Outrage is not enough.
Knowledge is not enough.
Conscience is not enough.
Relief efforts are not enough.
Genocide is not stopped by sentiment.
There’s a pattern to American reaction and non-reaction to genocide.
The Armenian genocide.
The Holocaust.
Biafra.
Cambodia.
Rwanda.
Darfur.
And now, the killings in Syria.
In every instance, the American public has been outraged. Why not? The mass murders are brutal, intentional — everything from gassings to hackings to tortures to baby-killing to burnings.
Unspeakable.
And people of conscience respond — sort of.
They respond with sentiment. With horror. And sometimes with money, or goods (such as food and clothing), and sometimes with protests.
Nothing Americans do, however, stops the genocide.
Woodrow Wilson did not intervene in 1915 in the Armenian genocide.
Franklin D. Roosevelt did not intervene in the Holocaust until very late, in 1944, only after enormous pressure on him — and only after millions were already killed.
Lyndon B. Johnson did not intervene in Biafra.
Richard Nixon did not intervene in Cambodia. (Some say that his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made the “killing fields” there possible.)
Bill Clinton did not intervene in Rwanda.
George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not intervene in Darfur.
And Obama, like all the presidents before him, issues preachments on Syria.
Words.
Sympathy.
Horror.
But not action.
There’s always a reason. But the bottom line is this: The killings, and the killers, continue. Then they get off scot free, with very, very few exceptions.
Outrage is not enough.
“Never again” happens over and over.
Turkey gets away with “denying” — i.e., lying about — the Armenian genocide.
Roosevelt, to this day, has his apologists for not bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz.
Biafra is forgotten.
Cambodia is dissociated from American actions.
Rwanda is not even mentioned in evaluations of Bill Clinton.
Darfur is far away. Remote. Bush and Obama get a pass.
Which brings us to Syria.
Don’t expect the US to act.
It doesn’t act on genocide.
It’s almost 100 years since the Armenian genocide.
This is the pattern: In this country, we cry.
We sympathize.
We talk.
We condemn.
We think: Trials of the war criminals, after the fact.
We gaze.
We fail to understand the killers.
We reprove.
We feel superior.
Or helpless.
Or disengaged.
Or indifferent —“what, who me?”
Whatever.
Action is not in the equation.
We don’t intervene.
The killings go on.
For shame.
Human solidarity means:
Mass murder is stopped.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
