This was not the first genocide of the 20th century. The systematic extermination of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks started slowly in 1895 and peaked in 1915. While it is horrific that as many as 110,000 people died, the Armenian genocide totaled more than 1.5 million deaths, and was held up by Adolph Hitler as an example of how such crimes against humanity disappear in history: "Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

I was in South Africa this summer and picked up the following book because I had no idea that the Germans practiced and perfected their genocidal ways on the S. Africans.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kaisers-Holocaust-Germanys-Forgotten-Genocide/dp/057123142X

I hear this all the time, that we, the USA, should have done something in Rawanda. What could we have done to stop one group from killing another?? Send in Marines, who then would have to shoot people to protect themselves?? no American life was worth that mess.

Clinto did the right thing, stay out of it.

I presume they know, but in case:

Thomas Pynchon takes a typically idiosyncratic (and horrifyingly hilarious) view of the Herero and Germany, especially WWII Germany, in "Gravity's Rainbow."