This Movie Could Make You Weep

Ben Rhodes, Samantha Powers, John Kerry, and Barak Obama

The Final Year delivers an overview of the final year of Obama's second term, and how he and his team carried on foreign policy. As well as Obama himself, the story focuses on three people nearest the President: the passionate, idealistic, committed Samantha Power, Ambassador to the United Nations, the experienced and dedicated John Kerry, Secretary of State, and blunt-spoken behind-the-scenes Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications.

The segments cover activities in Syria, Laos, Viet Nam, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Cuba and the UN, dramatizing the scope of US concerns around the world. We see Kerry's dogged persistence in seeking a deal in Iran. We see Obama interacting with young people wherever he goes. We see Power barely holding back the tears when meeting mother of the  girls kidnapped by Boko Haram.  We see Rhodes mind-morphing with Obama to craft drafts of his speeches.

It's heart-wrenching to compare the high ideals and global empathy of this cast of characters with the venality and self-interest of the current US president. Power's women's party to celebrate Clinton's expected victory deflates like a sad balloon. Rhodes, the wordsmith, cannot find words to express his desolation on the night Trump is elected.

The movie ends with the ultimate irony:  The Times They Are a Changin', once a chant of hope and progress, is a dirge for the death of principled US diplomacy. Or if you feel hopeful, it's just a blip in human progress.

I highly recommend* this movie, but take a tissue. It'll make you cry.

* The movie gets a low rating on rottentomatoes. I can only believe the ratings were stacked by Trump supporters. It's a great movie.

What's in a Word? Genocide.

There is a famous thought experiment that goes,

"If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it does it still make a sound?"

What about this thought experiment?

"If there is no word to describe the systematic and premeditated extermination of a large group of people of a particular ethnic group or nation, is it still a crime?"

Essentially no. The Nazis prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials were charged with crimes against humanity, exterminating citizens of other countries. At the time, what you did in your own country was not a crime, no matter how many people you killed; so the Nazis could only be indicted for crimes that took place across borders. 

The movie Watchers of the Sky chronicles the emergence of the term genocide. Raphael Lemkin first coined the word genocide in 1944. Naming the crime was the first step to declaring it an international crime.

Lemkin was a Polish Jew who emigrated to the US from Germany in 1941. It was his study as a youth of the Ottomans' persecution of the Armenians and Assyrians that motivated him to dedicate his life to criminalizing genocide so that its perpetrators could be brought to justice. 

Lemkin drafted the UN resolution known as The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. He relentlessly pushed for its adoption, lobbying shamelessly around the corridors of the UN to anyone who would listen, and the convention finally came into force in 1951. Prosecution for genocide is still not easy, but it would be impossible without the pioneering work of Lemkin. His work on genocide shows the power of a word. Naming the evil was the first step in criminalization.

The movie was partially inspired by Samantha Power's book on genocide, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Power appeared several times in the movie; her cool and dispassionate account of truly atrocious events made them even more sinister. The US Ambassador to the UN, Power is one impressive woman. She had me in tears at the 2008 TED conference, when she told the moving story of Sergio de Mello, the UN envoy killed in a terrorist attack in Iraq.

You might wonder where the title Watchers of the Sky came from. We're told at the close of the film. It comes from a comment by Tycho Brahe. Brahe was a Danish astronomer who spent his life meticulously recording observations of the night sky. When asked what value these observations might have since he had broached no new theories, Brahe stated that these observations would save future Watchers of the Sky years of work. Lemkin felt that his life's work in gaining acceptance of genocide as a crime would similarly make it easier for future prosecutors to nail those who commit genocide.

The movie was beautifully wrought. Black and white trees etched against the horizon dissolved into streams of refugees, fleeing from many genocides of history. My friends and I all enjoyed this movie. Well, maybe 'enjoy' isn't the right word. We were engaged, we were enlightened, we were dismayed, we were moved: those are some of the right words.

Will Evil Prevail?

Exploring this big question was a rare descent into pessimism for TED, but offered some interesting fare, and ended with calls for heroism, so it was true TED fare.

Irwin Redlener, a public health doctor, addressed the question of nuclear threat. He described the nuclear threat from 49-19 as being threat of nation-nation nuclear threat, mostly mitigated by the principle of mutually assured destruction. During this period, there was virtually nothing you could do cope with possible nuclear events (despite the futile duck-and-cover campaigns) because a first strike would inevitably be followed by nuclear bombs raining on all participants – and thus resistance was futile.
His message was that the nuclear threat of today came from possible terrorist use of the stockpiles (left after disarmament), many of which are extremely insecure. Between 95 and 2006, there were 175 cases of nuclear theft. But there is something that can be done to prepare for such localized terrorist nuclear threats. The old advice to get protected from the immediate blast makes sense when it’s likely to a single blast. Moreover, with proper preparation for evacuation a huge proportion of people in the fallout zone could actually escape it. However, no American cities have such a plan.

Philip Zimbardo, social psychologist, is most famous for a prisoner experiment that degenerated so brutally over a few days that it had to be stopped – the woman who was to become Zimbardo’s wife, who was not part of the experiment, protested in order for it to be stopped. That and other experiments are the basis of his theory that ordinary people can succumb to evil under the right circumstances. In fact, he categorized people into 3 categories:
People who are evil – the bad apples
People who can become evil in certain circumstances – the bad barrel
Systems that create circumstances where people can become evil – bad barrelmakers

In narrating the horror of a series of Abu Ghraib photos what he gained access to through being an expert witness in the trial, he professed that it was a case of bad barrelmakers.
It takes courage to diverge from the norm, as was the case for the American who reported Abu Ghraib whose family had to go into hiding. He pleaded for early education about heroism and that it was the domain of ordinary people, so that people could step up when the need arose.

Samantha Power, political scientist and journalist, told us all a story, that exemplified such heroic courage, of the remarkable Sergio de Mello, the UN envoy who was killed in a terrorist blast in Iraq. “The world needs more Sergio”, she declaimed. He embodied four principles
Get in the room and talk to evil in order to try to reach some balance and accommodation
Have a reverence for dignity
Fear is a bad advisor –rise above it
Be humbled and aware of complexity but not paralyzed by it