Trying to End Genocide by Putting Ourselves in Their Shoes

            I am a member of United to End Genocide, an activist organization preceded by the Save Darfur Coalition and the Genocide Intervention Network. It operates primarily in the United States to lobby lawmakers and other people who have power to take action against genocide in the world. An email I received a while ago from United to End Genocide announced a day of action on March 16- a day of fasting to protest the Sundanese regime’s use of food as a weapon of genocide. Not only does this point to the fact that genocide is far from over in the modern world, it also tells us of a commonly used tactic in the genocides we have studied so far: food shortages. The limiting of food to a target population has been a hallmark of genocide for a long time- forcing people into cattle cars and on hundred mile marches without adequate food or water as in both the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and the extreme rationing of food to Jews in the ghettoes, again during the Holocaust, though I know there are many more examples.

            However, what struck me most about this email was not the news it was reporting about the genocide in Sudan, or the use of food as a military weapon to cause the deaths of a target group. What interested me the most was that the organization was saying that to not eat on March 16 is to be in solidarity with the Sudanese and will call attention to the issue. Perhaps this will indeed be the case. However, the striking thing to me about this kind of action is that I think it is very common in the United States. When there is an issue of oppression or the hurting of innocents, we in the United States often look for a way that we can experience what the victims are experiencing, but on a very small level, and I have seen this occur with fasts several times in my life- the fasting is to feel that pain of the victim, or ostensibly is so. I wonder what this says about the US as a culture? Does it mean that we want to be able to feel what the victims are going through and in that way support them, or does it more so mean that feeling a little bit of the victim’s pain means that you have done your part, felt the pain, and in that way you have made yourself less complicit in the genocide happening in another part of the world and you no longer need to worry about it to the same extent? And that you may feel this way even though the part that you have done hasn’t constructively necessarily done anything at all towards solving the problem, or in this case, ending the genocide? (Though I do not discount that sometimes these actions do sometimes have effects, I am just interested in what it says about the US)