I'm going to be a bit cynical here, but American college kids traveling abroad usually are not going to go out of their comfort zone. They want modern plumbing, clean beds, cell phone reception, and food they recognize and know is safe to eat.

Their refusal to visit Darfur or Bosnia has little to do with their social conscience, or lack thereof. It's that it is too unclean, unsafe, and probably unfun.

When large groups of refugees from those genocides want and are granted citizenship in the United States or have a large enough population of relatives in the US to tell the tale. It also has to be given importance in the high school curriculum .

Otherwise, it's just something "out there". Cambodia is a case in point.

Even in Cambodia itself, many young people have no idea of the extent of the killings during Pot Pol's rule. Only in October,2008, two generations after the fact, has the UN-sponsored war-crimes court decided that the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders are fit to stand trial.

_{"The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy" - Bob Herbert}

Sometimes I think it is as if we've (unilaterally) taken the guilt off the shoulders of the Europeans who committed the horrible act and taken on the burden ourselves. And this has warped our foreign policy in the Middle East in immeasurable ways.

We've taken on the "burden" the way the British Empire took on the "white man's burden". Every time the elites want to exercise power, they call the object Hitler. Dissenters are appeasers like Chamberlain. It's the blanket justification for war.

Is the guilt a burden to us? Our guilt consisted in not going to war fast enough, but was more than compensated for by our assuming the burden of fighting Hitler. That was our "Great Generation". We are guilty only if we don't go to war fast enough.

How little we are burdened by the disappearance of 90% to 95% of the native Americans during the 400 years of European colonization. We wipe our memories of the death toll in the "Middle Passage" that brought Africans as slaves to America. We don't have a museum on the Washington Mall to commemorate either long event where national guilt, if such a thing exists, is clearly on the shoulders of Americans. Of what use is our own guilt?

Amnesia starts at home.

Maybe I am being overly sensitive, but I would like to point out the following about that trip:

1) Believe it or not, it is actually cheaper for them to travel to Europe than Asia or Africa. The flights to Asia or Africa alone are over 2/3 the total cost of the trip to Europe.
2) In terms of comfort zones, most are traveling internationally for the first time in their lives. Many rarely venture out their own neighborhoods. And who can blame them? There are daily occurrences of these students getting jumped for an iPod or nice jacket on the way to and from school.
3) Last, I would like to point out that this public school is relatively young, having been around for only 6 years. Programs like these take time to build. So, it is with a great deal of pride that I share the news that a group of students from this school just won a grant that will take them to Rwanda for three weeks next summer through this organization:
www.facing.org

Numerian made what's probably the salient point, as unfortunate as it is. And nymole makes another. The Holocaust has become something that happened to Jews, but its not as if Hitler singled them out and let every other untermenschen live happily ever after. Gypsies and Slavs weren't any better than Jews in his eyes, and his genocidal ambitions didn't leave them out.

I read the link and, oddly enough, it goes a long ways towards proving that young Americans really don't get it...even when we're pretending that they do.

"To stand where thousands and thousands of people were killed was extremely difficult." This student was describing his/her experience at Dachau, where one can walk through the "showers" and into the crematorium...which is set up as a life size diorama, with mannequin SS officers and a not quite dead prisoner hanging from the rafters. Tourists are allowed to walk through the whole complex because it was never used (the crematoria was, not the showers). It says this clearly on signs all over the place...which doesn't make it significantly less unnerving. And it should be noted that 2/3's of the Dachau population were political prisoners, mostly Slavs, but it seems like the students took away the idea that Dachau was a place for exterminating Jews first and foremost.

I don't remember if there's a McDonald's in the town itself or not.

The commenter who posted the blog is a colleague of mine and it is my class that takes this trip. There area several reasons why I chose to respond to your post. First, in regards to why we visit Holocaust sites, it is by far the most affordable. Our students don't pay for this trip and we fundraise and write grants to cover the cost. Unless we come up with an additional $50,000, we can't take over 20 of our students to Rwanda. Kosovo and Bosnia would be possibilities, but the sights that are safe to visit are much fewer in number than throughout Eastern and Central Europe.
You also mentioned that we as Americans act "as if the only really important (Genocide) was that of European Jewry during WWII." We agree that all genocides are bad and, regardless of size, their intention alone is enough for condemnation. Our students read Samantha Power's book, "A Problem From Hell" and use it in there studies of genocide in the Ottoman Empire, Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Darfur, and the Holocaust. We also cover domestic issues such as treatment of Native Americans as well as lynching crimes in Jim Crow America. I have to admit I was surprised that a reader of Power's book would seemingly miss the point about how much these genocides have all had in common and that the inaction of America and her allies have exacerbated each one. Not only that, but each perpetrator seems to have learned from prior atrocities to "perfect" their methods. We study the behavioral patterns and use the different examples of genocide as case studies.
I take issue with your closing, seemingly an accusation that we are ignoring other genocides simply because we do not visit them. I will gladly share my curriculum with anyone interested which shows exactly how much time we spend on each topic and how we share this information with them. We are not committing "a national act of historical amnesia" but instead are trying to expose our students to examples of these atrocities as best as we can, including attending public speaking engagements with people like Carl Wilkens (Rwanda) and Arn Chorn Pond (Cambodia).
Finally, some of the posters here are getting a little ridiculous. I know that the risk in posting here is "feeding the trolls" but there are some inaccuracies that I cannot let go. In fact, if these inaccuracies were made by one of my students it would probably cost them a couple of letter grades. While Dachau was the first camp to open in Nazi Germany and the purpose was initially to house political prisoners, later in its existence the purpose of the camp and the population changed drastically. The torture methods that took place there were issued overwhelmingly to Jews before others. While some of the political prisoners were released by the Nazis, they offered no such possibilities to their Jewish prisoners. Additionally, the gas chamber was not built until 1942, after the "Final Solution" was posed. Lastly, I have been to Dachau six times now and have yet to see the half dead prisoner in the rafters and SS mannequin in the gas chamber and crematorium. Please do a little research before you make a post. Also, try to remember that these are high school students of mixed ability levels who may not have ever left Dorchester before this trip. We then spend three hours with them at this camp and ask them to express their feelings in the form of a blog entry. Please, cut them a little slack if they do not leave the camp as experts on Dachau.