[VISION] | PEOPLE: There are no people visible in the image. | TEXT: It is a bold effort. Stylishly written, packed with vignettes and sharp portraits, it essentially rewrites much of twentieth-century American history in the shadow of genocide. She observes that, again and again, Western powers looked away from massacre. The problem, she famously declared, wasn’t that America’s policy failed. It was that it worked. Reticence about protesting mass murder was a constituent part of America’s hard-nosed, realist approach to foreign affairs. What is missing from Power’s work, however, is a political context. There seems to be the assumption that Washington can always be on the right side of history—that American presidents can ignore domestic and international considerations simply to plunge into conflicts on the side of the beleaguered whenever they feel like it. It is also notable that Power, in her extended case studies of genocide, ignores some of the biggest examples of the past century. There is no mention of Stalin’s man-made Ukrainian famine. There is no mention of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which killed tens of millions. Perhaps this is because these cases don’t quite fit with her theory that the American government’s deliberate indifference has invariably been key in the failure to stop mass deaths. Rather, many on the American and British left were bedazzled by what they saw as Communist dictatorships greatly leaping forward, whatever the human toll might be. It was active blindness on the part of these intellectuals, a shameful historical legacy that nothing can efface. As Saul Bellow once observed, “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” The true strength of Power’s book is as a literary work, a ringing and idealistic call to arms. It does not merely recount. It instructs its reader what is to be done. Power’s work begins with a bang—the 1921 assassination in Berlin of Mehmed Talat, the former Turkish