"The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century"
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Allyson Schwartz points to the brutal ledger of the 20th century to argue that passivity enables atrocity. When crimes against humanity met only hesitation or appeasement, they grew into the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, and Bosnia. The phrase unbridled evil captures the human capacity for organized cruelty when it encounters no early resistance and little accountability. The indictment is not only of perpetrators but of a watching world that delayed, equivocated, or prioritized narrow interests over human life.
Heeding the lessons means translating remembrance into policy. The late 1990s and early 2000s wrestled with exactly that challenge, as nations confronted the shame of Rwanda and Srebrenica and articulated the Responsibility to Protect doctrine in 2005. As a U.S. congresswoman, Schwartz spoke amid debates over Darfur, where mass killing and displacement revived the cry of Never Again. The call to stand up to these murderers is a call for political will: early warning systems, sanctions with teeth, protection of civilians, robust and timely peacekeeping, and post-atrocity justice through national courts and the International Criminal Court.
Ending genocide in the 21st century is aspirational, but not naive. Prevention is often less dramatic than intervention: countering incitement, supporting independent media, strengthening civil society, and opening escape routes for threatened populations. It also requires realism about the tradeoffs and risks of force, and a refusal to let the perfect be the enemy of the life-saving. Subsequent crises, from the Yazidi genocide by ISIS to the persecution of the Rohingya, show how quickly the machinery of mass violence can mobilize and how slowly consensus can form.
The moral is stark: evil thrives in the vacuum created by global indifference. The lesson of the last century is a mandate for this one—to narrow that vacuum through vigilance, solidarity, and action commensurate with the stakes.
Heeding the lessons means translating remembrance into policy. The late 1990s and early 2000s wrestled with exactly that challenge, as nations confronted the shame of Rwanda and Srebrenica and articulated the Responsibility to Protect doctrine in 2005. As a U.S. congresswoman, Schwartz spoke amid debates over Darfur, where mass killing and displacement revived the cry of Never Again. The call to stand up to these murderers is a call for political will: early warning systems, sanctions with teeth, protection of civilians, robust and timely peacekeeping, and post-atrocity justice through national courts and the International Criminal Court.
Ending genocide in the 21st century is aspirational, but not naive. Prevention is often less dramatic than intervention: countering incitement, supporting independent media, strengthening civil society, and opening escape routes for threatened populations. It also requires realism about the tradeoffs and risks of force, and a refusal to let the perfect be the enemy of the life-saving. Subsequent crises, from the Yazidi genocide by ISIS to the persecution of the Rohingya, show how quickly the machinery of mass violence can mobilize and how slowly consensus can form.
The moral is stark: evil thrives in the vacuum created by global indifference. The lesson of the last century is a mandate for this one—to narrow that vacuum through vigilance, solidarity, and action commensurate with the stakes.
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| Topic | Human Rights |
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