The news about the Rohingya population in Myanmar (Burma) continues to astound me. As someone who has taught about genocide to high school students, this struggle for life is heartbreaking. I wrote about genocide in the past (Duck, Duck, Genocide) and it would appear that the United States (and the West) is taking the same position is has in recent years, calling genocide “ethnic cleansing” just so it doesn’t have to do anything about it. The United Nations “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”  is pretty clear, but there are too many ways to avoid committing to stopping genocide. This is one area where we seem to pick and choose how we will respond – sometimes we do something, most of the time we do nothing.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, when he said “Never Again” after the Holocaust, continue to ring hollowly in the collective memory of the world. I would venture to say that we have not learned from history and we are doomed to repeat it, at the expense of humanity.

Here are a few articles to get you up to speed if you need to know more about this:

No Such Thing as Rohingya: Myanmar Erases a History

Rohingya Crisis: US calls Myanmar action “ethnic cleansing”

US Denounces Violence Against Rohingya as “Ethnic Cleansing”

When will the world stop sitting back and watching as peoples, and histories, are erased?