Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts believes that despite the influx of information about genocide around the world, the Holocausts of today are still largely ignored.
“One would think that with the age of 24-hour news, that somehow there’d be no excuse, and that when people receive that information that people were being exterminated, that there’d be this immediate reaction,” McGovern said in a speech April 13 in Ward 2.
Instead, the immediate access to coverage of global atrocities has normalized them, he said.
“This deluge of all this information has kind of numbed us,” he said.
As part of AU’s Holocaust Remembrance Week, McGovern, a College of Arts and Sciences 1981 graduate and School of Public Affairs 1984 graduate, addressed the Holocaust and how to prevent genocide with Jean Freedberg, Director of Policy and Programs for the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
McGovern has been vocal against political violence and currently serves as co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the U.S. Congress, died in 2008.
In 2006, Lantos and McGovern were arrested for protesting at the Sudanese embassy.
“It was an honor to be in a cell with him, if only for a few hours,” McGovern said.
McGovern said most congressmen do not prioritize human rights issues because of certain political factors.
“Different things come into play as to whether or not we want to be involved and upholding a high standard of human rights,” McGovern said. “It depends on whether the country perpetrating human rights is a friend of ours, it could be an economic or strategic partner… could depend on financial interests in terms of oil. We tend to be less tough on countries where we have a lot of interests.”
The political climate in the U.S. also has huge ramifications for humanitarian relief, he said. McGovern worries that the current continuing resolution, the apprpriations legislation that funds government agencies, cut too much from aid for programs like women empowerment in foreign countries.
“I’m very concerned,” McGovern said. “The good news is that this agreement that has been reached, as horrible as it is [because] it restores some of the most draconian cuts in humanitarian assistance, are not as bad as they were going to be.”
McGovern said that, while congressmen have not taken up humanitarian issues themselves, the activism of high school and college students has helped bring awareness to atrocities such as the genocide in Darfur.
One of McGovern’s history professors while at AU encouraged his students to pursue this same activism.
“He would end every class by saying, ‘The world will not get better on it’s own,’” McGovern said. “I never knew what the hell he was talking about when he would say it all the time, but the older that I’ve become and the more that I have seen, the more I see the wisdom in my professor’s words.”
lgiangreco@theeagleonline.com
