Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond by Don Cheadle, John Prendergast Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond
Book Review: Makes me want to get involved.
Summary: 5 Stars
There is so much information in this book. If this doesn't make you want to get involved, you may not have a pulse. Extremely interesting.Book Review: Activist guidebook with short stories
Summary: 4 Stars
What does the phrase "Not on our watch" mean? We hear it off and on, from a variety of people in a variety of contexts. Well Don Cheadle and John Prendergast want you to know that while they are alive and kicking they will not allow genocide or mass atrocities against humanity to go unnoticed. In their book titled, Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, they have created an activists guidebook.
Sharing from their personal experience they relay the hard story behind the current genocide in Darfur. They share easy steps that can be taken to end the horrible tragedy there. One letter can shift the balance in government which could change the entire landscape of how the world interacts with Sudanese officials. The two authors draw on their experiences with advocacy, but throughout the book share short stories about how regular individuals, like you and me, have taken action. Simple ideas that create massive change - that is the theme of the book.
Outside of the short stories, it can get a little dry, but when you realize that you can create change it can be a powerful motivator. Out of their efforts came an organization called the Enough Project, which basically wants to end and prevent future genocides.
I've had enough of the indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children. Have you?
The book ends with this great quote from Cheadle, it is a powerful reminder we are not alone in our work.
Times like this, it's easy to feel powerless, easy to feel alone. But when I take off those blinders and look around I see that I am actually surrounded by many people "intending the light," as Joseph Campbell says, hoping against hope to make a difference in their time. I grow inside as we grow in size, not an army of one but one of many taking up the gauntlet thrown at our feet. Millions of lives hang in the balance, their futures determined in part by wheter or not we act. Ultimately, I pray that we not stand down from our post. Not us. Not now. Not on our watch.
Book Review: An Introduction to the Recent Genocides in Africa
Summary: 4 Stars
This book helps balance the usual Eurocentric emphasis on genocide. The reader learns that 800,000 humans were slain in Rwanda during a 100-day period in 1994. This is a greater rate than that of the Jews by the Germans during WWII.
In Darfur, non-Arab peoples were targeted. The governments chose the most extreme form of counterinsurgency in the world: drain the pond to catch the fish. (The pond, in this metaphor, represents an entire ethnic group, and the fish represent those who actively oppose the government). The governments also played one group off against others. Gang rapes and harsh slavery were the order of the day. The desert contained the dehydrated bodies of the victims.
As for activism, one can picture the hindrance caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Apathy, Indifference, Ignorance, and Political Inertia.
Book Review: The futility of compassion
Summary: 1 Stars
This book will stir your outrage and fuel within you a tremendous desire to help. To do something! It is well-written to engage you and it evokes powerful emotions -- disgust, horror, hope.
But in the end, what a let-down!
The course of action recommended? The community of nations should come together to end this. Hasn't all this useless talking been going on for decades?
There is more to this story.
Sudan is an Islamic nation that has spent two decades ELIMINATING in evil and horrendous ways its Christian and non-Muslim populations. People get a real taste for it, after a whole generation. So now the various Muslim factions are turning against one another, sort of a Muslim-purity civil war, if you will. And the atrocities, the inhumanity, the disgusting, animalistic, sickening actions of these factions are finally getting a little attention.
But the U.N. is not going to do a thing about it. And the Sudanese are not likely to be convinced by chatter.
To end this horror in Darfur, you'd better put together an elite coalition of American, British, and Australian forces and go in there to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Declare martial law and shut the place down. Permanently.
Because if you are going to declare "Not on our Watch," you had best take steps to ensure that it isn't just useless talk.
Book Review: call to action
Summary: 4 Stars
Well now I know where Darfur is, not to mention Chad, Congo, Uganda, Kenya etc....this book does a pretty good job of explaining the conflict. But their main purpose is to get the reader to ACT. Which I am doing... if only to allay the deep sense of trajedy one gets from reading of the terror going on there...and here, as we turn our backs on the situation. At first I was put off by the seeming light-heartedness of the authors but now I realize they, and you, as the reader, have to put up some kind of boundry in order to not be swept away by dispair.