Dirty hands and vicious deeds: the US government’s complicity in crimes against humanity and genocide (2018)

In a recent post I celebrate the new-books list at the Toronto Public Library:

Upgrades at Toronto Public Library website are highly impressive

Here’s a recently published study that I came across on the new-books (nonfiction category) list at the Toronto Public Library (please note that many other nation-states, besides the United States are, in my view as a student of history, who is reading recently published history studies all the time, complicit along the same lines that are outlined in this book):

Dirty hands and vicious deeds: the US government’s complicity in crimes against humanity and genocide (2018)

A blurb for the above-mentioned book (which I’ve broken into shorter paragraphs for ease of online reading), from the Toronto Public Library website, reads:

This collection of original essays, edited by renowned genocide scholar, Samuel Totten, shows how the United States government repeatedly aided certain regimes as they planned and then carried out crimes against humanity and genocide.

The cases include Indonesia, Bangladesh, Chile, East Timor, Argentina, Guatemala, and Rwanda. The goals of this book are first to inform U.S. citizens, university students, human rights activists, and anti-genocide activists why and how various United States presidential administrations responded to the perpetration of crimes against humanity and genocide by foreign nations with which it had close relations.

Second, to raise awareness – particularly that of students at the university level – how certain decisions with monumental consequences made by various U.S. government officials compare and contrast with the purported ethics of the United States.

Third, to encourage and prod readers to ponder whether certain actions of U.S. Government officials were reasonable or unreasonable; moral, amoral or immoral; right or wrong; and/or legal or criminal. In his Introduction, Totten offers a critical assessment of the US Foreign Policy as it pertains to genocide and crimes against humanity, and discusses the differences between those two terms – a subject that generates great debate among scholars.

In the following chapters, each author presents a detailed analysis of a particular case of crimes against humanity or genocide by a foreign government against its own citizens, and discusses why and how United States Government was complicit by aiding and/or remaining silent. What makes the collection unique – and chilling – is the inclusion of actual declassified documents generated by the U.S. Government at the time.

Such documents include memoranda, telegrams, letters, talking points, cables, reports, discussion papers, and situation reports. Students will see how the fate of human lives is discussed at the highest levels of government.

The Appendices include the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide and a List of Crimes Against Humanity.

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