international law, do not sign the treaty fending off any pressure to do so by pointing to the United States. But Rothkopf and others who agree with him have not yet been able to come up with a mechanism that will assure American Constitutional rights to Americans who might be involved with the World Court and allow the court to punish the dictators who abuse their own population. The French would like their laws and constitution to control. The Russians, theirs. The Chinese, theirs. Every American public official takes an oath to defend The Constitution. That is their primary duty. Foreign policy and punishing international war criminals must take a lower priority.
Many cultures and nations, even after a century will not admit to the human rights violations that previous governments might have committed. Most dramatic is the Turkish government's not even allowing studies or discussions about the organized government mass murders of citizens of Armenian extraction—–the so called "Armenian Genocide ", but even in his native Poland there was and has been little admission of those Poles who collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis in the murder of millions of polish citizens and stole the residences, farms and other properties of Jews and other Poles who the Germans sent to concentration camps and even for the few who survived threatened them with death when they returned to reclaim their own property. Most modern societies have great difficulty coming to grips with police brutality and often denying that it is an endemic problem as opposed to one or two "bad apples".
Philip Gourevitch (born 1961), an American author and journalist, is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a former editor of The Paris Review. His most recent book is The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008), an account of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison under the American occupation. He became widely known for his first book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998), which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
