the foreground as vividly as we have been the ordeal of jews in relation to the holocaust risks a deceptive backgrounding of the ordeal of the palestinian people if our concern is with the avoidance of catastrophic crimes against humanity we must not overlook other related expressions of acute mass suffering no matter how uncomfortable it may make us feel remembering the holocaust reminds us all so that we remain vulnerable to its repetition there's been a remarkable emergence of what i would call a normative architecture that refuted a genocide and crimes against humanity that has been  the premises of nine hundred forty even in the immediate aftermath of the war and then and the discovery of the extent of the nazi hor was that we were live being in a what i would call a very westphalia and world which meant that sovereignty and territorial sovereignty was the prime organizing principle of that world and that really meant that the international community have no authority to effectively address what was taking place within the borders of sovereign states and the u n the famous justly famous universal declaration of human rights which over the years has grown into what many including myself call perhaps the most important international document that exists was only a dot that was it was only capable of being agreed upon in the aftermath of world war two because this if istic a did statesman understood that it would never be implemented and the final victory in japan in this most destructive of all wars you have won a victory against war itself if we had had this charter a few years ago and above all the whales to use it millions now dead would be alive if we should fall there in the future in our will to use a million the knowledge thing will surely die dimension of world water i can only mention in the most schematic way its elements and it and one of the primary elements goes back to the nuremberg  kinds of crimes of state and delineated the the new category of criminality crimes against humanity which at least in that preliminary way suggested that sovereignty was no longer a shield for abusing people whatever their national identities may be that no longer could sovereignty be what can move has called sanctuary for human wrongs which it has been for most of the several centuries since the peace of westphalia and six hundred forty eight the most wide ranging development in constructing this normative architecture is the evolution of international human rights as a perspective defining legitimate political behavior and significantly subverting unconditional territorial sovereignty because human rights are some versed in the x to the extent they say there is a higher law then the law of the state and that that law can be used to judge state behavior and what gave international human rights this  i think which did not exist as i suggested at the very outset was a series of success stories that were premised on struggles populist struggles and struggles from below i would mention first of all the anti colonial movement that rested in a sense on the right of peoples to self determination the most fundamental of human rights according to the two human rights covenants also the exceptional influence exerted on south africa by the anti apart hate movement which even in the midst of the cold war allowed the otherwise antagonistic east and west to cooperate in a common commitment to  of that sort of official racism and achieved what is something of a political miracle that south africa was able to make the transition to a constitutional  multiracial society without violence also the transformation of eastern europe and the soviet union owed a great deal to the helsinki process and to the activity mobilization of civil society around human rights norms and then of course the american civil rights movement which it was inspirational for others as well as liberating for ourselves and beyond that did give the united states some credibility not only as the most powerful country in the world but as one that was addressing but the most serious pressing  issue within its own borders but generally on the most serious issues of criminality there was relatively little development during the cold war  only in the one nine hundred ninety one had to revive all of the efforts that had taken place immediately after world war two and that involved and again i have to go very try to rescue vulnerable populations from catastrophic results arising from the behavior of their own governments the a formation of the international commission criminal tribunal for yugoslavia and rwanda although it has problems did significantly revive the nuremberg idea and begin to apply it more generally  the again civil society activism that helped to bring into being in the international criminal court which puts criminal accountability now on a much more universal ninety s and the pinochet prosecution is now a prosecution of another shell am leader is accused of torture in spain represented the birth of what is called universal jurisdiction that national courts can treat those accused of crimes wherever they're committed as crimes within their own national judicial system so what we have is this development of architecture of a very impressive potential sort but that's the good news the bad news is that the political will does not exist to implement this normative architecture in the absence of strategic interests in other words it's only where the main political actors have non humanitarian motivation is that well one will find a deep enough commitment to move east norms that one will take the risk to in the aftermath of that the the million who died in iran were ignored you have the normative arc architecture but it's to some extent neutralized by this geopolitics of indifference you can e american government and the society are willing to bear in iraq as compared to the unwillingness to bear costs if there are no strategic arguments that justify the use of force why is this absence of political will i think the basic explanation is that the leadership of all major political states including our own is interests a tradition of realists them is in a way trumping the normative imperatives to rescue vulnerable people george ken her haps the most brilliant and respected of realist thinkers wrote a secret memo back in one thousand nine hundred fifty when he was head of the policy planning staff in the state department in which he said we've got to stop thinking about human rights and democracy and realize that the real problem for our foreign policy is how six percent of the world's population can continue to use fifty percent of the world's resources now the percentages are different now but the gap still exists and to some extent that is the underpinning of why some of things are treated as strategic and others are treated as no fundamental consequence for the wellbeing of a country intervention in a hostile society is extremely difficult thing to do and military superiority is very seldom translated into political outcomes but the cake walk advocates of the war in iraq didn't understand the primary lesson of vietnam that you can win every battle and lose the war and the capacities for national resistance are quite detached from relative military capabilities if you want to make this normative architecture work you have to close this gap between political will and the norms and create a political will that is prepared to act effectively we can reinforce the normative architecture with some implementing reforms such as this proposal for a u emergency peace force that would have the capacity to some extent to detach the prevention of genocide from the geopolitics of indifference and i think that's the real strength of the proposal is it's an it's a initial effort to say yes we are living in a world where this indifference exists but there are some things we can do about it the  not make us safe it's only by liberating our moral and political imagination from these geo political horizons that we can begin to conceive of a world that takes seriously this responsibility to protect vulnerable peoples confronting genocidal dangers to the extend the powerful states primarily of this point our own think the fe have the discretion to wage war without accepting this discipline of international law which basically is just the prudential wisdom rather than as some kind of legal list dick code of behavior it's the the prudential wisdom gathered through centuries of tragedy associated with war and if you look back at the last fifty years of american foreign policy had we have here to this discipline of international law we would have voted the worst disasters in foreign policy vietnam and  real islam is what the american sociologist c wright mills called crackpot realists it it misunderstands the nature of the world in such a way as to think that the absence of restraints on the use of force is somehow a disadvantage in operating within that world i would argue that on balance it's a huge advantage and that we would be much safer as americans as well as wider citizens of the world if we if we accepted this discipline as a framing of our policy i think it's very important in trying to mobilize a more radical moral imagination that we not private tyra's empathy and compassion by an overly selective of victimization we who are jews i think it's particularly important that we not foreground the holocaust at the expense of other victims and symbolically and substantive that means the palestinians above all others we have a gigantic normative edifice but it's without a single security guard let me end by quoting a poet i think it's a brilliant idea that promises to make use of existing opportunities that are there with cable local cable access no visitors and existing structures where people have been putting together documentaries have been filming lectures