Presidents' Body Counts: The Twelve Worst and Four Best American Presidents by Al Carroll - HTML preview

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Section Two:

Turning a Blind Eye to Genocide

* This section focuses most on two matters. First, on those humanitarian disasters where US presidents played a role in creating the eventual conditions for genocide, though not actually taking part, such as Nixon's betrayal of the Kurds. Obviously there was no intent to cause genocide itself, but anyone could see this was a situation bound to create chaos, and at the least many deaths would result.

* Second, this section focuses on cases where US presidents made a deliberate effort to avoid doing anything and even tried to keep others from aiding the victims or stopping the violence, such as Clinton's elaborate efforts to do nothing about Rwandan genocide. This was morally if not legally depraved indifference, where the previous section described willful outright mass murder.

* In either case, had these presidents actually been held accountable for their actions, the right thing to do would not be prosecution, but condemnation. Clinton is unique among these presidents for his wrongs being widely recognized within the US while he was still alive, and also for actually apologizing, though insincerely. The other presidents were in some cases not condemned nor their wrongs recognized for decades. In some cases the public did not know, and still largely does not know even today, about certain presidents' indifference to genocide.