Never Again, Again: A World Tour of Genocide and the Art of Pretending to Care
Genocide: The World’s Most Reliable Failure of Imagination
The word itself sounds clinical—like a pharmaceutical side-effect you might hear whispered over late-night television between ads for restless-leg cream. But genocide isn’t a side-effect; it’s the main course, served hot and repeatedly since someone first noticed that sharpened rocks have multiple uses. From the Herero in 1904 to the Rohingya in 2024, the international community has perfected the same choreography: gasp, condemn, forget, schedule next atrocity.
Start with the League of Nations—humanity’s first attempt at a planetary group chat—whose members in 1933 couldn’t even agree on a definition of “mass murder.” That proved awkward when the Third Reich provided a live demonstration shortly thereafter. Fast-forward to 1948: the freshly painted United Nations unveiled the Genocide Convention, a document whose 19 pages of righteous prose have since aged like milk in the Sahel sun. Signatories promised “never again,” a phrase now translated into every UN language and promptly filed under Fiction.
The mechanics are wonderfully consistent. First comes the dehumanization campaign—cartoons, radio slogans, Twitter memes—whatever reduces neighbors to vermin with passports. Next, the procurement phase: machetes for Rwanda, Facebook algorithms for Myanmar, artillery shells for wherever Russia misplaced its map of Ukraine this week. Then the paperwork: an underfunded peacekeeping mandate here, a sternly worded press release there. Finally, the memorials: candlelight vigils, museum wings, and bestselling memoirs that allow future generations to feel appropriately horrified without actually learning to spell “Darfur.”
Global implications? Oh, they’re everywhere. Supply chains wobble when cobalt mines in eastern Congo switch from digging for phone batteries to unearthing mass graves. Refugees huddle at borders, providing excellent photo-ops for politicians who, moments later, vote to cut foreign aid by exactly the amount needed to process asylum claims. Financial markets, those finely tuned seismographs of human misery, usually shrug—unless oil fields are threatened, in which case the Security Council suddenly remembers where its emergency meeting room is.
Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court keeps a docket longer than a Russian novel and about as conclusive. Suspects tend to die of old age before the verdict, assuming they don’t get elected to higher office first. The ICC’s budget, roughly the cost of a mid-tier Champions League striker, suggests how seriously humanity takes the crime. The court’s most reliable accomplishment is giving law students something to cite while their governments sell fresh arms to the next regime warming up the crematoria.
Technology, ever helpful, has streamlined the process. Drones now deliver ethnic cleansing with the same “tap to confirm” ease as ordering pad thai. Algorithms amplify hate at scale, turning village gossip into continent-wide pogroms before fact-checkers can finish their coffee. Blockchain evangelists promise immutable ledgers of atrocities, because nothing deters a war criminal like knowing his crimes are NFT-certified.
And yet the broader significance—if one insists on finding a silver lining in barbed wire—is that genocide remains the most honest mirror humanity owns. Strip away the flags, anthems, and TED Talks, and you’ll see the same primordial software running on repeat: fear plus power minus empathy equals bodies. Every generation beta-tests a new patch—religion, race, politics, class—but the core code never changes. The international order pretends otherwise, holding summits in Geneva and adding fresh paragraphs to already ignored treaties. It’s like repainting the Titanic’s hull while it’s still wedged on the iceberg.
So what’s a conscientious global citizen to do? Donate, march, hashtag, repeat—rituals that create the comforting illusion of motion without the inconvenience of actually stopping the machine. Because the hard truth is that genocide isn’t a malfunction; it’s a feature, baked into the operating system of nation-states that prize sovereignty over survival. Until that changes, the only reliable prediction is the calendar: somewhere, tomorrow, someone will discover that atrocity is surprisingly affordable, and the rest of us will act shocked—again—while quietly updating our travel advisories.
