Welcome to our readers of Issue 4 of GPN GENOCIDE PREVENTION NOW
We Need to Act
This is a powerful issue that protests appeasement, indifference and passivity.
Along with a wide range of news and features about many aspects of many genocides and developments in genocide studies and prevention, this issue of GPN includes powerful reviews and summaries of the developments in IRAN, SUDAN-DARFUR and NORTH KOREA.
We believe that significant real action is called for in respect of IRAN's threats to develop nuclear weapons – see the several years of ridiculously self-righteous denials by people who may mean well in their quest for a peaceful world but who, like in pre World War II days, have played right into the hands of calculating totalitarians who are arming to KILL.
We believe that significant real interventions are called for in respect of SUDAN's evident and ongoing, let alone imminent intensification of genocide – how many more campaigns raising money and writing petitions can we tolerate while the killing goes on without real actions to stop it?
We believe that we need a significantly real policy towards NORTH KOREA that continues its nuclear testing and supplies powerful weaponry to Iran and others, even as it is ruled by a despotic family of dictators who can hardly be counted on to act rationally and humanistically-- and God only knows what and when they will do next.
Granted the needs and challenges are awesome and quite obviously beyond the conventional resources of a USA struggling with aspects of decline, or of our current international system and its several corrupt anti-democratic players. But without a consortium of life-respecting countries sounding an inspired call to protect human life everywhere on the planet, and without a resolution to address the most pressing problems, the dwindling free world is riding for a terrifying apocalyptic fall.
Of all the current problems, we believe the immediate dangers of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of totalitarian regimes and transnational terrorist groups is the most imminent and pressing, and will set the note for the larger survival of our civilization or not. It is getting that bad that the stakes are now reaching towards the global and the survival of our species.
Our message to our scholarly and professional field of genocide studies and prevention is also evident in this issue. We believe the time has come for our discipline to make calculated efforts to translate emerging understanding of the genocidal process into tools for action and projects that aim to impact in a real way on our dangerous world. We want to work toward reducing deaths and injury from intentional violence, the most extreme example of which is genocide. Waxing forth in lecture and seminar rooms while the forces of Talaats/Hitlers/Stalins/Maos/Pol Pots/Miloseviches/Ahmadinejads/Bashirs/and more command, and strut and murder doesn't make any kind of sense, not even allowable academic nonsense. The issues are too serious and real.
R 2 L – Right to Life, A Proposal for a Worldwide Organization of Genocide Victim Peoples
Be sure also to see in this issue a proposal for a WORLDWIDE UNION OF GENOCIDE VICTIM PEOPLES – AND ALL CARING PEOPLE – ON BEHALF OF A RIGHT TO LIFE OF ALL PEOPLE – R 2 L.
What do YOU think? Are the various victim peoples YOU know ready to join in recognizing and caring the for histories of other peoples who have suffered genocide, and to work with them together in an umbrella organization that contributes to the prevention of genocides in our time?
GPN is Winning Accolades and Distribution
On a more mundane everyday level of good living, we also admit to our pleasures in the journalism of GPN. It is fun to bring you a wide range of information and analysis on the subject of protecting human life from genocide and genocidal terrorism and massacres. We are grateful and excited at the wonderful feedback we are receiving from many readers all around the world. An amazing number of GPN articles in our first three issues have earned visible placements on Google Searches, and GPN itself as Genocide Prevention Now has moved quickly to a prominent position. Your editors are continuing to explore and learn the range of tools available in this new journalistic medium of a "webmag" (web magazine), at once so familiar, yet in so many new ways also unfamiliar to our tried and true editorial habits of many years.
The New GPN Web Site will be up for the Next Issue
In respect of our medium, we are very pleased and almost certain that we can announce that the next issue of GPN – ISSUE 5, WINTER 2011 – will be produced on our new Web site. The publication of Issue 5 will also be accompanied by a re-publication of Issues 1-4 from our current blog site to our new Web site. This means that all materials on GPN to date will be included in the Search services that will be built into our site. We are told by those of our staff who carry the brunt of the design of the computerization that they are a very good quality, and we too are looking forward to begin working with them. We are also told that all of us on the editorial team are going to have to embrace a whole range of new ways of working just as we have grown reasonably comfortable with the workings of the GPN blog. You can wish us successful transitions.
GPN is Reprint Friendly
Behind the scenes, we do a great deal to make it possible for you to reprint easily individual articles and stories in GPN for classroom and group instruction. Please avail yourselves of this resource freely. While you do not have to write us for permission, we will be grateful if you would email us ever so briefly of your use of a GPN article for instructional purposes. E-mail: gpn.general@genocidepreventionnow.org
Feedback or Letters to the Editor
When the new Web site is working well, we intend to introduce a Feedback or Letters to the Editor mechanism. Watch for it.
We wish you good reading and renewed inspiration to act on behalf of human life and against genocide.
Best wishes from all of us on the GPN Staff,
Israel
Israel W Charny
