Yes, I give a damn about genocide.
It’s a weird way to start a conversation, but people are always intrigued when I tell them I’m interested in genocide. It seems like a morbid interest.
They always wonder if I “knew someone.” Surely, a person who cares so much must have a personal stake in the matter. But I don’t have that kind of connection with genocide. I’m a white Methodist from suburban Richmond, Virginia. I’ve never had to worry about my family’s safety. I’ve never had to worry about being targeted for who I am or what I believe.
As early as I started learning about genocide — and it started with children’s literature like Number the Stars by Lois Lowry — I felt revulsion at the scale and inhumanity of killing, but also drew inspiration from the bravery and goodness that atrocities could awaken in ordinary people: Oskar Schindler, Anne Frank, Paul Rusesabagina. Learning about genocide was one early step in what I’m sure will be a lifelong struggle with the problem of evil.
Ellen had said that her mother was afraid of the ocean, that it was too cold and too big. The sky was, too, thought Annemarie. The whole world was: too cold, too big. And too cruel.
— Lois Lowry, Number the Stars
So maybe that’s why when I learned that millions of people have been targeted and wiped out en masse throughout history because other people hated who they were, the idea of genocide shook my world. It made me question one of my fundamental assumptions: my early belief in progress, the notion that things are getting better all the time.
The narrative of human progress is enchanting, seductive even. It is easy to view history as a steady — perhaps even inevitable?— march of invention, revolution, and expansion of civil and human rights, leading up to the present day. World poverty has reached new lows. Violence, as Harvard professor Steven Pinker so famously argued, has actually declined. Humans are living longer, safer, healthier lives than ever before. How, then, do we explain genocide? And how do we explain why it happened again and again on such a scale in the 20th century? And do we dare question why it happens today?
I’d like to think that as I grew up, I discarded the narrative of human progress for something a little more realistic, for a conceptualization of history that accounted for the evil we all are capable of (what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”). In my head, at least, I’ve managed to do that. But in my heart, I still clasp that kernel of hope in progress.
Hope drives me to understand genocide, because if human beings are capable of carrying out genocide, we’re also capable of putting a stop to it, and shutting it up forever in the history books. That’s why I give a damn about genocide. That’s why I do this work. For, as Viktor Frankl wrote, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
P.S. The #TogetherWeRemember campaign marks the latest step in my passion for remembering, studying, and preventing genocide. Check out an earlier post to learn how I met TWR founder David Estrin and joined this movement.
