A Problem From Hell: Chapters 1–2

In Turkey, not the Thanksgiving dinner kind, but the large country. The country is between Europe and Asia. In Turkey, in the year 1915, just a few years before the Titanic, nearly one million Armenian people were killed by the Turkish Government. Unlike other genocides like the Holocaust, the world knew about the deaths that were occuring. As far as we know today, the United States did not know anything about the Holocaust until soldiers began to free camps from enslavement. In the Turkish genocide, Mehmed Talaat stated that Christians did not belong in Turkey, and that the Turkish Government would target Christians. Talaat was high up in the Turkish Government with a lot of power. The majority of Armenians were Christian. The entire world knew that Armenians were not safe in Turkey, yet there was still a blind eye to the genocide. A few months after Talaat said that Christians were not welcome, the goverment murdered hundreds of smart Armenian people. The goverments of the world played the bystander role. They knew that Turkey was unsafe for Christians.

Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Talaat in 1921. He was an Armenian survivor. Throughout the second chapter of the book, a young Jewish man tries to learn why the goverment won in trial, when Tehlirian was far less guilty than Talaat. What he found was that ‘state sovereignty’ trumped him in court because he was not in the government. He was dumbfounded when he learned about this because it seemed so wrong.

“Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people.” (A Problem From Hell P. 19)

Interestingly, the young man wrote a paper that compared the rise of Talaat to the rise of Hitler in Germany. The paper was meant to create a law that stopped the destruction of racial or ethnic groups.

I believe that the groups are responsible again are the goverments. Again ang again the governments of the world let this man lose in trial because of sovereignty. The United Nations have been too nice to genocides. They allow countries to kill millions of people without punishment because they are too slow to react.

”The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.” (A Problem From Hell Preface XV)

The preface of the book states it, the United States never hold other countries accountable for genocides and mass murders. The United States holds a piece of the blame for letting countries commit these crimes again and again. The reason America does not engage in war with those countries is a mystery.