Getting Things into Perspective

From a Latin American perspective, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers (the Albright-Cohen Report) is an interesting but confusing report.1 Like many documents produced in the United States for domestic consumption, it is so embedded in the values of American society that even if we try to put ourselves in the writers’ shoes, it is difficult for outsiders to evaluate it as an action plan. Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Tampa Library at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact scholarcommons@usf.edu. Recommended Citation Feierstein, Daniel (2009) "Getting Things into Perspective," Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 4: Iss. 2: Article 5. Available at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol4/iss2/5 Getting Things into Perspective Daniel Feierstein Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero and Universidad de Buenos Aires From a Latin American perspective, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers (the Albright-Cohen Report) is an interesting but confusing report. Like many documents produced in the United States for domestic consumption, it is so embedded in the values of American society that even if we try to put ourselves in the writers’ shoes, it is difficult for outsiders to evaluate it as an action plan. Perhaps the most striking and significant feature of this report is not what it actually says but what it does not say about the causes of genocide and ways of preventing it. It is not that these omissions are deliberate; rather, they are a consequence of the perspective used to understand genocide. This perspective directs attention away from one of the principal causes of genocidal social practices since the beginning of the twentieth century, namely, the active role played by US governments in promoting such practices in the first place. The Perspective of the Report The Albright-Cohen Report reflects a point of view that is common in the United States and clearly discernible in Samantha Power’s book ‘‘A Problem from Hell’’: America and the Age of Genocide, which focuses on genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Balkans. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Power—a former Balkan war correspondent—has done perhaps more than anyone else to shape the way in which Americans view their country’s relationship to genocide. At the risk of oversimplifying her position, Power’s book can be seen as a denouncement of the ‘‘failure’’ on the part of the United States to prevent, slow down, or hinder the development of genocidal processes when it has had the power to do so. Thus, Power complains of ‘‘America’s toleration of unspeakable atrocities, often committed in clear view’’ and the fact that ‘‘the United States has consistently refused to take risks to prevent genocide.’’ Similarly, she points out that ‘‘no U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.’’ The Albright-Cohen Report takes this logic a step further and tries to develop proposals for greater US involvement, often riding roughshod over the national sovereignty of other states and even over international agreements; gaining the support of regional and international organizations is considered important, but by no means necessary, for US intervention to occur. We will return to these issues in a moment; but first we need to understand what is missing in the report. The ‘‘Epistemological Obstacle’’ The term ‘‘epistemological obstacle’’ was coined by Gaston Bachelard in 1938 to describe those psychological difficulties that preclude a proper appraisal of knowledge. Later, Jean Piaget and Rolando Garcia extended this concept to account for the process whereby certain ways of constructing (or ‘‘re-presenting’’) reality make it Daniel Feierstein, ‘‘Getting Things into Perspective.’’ Genocide Studies and Prevention 4, 2 (August 2009): 155–160. ! 2009 Genocide Studies and Prevention. doi:10.3138/gsp.4.2.155 impossible for us to observe phenomena that contradict our representations— even though these would be patently obvious to any observer with a different point of view. By way of example, anyone living in a Third World country in Latin America, Southeast Asia, or Africa would find almost laughable the idea that the main problem of the United States with respect to genocide has been ‘‘non-intervention.’’ From Mexico to Argentina, from India to Cambodia, and from Algeria to Angola, it is axiomatic that reduced US intervention in these regions has led to a significant reduction in systematic mass murder in recent years. During the Cold War, the US government and its intelligence services played a key role in the processes of political violence and genocide around the world, from direct involvement of US advisers and troops in overthrowing democratic regimes and invading other states (e.g., the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq) to support for local movements attempting to destabilize democratically elected governments or to bring about military coups (e.g., Chile, Uruguay, Argentina) and funding insurgent organizations as a way of undermining ‘‘enemy’’ governments (e.g., the Khmer Rouge to undermine the Vietnamese government, the contras in Nicaragua to subvert the Sandinistas, the Taliban in Afghanistan to fight the pro-Soviet government). The fact that the 150-page report drawn up by the Genocide Prevention Task Force, chaired by former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former US secretary of defense William Cohen, does not even mention these events is so obvious to anyone living in the Third World that it calls for some sort of explanation. This is where the concept of the epistemological obstacle may prove useful. For if we assume— and there is no reason to suppose otherwise—that the task force is acting in the utmost good faith and that the authors of the report have not excluded any of these issues deliberately, then there is clearly a huge conceptual, emotional, and political obstacle—most likely arising from problems of self-esteem, public discourse, and the construction of common sense in the United States—that prevents everyone from seeing the obvious: the direct intervention of the United States to commit mass murder in regions all over the world. Given these glaring omissions and the apparent naivete of its approach, we might ask whether it is worth looking any further into the Albright-Cohen Report. I believe that it is worth examining a little more—if only to highlight some of its misunderstandings and to get things into perspective. The Meanings of the Word ‘‘America’’ and Its Consequences The key problem of the report, as I see it, is its profoundly ethnocentric approach, which is clear in its abundant use of the term ‘‘American.’’ Although the word ‘‘American’’ is used in English to refer to a whole continent (made up of seventeen separate states excluding the countries of the Caribbean) as well as to a specific country (the United States of America), many people from Central and South America object to being called ‘‘Americans,’’ as if they had no distinctive identity of their own. Within the context of the Albright-Cohen Report, it is significant that there is not a single reference to the need for cooperation with other ‘‘American’’ states through organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS), MERCOSUR (Mercado Comun del Sur), and UNASUR (Union de Naciones Suramericanas), which have played key roles in preventing conflicts in the region. This is despite the fact that Genocide Studies and Prevention 4:2 August 2009