I love Bruce Willis action movies. They’re mostly full of one-liners and guns.

“Tears of the Sun” is better than most because Willis shoots up a genocidal militia. The ending has Willis and his remaining men rescuing refugees from genocide.

It would be great if that happened in real life. But it never does. There is a long history of movies being made about genocide, including “Hotel Rwanda” and “Schindler’s List,” and a history of nothing being done about it.

Jan. 27 was the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation. While Oscar Schindler saved many Jews from that terrible place, the world did not. America refused to bomb Auschwitz despite reliable knowledge of the atrocities there.

We didn’t even punish many Nazi officials properly. An American Radioworks documentary said all those imprisoned due to the Nuremberg war crimes trials were released by 1958. These included four Einsatzgruppen (Special Task Force or death squad) officers, who may have become CIA spies.

The cruelty of Auschwitz was repeated in more recent decades. While Republicans now decry Saddam Hussein’s murder of 100,000 Kurds in the 1980s, the Reagan administration knew about it then. In “Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Samantha Power, journalist and author, wrote of the situation in 1987: “Already, U.S. officials reporting on the attacks had acquired a matter-of-fact tone, describing the harsh treatment of Kurds as routine.”

Yet America did nothing. The Prevention of Genocide Act, opposed by the Reagan administration, died in Congress. Power wrote that a fundamental reason for the opposition to the act was economics. The world tolerates genocide because it might lose lives or money to oppose.

Genocide continued in 1994, when the Rwandan government began slaughtering Tutsi tribes. I got insight on this genocide not from “Hotel Rwanda,” but from the U.N. commander there, retired Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire. Dallaire spoke at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale while I was there in 2001. Dallaire recalled a woman carrying her child, both of whom were cut apart by machete-wielding teenagers. By the end, he was almost screaming about the 800,000 people he couldn’t save.

Power wrote of Rwanda, “The Clinton administration did not actively consider U.S. military intervention, it blocked the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers, and it refrained from undertaking softer forms of intervention.” Power also wrote that no group made the administration fear the political consequences of non-intervention.

Even after many years of killings, they have not stopped. Since November 2003, the Sudanese government’s policy of violence has left 70,000 Darfurians dead and 1.5 million homeless. The United Nations took more than a year to broker a peace deal. Although the U.N. recently released a report saying it did not find the Sudanese government guilty of “genocidal intent,” the country’s systematic killings are no less horrible.

The world needs to do more. Just boycotts can be effective, as Mohandas Gandhi proved. If people all boycotted companies doing business in genocide-committing countries, corporations would lobby Congress for immediate intervention.

It doesn’t matter, because you’ll forget this column by dinner. So rescuing genocide victims will remain only a movie fantasy while little children are still thrown into ovens. Where’s Bruce Willis now?

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.