The first third of the book A Problem From Hell looks specifically into three genocides that happened in the twentieth century.  The first genocide took place in Turkey.  In Turkey, thousands of Armenians were slain by order of Turkish leaders after refusal to convert religions from Christianity to Islam.  Barely anyone did anything to contest the killings of the Armenians, and nothing was initially done to stop it.  After World War I ended in 1918, the killings stopped.  However, America’s lack of response was taken into account by many people.  The next chapter talks of the view of a man by the name of Raphael Lemkin, a young Jewish man who had many ideas on the genocide in Turkey and genocides in general.  A famous qoute from his ideas says, “If it happened once, it would happen again.”  (19).  Lemkin was completely right in this sense, because a short number of years later, as Hitler rose to power, another genocide was started.  The Holocaust is the most widedly known genocide in the history of mankind.  Over twelve million people were killed, six million of which were jews.  The jews became the scapegoat for Germany’s loss in Worl War I and the depression in the country after the war.  This then led to World War II and Germany was defeated.  The third genocide in this part of the book was in Cambodia.  After a very bloody civil war, the communist rebels, known as the Khmer Rouge, came into power.  Under the Khmer Rouge, millions of Cambodians were slaughtered and tortured solely as a method of obedience and control.  The genocide was put to rest in 1975 after the Americans became involved.

There are many similarities between these three genocides.  The Armenian genocide and the Holocaust both had to do with the religion of those being killed and how the government leaders were against these religions.  Both of these governments had no restraints in the killings and that is why they were so terrible.  A similarity between the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide is that in both cases, killing of innocent civilians was used as a method of control for people.  If anyone stepped out of line, then they would be killed too.