Article:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php? ... ticle/2907

Is it not sickly violent? Does it not need help from outside forces to resolve potential bloodbaths (be they of genocidal scale or not?) Furthermore, whether or not we can link the term 'genocide' to some type of racist connotation (a reach by most stretches of the imagination) does it not still follow that such atrocities should still, by a nation with a conscience, be dealt with?

This raises issues of interventionism and nationalist xenophobia and isolationsim, but I still believe that as a superpower, it is the US' role, as well as the rest of the Western world, to aid in the creation of some type of stability throughout Africa--especially as it becomes more and more clear that such stability is not being wrought from the continuingconflict on the ground.

After having read the rest of the article, I offer the following:

While I agree that the term 'genocide' should not be tossed around lightly, it is an appropriate description of much of the violence going on in Africa, as it was in the Turkish demolition of the Armenians in 1915. Genocide is a systematic attempt to annihilate a racial group or culture. To assert that genocide is being used as a political tool is a cynical oversimplification of a concept that trivializes the fate of victims worldwide.

O'Neill argues that genocide is being used to distance the West from the Third World, thus creating a moral high-ground and a sense of superiority in much of the Western world. However, O'Neill falls victim to the same criticism by asserting that the killing of 6 million Jews is more truly a genocide than the extermination of nearly 1 million in Rwanda, or the bloodbath in Darfur. Are 1 million lives then less important than 6 million lives? Are Jews more valuable than Africans? Can we really say that the deaths of one million individuals is any less shocking than the deaths of 6 million? Is there a cut-off somewhere? For those that would argue there is a slippery slope in calculating genocides, does it matter? If people in a position of state power are institutionalizing violence and murder as a means of wiping out the opposition/other, outrage seems to be the only acceptable reaction.

I also wanted to add that, for many victims of genocide, "pimping" their condition to outside forces that actually have the power to change something is not only the sole option at their disposal, it is also a very adept and intelligent way to exploit their own unfavorable situation.

My two cents is we don't generally use our superpower status for purposes of stabilization or from a position of moral outrage, horror or compassion. We use it to prop up regimes we find advantageous to ourselves, regardless of what sort of regime that is.

We stood firm for many brutal dictators simply because they weren't communist.

We let corporate profit, strategic location and access to valued natural resources trump death, torture and chaos.

Our country almost never simply steps in to "end the horror." Partly because there are too many horrors, partly because we're not actually all that horrified, at least not from a cold political viewpoint.

I don't agree with all this guy statements, but I don't see where he's saying the Holocaust was "more genocide" than other genocides. He's saying the terminology itself is used strategically and somewhat colonially. He's not saying the mass murders aren't happening or aren't awful.

I agree with most of your points but speak from a more idealistic perspective. Regardless, the following passages/ideas bothered me, and prompted most of my commentary:




I disagree vehemently here. 6 million deaths, while numerically greater, is no more astonishing that the nearly 1 million dead in Rwanda. Just because the Hutu didn't have the means to build gas chambers and concentration camps doesn't mean that the systematic raping and killing of an entire people isn't terrible, much less genocidal.

Furthermore, he trivializes genocide as an act by oversimplifying its political ends. Sure, genocide is used as a political tool to extract aid from less-than-active nations. But to negatively slant against politicizing victimhood is to villianize the wrong party, IMO.

His use of "not exceptional" in that paragraph is a tad egregious.

Oh, in the Meldrick Lewis voice, it'd be "holly-kass"