: This monograph explores the evolution of genocide and mass atrocities from the 20th Century until today, focusing specifically on the ability and desirability of the US to employ the US Joint Force to protect innocent civilians from the hands of brutal dictators. Public discourse in the US today generally favors doing something to protect civilians rather than doing nothing. Reliving the not-too-distant memories of Rwanda and Kosovo is painful for most US citizens who witnessed the nightly newscasts and read the front page of the local newspaper. These two genocides demonstrate how a policy of nonintervention and limited intervention can lead to a failed strategy with horrific effects on civilian populations. US Joint Forces can respond to a wide array of challenges and arguably does so better than any other force in the world. Should the US Joint Force deploy to protect civilians, even if a vital national interest is not at stake? This author contends that it should and this monograph explores and defends such an assertion, beginning with a definition of genocide, the evolution of genocide through the 20th century to today, and a review of the narrative for and against intervention. Included in this is a brief discussion of the morality of intervention and the effects on the US Joint Force, as part of the narrative. The author describes the future environment and establishes the strategic context by which the US Joint Force could potentially operate in, given the political will. This monograph reviews two distinct genocides, Rwanda and Kosovo, tragic events that were both unnecessary and the driving forces behind The Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The concept of protecting civilians using coercive force is vague and there are serious gaps in US Joint doctrine that directly affects how the US Joint Force organizes and operates.

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Mass Atrocity Prevention and Response: Protecting Civilians Using US Joint Forces

This thesis takes Zygmunt Bauman’s book Modernity and the Holocaust as a point of departure in an attempt to show that genocides of the twentieth century are by-products of modernity, and not aberrations, as previously thought. Bauman’s work focuses on the distinctly modern nature of the Holocaust. Using the theory he develops in Modernity and the Holocaust, this thesis attempts to show, first and foremost, that the Holocaust is not the only example of modern genocide. By comparing and contrasting the Holocaust to another, more recent, genocide, namely the Rwandan genocide of 1994, it becomes clear that despite superficial differences between the two genocides, the Rwandan genocide is also a byproduct of modernity. This conclusion has important implications, not only for the way in which we remember the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, but also for our understanding of evil and perpetrators of evil. Drawing on the work of Bauman and Hannah Arendt, especially with regard to the Eichmann case, chapter three investigates our traditional assumptions and expectations with regard to evil and perpetrators of evil and notes the unsettling differences between our assumptions and the modern reality. In order to truly understand the nature of perpetrators of modern genocide, it is important to look at the influence of morality on such perpetrators and the reasons why morality seems incompatible with modernity. In this regard, Haas’ book Morality after Auschwitz is of critical importance. Given the various failures and unexpected by-products of modernity, one has to wonder whether postmodernity would offer a better moral alternative to modernity. Chapter five investigates this supposition, and finds it wanting. Drawing yet again on Bauman, the notion of an ethics of responsibility is put forth as the only safeguard against modern evil. Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za

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Evil, morality and modernity

ACCORDING TO THE great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase "Never Again" first appeared on handmade signs put up by inmates at Buchenwald in April, 1945, shortly after the camp had been liberated by U.S. forces. "I think it was really the Communists who were behind it, but I am not sure," Hilberg said in one of the last interviews he gave before his death in the summer of 2007. Since then, "Never Again" has become kind of shorthand for the remembrance of the Shoah. At Buchenwald, the handmade signs were long ago replaced by a stone monument onto which the words are embossed in metal letters. And as a usage, it has come to seem like a final word not just on the murder of the Jews of Europe, but on any great crime against humanity that could not be prevented. "Never Again" has appeared on monuments and memorials from Paine, Chile, the town with proportionately more victims of the Pinochet dictatorship than any other place in the country, to the Genocide Museum in Kigali, Rwanda. The report of CONADEP, the Argentine truth commission set up in 1984 after the fall of the Galtieri dictatorship, was titled "Nunca Mas"--"Never Again" in Spanish. And there is now at least one online Holocaust memorial called "Never Again." There is nothing wrong with this. But there is also nothing all that right with it either. Bluntly put, an undeniable gulf exists between the frequency with which the phrase is used--above all on days of remembrance most commonly marking the Shoah, but now, increasingly, other great crimes against humanity--and the reality, which is that 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, "never again" has proved to be nothing more than a promise on which no state has ever been willing to deliver. When, last May, the writer Elie Wiesel, himself a former prisoner in Buchenwald, accompanied President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel to the site of the camp, he said that he had always imagined that he would return some day and tell his father's ghost that the world had learned from the Holocaust and that it had become a "sacred duty" for people everywhere to prevent it from recurring. But, Wiesel continued, had the world actually learned anything, "there would be no Cambodia, and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia." Wiesel was right: The world has learned very little. But this has not stopped it from pontificating much. The Obama administration's National Security Strategy Paper, issued in May 2010, exemplifies this tendency. It asserts confidently that "The United States is committed to working with our allies, and to strengthening our own internal capabilities, in order to ensure that the United States and the international community are proactively engaged in a strategic effort to prevent mass atrocities and genocide." And yet again, we are treated to the promise, "never again." "In the event that prevention fails," the report states, "the United States will work both multi-laterally and bilaterally to mobilize diplomatic, humanitarian, financial, and--in certain instances--military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities." Of course, this is not strategy, but a promise that, decade in and decade out, has proved to be empty. For if one were to evaluate these commitments by the results they have produced so far, one would have to say that all this "proactive engagement" and "diplomatic, financial, and humanitarian mobilization" has not accomplished very much. No one should be surprised by this. The U.S. is fighting two wars and still coping (though it has fallen from the headlines) with the floods in Pakistan, whose effects will be felt for many years in a country where America's security interests and humanitari an relief efforts are inseparable. At the same time, the crisis over Iran's imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons capability is approaching its culmination. Add to this the fact that the American economy is in shambles, and you do not exactly have a recipe for engagement. …

David Rieff

Papers

The Persistence of Genocide