Becky Tinsley in The New Statesman: "In the four years I have been campaigning against the genocide in Darfur, I have realised that the rules of the schoolyard apply to international relations. Unless nations come together to call the bullies’ bluff, the thugs will continue to divide and rule, to terrorize, and to make the rest of us look like irresolute fools."
Tony Judt - author of Postwar - in the New York Review of Books: The 20th Century we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus... a pedagogically serviceable Chamber of Historical Horrors whose way stations are labelled "Munich" or "Pearl Harbor", "Auschwitz" or "Gulag", "Armenia" or "Bosnia" or "Rwanda"... But such official commemoration does not enhance our appreciation and awareness of the past. It serves as a substitute, a surrogate... The resulting mosaic does not bind us to a common past, it separates us from it.
"[The] abstracting of foes and threats from their context—[the] ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with "Islamofascists," "extremists" from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant "Islamistan," who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy "our way of life"—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them."
