genocide
You are viewing stuff tagged with genocide.
You are viewing stuff tagged with genocide.
For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow. A completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice but the preservation of existing power. History is a debris field of such moments. They arrive in the form of British and French soldiers to the part of the world I’m from. They come to the Salvadorans and Chileans and Iranians and Vietnamese and Cambodians in the form of toppled governments and coups over oil revenue and villages that had to be burned to the ground to save them from some otherwise terrible fate. They arrived at the turn of the twentieth century to Hawaii (the U.S. apologized for the overthrow of the Hawaiian government—almost a hundred years later.) They come to the Indigenous population eradicated to make way for what would become the most powerful nation on earth, and to the Black population forced in chains to build it, severed from home such that, as James Baldwin said, every subsequent generation’s search for lineage arrives, inevitably, not at a nation or a community, but a bill of sale. And at every moment of arrival the details and the body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a commonality: an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice saying, Just for moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.
Now, for a new generation, the same moment arrives. To watch the leader of the most powerful nation on earth endorse and finance a genocide prompts not a passing kind of disgust of anger, but a severance. The empire may claim fear of violence because the fear of violence justifies any measure of violence in return, but this severance is of another kind: a walking away, a noninvolvement with the machinery that would produce, or allow to produce, such horror. What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked to the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.
Atul Gawande at The New Yorker, The Cost of Defunding Harvard:
Sarah Fortune, a professor and the chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s school of public health, is among the world’s leading experts on tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious cause of death globally. She had a sixty-million-dollar N.I.H. award for a seven-year moon-shot effort to unravel exactly how tuberculosis makes people sick, in order to find ways to better control the disease. It is now the beginning of the fifth year of the contract, which has supported work involving some sixty people across fourteen institutions—including Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Colorado, and clinical sites in South Africa and Uganda. That work—in humans, animals, and machine-learning models—had already revealed a pathway to a truly protective vaccine against T.B., which was previously believed impossible. The team had been conducting testing in macaques of an injectable vaccine developed by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital.
But, on Tuesday morning, Fortune had received an e-mail with a letter from the N.I.H. ordering her to stop her research, “effective immediately.” Virtually all spending was halted. This was reminiscent of the stop-work orders and terminations at U.S.A.I.D., which ended more than eighty per cent of the agency’s programs and led to layoffs for some two hundred thousand people in the U.S. and around the world. These programs and people had saved lives by the millions. The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
When I was in university, there was this major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, who said, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’ I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.