When there are no gas chambers, no barbed wire, and no concentration camps, many don't recognize the perpetration of new genocides and other targeted mass atrocity crimes because they may not look the same.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how the absence of recognizable symbols of genocide can blind people to ongoing atrocities.
John Prendergast emphasizes that the lack of traditional indicators of genocide, such as gas chambers or concentration camps, can lead to a dangerous complacency. Many people may fail to recognize or acknowledge new forms of genocide and mass atrocities simply because they do not conform to historical examples, underlining the importance of vigilance and awareness in the face of evolving human rights abuses.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of recognizing modern atrocities in a human rights conference.
I see courage everywhere I go in Africa. Fearless human rights activists in Darfur. Women peace advocates in eastern Congo. Former child soldiers in Northern Uganda who now are helping other former child soldiers return to civilian life.
In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.
Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.
It seems to me that a man who can think straight along for forty-seven years without changing a single idea ought to be kept in a cabinet as a curiosity.
The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life and the older you get- the more specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).
We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.
The only freedom is the freedom from the known.
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