A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power is the first massive book I've attempted this year. It only took two weeks, and I think that's pretty good, right?

This book left me feeling exhausted and somewhat emotionally drained. I had to shut down my feelings after a certain point in order to make it to the end of this gigantic book because it was too depressing.

Power covers the coinage of the term "genocide" by Raphael Lemkin. He had studied the Armenian genocide in 1915 and was a Polish Jew living during World War II. Much of his family was killed in the Holocaust and he wanted a way to capture what had happened to the Jews and Armenians in a single word. He searched high and low, using his background in linguistics, to come up with a term that he felt did justice to the horrific acts and and eventually combined the Greek word "genos", meaning "people, race", with the Latin "cidere", meaning "to kill". It covers not only the murder of one group of people by another, but the attempt to extinguish every last bit of culture and history associated with those people. Heartbreaking.

Even more heartbreaking is the failure of America to ratify Lemkin's Genocide Convention until 1989, 40 years after it was first introduced to the United Nations.

Throughout the rest of the book, Power outlines the history of the genocides in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo, explaining what happened to cause one people to want to kill another, and what was going on that made them feel like they could get away with it. The failure of the US to act until it was nearly too late (or, in the case of Rwanda, at all) is highlighted throughout these stories. The rise of Pol Pot's killing regime was even supported by the US because, basically, anyone who wasn't a Communist deserved support.

The terror that people have had to endure in the past is horrifying and it is difficult to come to terms with the fact that it still happens. ISIS, Boko Haram. It's still going on. It's hard to believe that people can hate one another that much, but we can. We might wonder if it's worth stepping in, getting involved in someone else's affairs, but really... People's lives are at stake and if we see it happening, we shouldn't sit back and wait it out, hoping that people in a murderous rage will see reason. If American people could put their imaginations to use when stuff like this was beginning to happen, and if they would have spoken up earlier when they first realized the evil that was being perpetrated, they could have made a huge impact on the US's foreign policy.What if we make the same mistake now?