Much intelligence has been channeled toward technological innovations that proved remarkably efficient in the mass extermination of people and other living things. We might ask whether the human capacity to craft a “science” of politics that avoids restaging the tortured history of the last century has advanced as far as the science driving the media that aid our blissful temporary forgetting of it. Sounding a more positive note, Martha Minow writes, “The mass atrocities of the twentieth century, sadly, do not make it distinctive. More distinctive than the facts of genocides and regimes of torture marking this era are [sic] the search for an invention of collective forms of response.” Minow is right that the range of responses to mass atrocity are distinctive. Yet, with respect to the forms of present-day atrocities, there are dangerous contemporary variations on old themes. While chattel slavery may be a thing of the past, the institution of slavery persists under the euphemism of “human trafficking” where upward of thirty million people are in bondage today.