Chris Hedges on Responding to Genocide in Syria
The Truthdig columnist went on The Real News Network to criticize Obama's reliance on a gas attack on Syrian civilians last month as he attempts to start a unilateral war, an act which Hedges says "illustrates the rise of our imperial presidency."
Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges went on The Real News Network to criticize Obama’s reliance on a gas attack on Syrian civilians last month as he attempts to start a unilateral war, an act that Hedges says “illustrates the rise of our imperial presidency.”
Early in the conversation with Real News Network senior editor Paul Jay, Hedges said:
I believe that one of the primary lessons of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. But there has to be an active campaign of genocide. So we are culpable by not intervening during the genocide in Rwanda, in Cambodia, when Saddam Hussein was wiping out the Kurds in Northern Iraq. But to respond after that genocide is complete as a kind of punishment is for me very short sighted because it essentially involves the United States not in an act of preventing an ongoing or current act of genocide, but in essence taking sides in this civil war.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.TheRealNews:
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