John Walsh, March 15, 2012
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Yesterday (3/14) NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a “discussion” about Syria and the U.S. All options were not on the table – at least not the anti-interventionist option.
Melissa Block hosted three guests seriatim: the aptly named Anne-Marie Slaughter, former “director of planning” at the State Department. Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the criminal war on Iraq and Daniel Serwer, a former U.S. “special envoy” and “coordinator” for the Bosnian Federation. How is that for a broad spectrum of views?
Going first, Slaughter suggested that “no-kill” zones be established but that plan quickly morphed into the need for a supporting air campaign by the U.S. and NATO and “defensive” arms to the pro-Western forces in Syria. When Melissa Block inquired about the nature of a “defensive” arms, Slaughter conceded that there was no way to prevent the arms from being used in other ways, “revenge attacks” and “offensive actions” in Block’s terms.
For Slaughter time is of the essence, because there is “brutality on an extraordinary scale” in Syria (There are indeed 7000 dead in Syria – thousands on each side of the civil war there.) Enter the second guest Paul Wolfowitz whose Iraq war has resulted in the deaths of 1.4 million Iraqis and the displacement of 4 million. That, however, is not to be considered “brutality on an extraordinary scale.” Of course the U.S. was not killing its own people in Iraq but other people – which seems to make it OK. Block and her editors apparently were clueless about the irony of this juxtaposition of Slaughter’s claim and Wolfowitz’s appearance.
What was Wolfowitz’s prescription for Syria? “Defensive weapons.” Where had I heard that before? But Wolfowitz wants more US control over the weapons saying: “Hamas, which used to be in bed with Assad, has now distanced itself from the Assad regime. I’m sure the bad guys are figuring out how they can help the opposition so that they can have a position later.” Hamas the democratically elected government of all Palestinians and still in control of Gaza, daily under an assault by Israel (backed by the U.S.) is of course one of the “bad guys,” the infantile designation for official enemies, at least weak ones. Block concluded by raising what lessons Iraq holds for the present situation in Syria. And Wolfowitz had the answer. The problem was that the US did not invade earlier, in 1991, rather than 2003. No challenge from Block on that one.
So far two guests – one opinion. Surely the third guest, Mr. Serwer must be an anti-interventionist. Early on he made his position quite clear: “I don’t believe that there is a military solution in Syria without a massive U.S. effort to defeat the air defenses, the artillery, the tanks of the Syrian army and I see no will in Washington to do that kind of thing at the moment.”
Serwer simply says he opposes military action because it must be big and costly and there is no will “at the moment” in Washington to do so. That lack of will is due to the fact that the average American is fed up with the endless wars in the Middle East. Serwer continues: “You know, if you take military action, I think you have to think about taking serious military action. And serious military action would be aimed at decapitating this regime. The problem is you don’t know what comes after because there is no really consolidated opposition political structure.” Like Wolfowitz Serwer is concerned about “the bad guys.” Again no opposition to intervention but there is concern that once the dogs of war are unleashed, the new rulers may be one of “the bad guys.”
Serwer tells us that regime change could be effected if only Russia and China would go along. But Russia and China saw what happened in Libya, with “humanitarian” cover used to plunge Libya into an orgy of death and destruction; they are unlikely to be fooled again. So Serwer advises the “opposition” to bang on pans in the middle of the night.
Three interventionists, with one, Serwer, opining that intervention is impractical now so that we have to hope we can effect regime change through diplomatic means. The idea that we have no right to intervene in Syria is not even discussed. The anti-interventionist view is not even considered. Humanitarian Imperialism holds sway in the corridors of NPR.
NPR is one of the main opinion shapers for the intelligentsia in the US, and hence a very valuable asset for the Empire. What is an anti-interventionist to do? This writer has stopped contributing. If I want to listen to the occasional decent show (Car Talk is the only thing that comes to mind.), then I take heart in the fact that my tax dollars more than cover that one hour a week.
John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com
Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Amnesty's Shilling for US Wars
By Ann Wright, Coleen Rowley, Consortium News
20 June 12
readersupportednews
he new Executive Director of Amnesty International USA – Suzanne Nossel – is a recent U.S. government insider. So it’s a safe bet that AI’s decision to seize upon a topic that dovetailed with American foreign policy interests, "women’s rights in Afghanistan," at the NATO Conference last month in Chicago came directly from her.
Nossel was hired by AI in January 2012. In her early career, Nossel worked for Ambassador Richard Holbrooke under the Clinton Administration at the United Nations. Most recently, she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organizations at the U.S. Department of State, where she was responsible for multilateral human rights, humanitarian affairs, women’s issues, public diplomacy, press and congressional relations.
[aiposter]
Amnesty International's "NATO: Keep the Progress Going" poster at a Chicago bus stop.
She also played a leading role in U.S. engagement at the U.N. Human Rights Council (where her views about the original Goldstone Report on behalf of Palestinian women did not quite rise to the same level of concerns for the women in countries that U.S.-NATO has attacked militarily).
Nossel would have worked for and with Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, and undoubtedly helped them successfully implement their "Right to Protect (R2P)" – otherwise known as "humanitarian intervention” – as well as the newly created "Atrocity Prevention Board."
This cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy (which has served mainly to rationalize the launching of war on Libya) is now being hauled out to call for U.S.-NATO military intervention in Syria.
"Smart Power" = smart wars?
In fact, Nossel is herself credited as having coined the term “Smart Power,” which embraces the United States ’ use of military power as well as other forms of “soft power,” an approach which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced at her confirmation as the new basis of State Department policy.
An excerpt from Nossel’s 2004 paper on “Smart Power” published in the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs magazine sounds a lot like Samantha Power’s (and also traces back to Madeleine Albright’s) theories:
"To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism, which posits that a global system of stable liberal democracies would be less prone to war.
"Washington, the theory goes, should thus offer assertive leadership — diplomatic, economic, and not least, military [our emphasis] — to advance a broad array of goals: self-determination, human rights, free trade, the rule of law, economic development, and the quarantine and elimination of dictators and weapons of mass destruction (WMD)."
Perhaps the AI’s hiring of a State Department shill as executive director of its U.S. affiliate was merely coincidental to how/why its "NATO Shadow Summit " so closely mimicked the CIA’s latest propaganda assault, but….
The "CIA Red Cell," a group of analysts assigned to think "outside the box" to anticipate emerging challenges, was right to worry in March 2010 when the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) found that 80 percent of French and German citizens were opposed to continued deployment of their countries’ militaries in the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan.
Even though public apathy had, up to that point, enabled French and German politicians to "ignore their voters" and steadily increase their governments’ troop contributions to Afghanistan, the CIA’s newly-created think tank was concerned that a forecasted increase in NATO casualties in the upcoming "bloody summer … could become a tipping point in converting passive opposition into active calls for immediate withdrawal."
In a "confidential" memo, the "Red Cell" wrote: "The Afghanistan mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Berlin and Paris currently maintain the third and fourth highest ISAF troop levels, despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments, according to INR polling in fall 2009.
"Public Apathy Enables Leaders To Ignore Voters …
"Only a fraction (0.1-1.3 percent) of French and German respondents identified ‘Afghanistan’ as the most urgent issue facing their nation in an open-ended question, according to the same polling. These publics ranked ‘stabilizing Afghanistan’ as among the lowest priorities for US and European leaders, according to polls by the German Marshall Fund (GMF) over the past two years.
"According to INR polling in the fall of 2009, the view that the Afghanistan mission is a waste of resources and ‘not our problem’ was cited as the most common reason for opposing ISAF by German respondents and was the second most common reason by French respondents. But the ‘not our problem’ sentiment also suggests that, so for, sending troops to Afghanistan is not yet on most voters’ radar.
"But Casualties Could Precipitate Backlash
"If some forecasts of a bloody summer in Afghanistan come to pass, passive French and German dislike of their troop presence could turn into active and politically potent hostility. The tone of previous debate suggests that a spike in French or German casualties or in Afghan civilian casualties could become a tipping point in converting passive opposition into active calls for immediate withdrawal."
The CIA "Special Memorandum" went a step further, inviting "a CIA expert on strategic communication and analysts following public opinion" to suggest "information campaigns" that State Department polls showed likely to sway Western Europeans.
The "Red Cell" memo was quickly leaked, however, furnishing a remarkable window into how U.S. government propaganda is designed to work upon NATO citizenry to maintain public support for the euphemistically titled "International Security Assistance Force" (ISAF) waging war on Afghans. Here are some of the CIA propaganda expert’s suggestions:
"Messaging that dramatizes the potential adverse consequences of an ISAF defeat for Afghan civilians could leverage French (and other European) guilt for abandoning them. The prospect of the Taliban rolling back hard-won progress on girls’ education could provoke French indignation, become a rallying point for France’s largely secular public, and give voters a reason to support a good and necessary cause despite casualties. …
"Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission. … Media events that feature testimonials by Afghan women would probably be most effective if broadcast on programs that have large and disproportionately female audiences."
‘NATO: Keep the Progress Going!’
Amnesty International struck similar themes in announcements posted online as well as billboard advertisements on Chicago bus stops, telling "NATO: Keep the Progress Going!" beckoned us to find out more on Sunday, May 20, 2012, the day thousands of activists marched in Chicago in protest of NATO’s wars.
The billboard seemed to answer a recent Huffington Post article, "Afghanistan: The First Feminist War?"
"The feminist victory may be complete in America, but on the international stage it’s not doing so well with three quarters of the world’s women still under often-severe male domination. Afghanistan is an extreme case in point in what might be termed the first feminist war … a war that now may not be won even if Hillary Clinton dons a flack jacket and shoulders an M16 on the front lines. Still, since the Bush Administration to the present America ‘s top foreign policy office has been held by women … women who have promised not to desert their Afghan sisters."
Our curiosity was further piqued because we consider ourselves to be women’s rights and human rights proponents and also due to our own prior federal careers in intelligence and military. (Colonel Wright is retired from the State Department/US military and Rowley is from the FBI.)
So along with a few other anti-war activists, we packed into a taxi to head to the Chicago hotel where Amnesty International’s "Shadow Summit" featuring former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other female foreign relations officials was being held. We happened to carry our "NATO bombs are not humanitarian"; "NATO Kills Girls" and anti-drone bombing posters that we had with us for the march later that day.
As we arrived, an official-looking black car dropped off Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, who was to be a main speaker (on the first panel, along with former Secretary Albright; U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois; and Afifa Azim, General Director and Co-Founder, Afghan Women’s Network; along with Moderator Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Deputy Director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women and Foreign Policy Program).
Verveer cast a cold glance at us and would not answer Ann Wright’s questions as she scurried into the hotel with her aides surrounding her and us following behind. At first the hotel security guards tried to turn us away but we reminded the registration desk the Summit was advertised as "Free Admissions" and that some of us were members of Amnesty International.
So they let us register and attend as long as we promised to leave our signs outside and not disrupt the speakers. The hotel conference room was about half full. We stayed long enough to hear the opening remarks and the moderator’s first questions of Albright and the other speakers on the first panel.
All generally linked the protection and participation of Afghan women in government as well as the progress made in educating Afghan women to the eventual peace and security of the country as envisioned by the new strategic "partnership" agreement that Obama had just signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Ms. Verveer said Afghan women do not want to be seen as "victims" but are now rightfully nervous about their future. When we saw that audience participation was going to be limited to questions selected from the small note cards being collected, we departed, missing the second panel as well as kite-flying for women’s rights.
We noted, even in that short time, however, how easy it was for these U.S. government officials to use the "good and necessary cause" of women’s rights to get the audience into the palm of their collective hand — just as the CIA’s "strategic communication" expert predicted!
Secretary Albright?
Not everyone was hoodwinked however. Even before the "Summit" was held, Amnesty realized it had a PR problem as a result of its billboard advertisement touting progress in Afghanistan. An Amnesty official tried to put forth a rather lame defense blaming an accidental poor choice of wording.
But many readers (and AI members) posted critical comments and questions, including concerns about Albright’s involvement given her infamous defense of Iraqi sanctions in the 1990s, which were estimated to have caused the deaths of a half million Iraqi children, with the comment "we think the price is worth it."
Under the blogger’s explanation: "We Get It / Human Rights Now," there were comments like these:
"Could someone from AI please explain why Madeleine Albright was invited to participate in this event? We (and especially those of us who are familiar with AI) should all be able to understand that the wording on the poster was a genuine, albeit damaging, mistake. But why Ms. Albright?"
"The posters are pro-NATO and play into prevailing tropes about so called ‘humanitarian intervention’ via ‘think of the women & children’ imagery. The posters & the forum that includes Albright are neither slight slips nor without context. AI is coping heat because they have miss-stepped dramatically. There is NOTHING subtle about either the imagery nor the message!
"It is not a case of ‘oh sorry we didn’t realize it it could be interpreted that way!’ They used pro Nato imagery & slogans ahead of & during a controversial summit that has thousands protesting in the streets. Tell me again how that is not taking sides?
“They asked a notorious apologist for mass murder of children to speak on the right of women and children…tell me again: how is that not taking sides. So it is absolutely reasonable for past supporters (and board members like myself) to be asking how it is that Amnesty USA so lost its bearings they could make a critical SERIES of errors like this?"
Of course the defensive AI blog author never answered the numerous questions asking why Amnesty had chosen Madeleine Albright as their main speaker. So we will venture an answer that probably lies in the fact that all of the powerful feminist-war hawks who have risen to become Secretary of State (or are waiting in the wings) are now taking their lead from the ruthless Grand Dame who paved the way for them, Madeleine Albright — (see Coleen Rowley’s recent articles: "Obama’s New ‘Atrocity Prevention Board’: Reasons for Skepticism" and "Militarization of the Mothers: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, from Mother’s Day for Peace").
It’s also possible the highest ranks of the feminist wing of military interventionism (i.e. Madeleine Albright, Condi Rice, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, et al) are so passionate and hubristic about the nobility of their goal and "Amercan exceptionalism" that some have simply succumbed to a kind of almost religious (blind faith) type fervor.
The Road to Hell
Nossel’s and Albright’s theories are flawed in many ways but suffice it to say that democracies are actually not less prone to war. A long list of "democracies" – including Nazi Germany, the Roman Empire, the United Kingdom, France and the United States itself – disprove this assertion.
In any event, the U.S. has been terribly hypocritical in its support of "democracies" in foreign countries, often toppling or attempting to topple them (i.e. Iran’s Mossadeqh, Guatemala’s Arbenz, Chile’s Allende) in order to gain easier control of a foreign country through an allied dictatorship.
No one is going to argue that the goals of humanitarianism, preventing atrocities and furthering women’s rights around the world are not "good and necessary" (in the words of the CIA strategic communications expert). We would go so far as to say these ARE truly noble causes!
Testimonials about human rights’ abuse are often true and fundamentalist regimes’ treatment of women seems to vary only in degrees of horrible. But while it’s true that many women lack rights in Afghanistan, some would argue that it’s conveniently true. And that the best lies are always based on a certain amount of truth.
The devil, however, lies in the details of promoting equality and accomplishing humanitarianism. Most importantly the ends, even noble ends, never justify wrongful means. In fact, when people such as Samantha Power decide to bomb the village Libya , to save it, it will backfire on a pragmatic level.
It must be realized that it is the nobility of the U.S.-NATO’s motivation that – as CIA propaganda department has advised – should be relied upon to convince otherwise good-hearted people (especially women) to support (or at least tolerate) war and military occupation (now known to encompass the worst of war crimes, massacres of women and children, torture, cutting off body parts of those killed, as well as increasing mental illness, self-destructive behavior and suicides among U.S. soldiers and the corresponding cover-ups of all such horrible means).
In the decades after Vietnam, a number of military scholars identified declining American public support for that war as the main factor responsible for the U.S. "losing" Vietnam. One lesson learned and quickly implemented was to get rid of the military draft and put the wars on a credit card so fewer citizens would pay attention.
Some control also had to be gained over the type of free media (that led to trusted TV anchor Walter Cronkite broadcasting his public souring on the Vietnam War). A whole series of war propaganda systems, from planting retired generals as "talking heads" on TV to the assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deciding to "embed the media," have worked pretty well to maintain the necessary level of war momentum in mainstream media and amongst public opinion.
But now, with American polls approaching the same problematic levels as those in Europe cited by the "CIA Red Cell," we suddenly see major human rights organizations like Amnesty International (as well as others) applauding Obama’s (and the feminist war-hawks’) "Atrocity Prevention Board."
Such sleight of hand seems to work to work even better amongst political partisans. By the way, it should be noted that Congress may allow these Pentagon propagandists to target American citizens through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013. Should we connect the dots?
There are some clear lines where the laudable need to further human rights should not be twisted into justifying harsh economic sanctions that kill hundreds of thousands of children or, even worse, "shock and awe" aerial bombing that takes the lives of the women and children the "humanitarian" propagandists say they want to help.
Madeleine Albright’s response about the deaths of a half million children on 60 Minutes, that "the price was worth it," illustrates the quintessential falsity of what ethicists call "act utilitarianism" or concocting fictional happy outcomes to justify the terrible wrongful means.
It also seems that a human rights NGO, in this case Amnesty International, which had gained a solid reputation and hence the trust of those it has helped through the years, will be jeopardized in aligning itself with the U.S. Secretary of State and NATO.
This is exactly how the Nobel Peace Prize got corrupted, aligning itself with the U.S. Secretary of State and NATO, which is why Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire withdrew from the Nobel Peace forum held in Chicago during NATO.
Good NGOS and non-profits that want to maintain the trust in their humanitarian work tend to be very careful to maintain their independence from any government, let alone any war-making government. When NGOs, even good ones, become entwined with the U.S./NATO war machine, don’t they risk losing their independent credibility?
Ann Wright is a 29-year U.S. Army/Army Reserve Colonel and a 16-year U.S. diplomat who served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war. She returned to Afghanistan in 2007 and 2010 on fact-finding missions.
Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She wrote a "whistleblower" memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures. She retired at the end of 2004, and now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.
20 June 12
readersupportednews
he new Executive Director of Amnesty International USA – Suzanne Nossel – is a recent U.S. government insider. So it’s a safe bet that AI’s decision to seize upon a topic that dovetailed with American foreign policy interests, "women’s rights in Afghanistan," at the NATO Conference last month in Chicago came directly from her.
Nossel was hired by AI in January 2012. In her early career, Nossel worked for Ambassador Richard Holbrooke under the Clinton Administration at the United Nations. Most recently, she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organizations at the U.S. Department of State, where she was responsible for multilateral human rights, humanitarian affairs, women’s issues, public diplomacy, press and congressional relations.
[aiposter]
Amnesty International's "NATO: Keep the Progress Going" poster at a Chicago bus stop.
She also played a leading role in U.S. engagement at the U.N. Human Rights Council (where her views about the original Goldstone Report on behalf of Palestinian women did not quite rise to the same level of concerns for the women in countries that U.S.-NATO has attacked militarily).
Nossel would have worked for and with Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, and undoubtedly helped them successfully implement their "Right to Protect (R2P)" – otherwise known as "humanitarian intervention” – as well as the newly created "Atrocity Prevention Board."
This cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy (which has served mainly to rationalize the launching of war on Libya) is now being hauled out to call for U.S.-NATO military intervention in Syria.
"Smart Power" = smart wars?
In fact, Nossel is herself credited as having coined the term “Smart Power,” which embraces the United States ’ use of military power as well as other forms of “soft power,” an approach which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced at her confirmation as the new basis of State Department policy.
An excerpt from Nossel’s 2004 paper on “Smart Power” published in the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs magazine sounds a lot like Samantha Power’s (and also traces back to Madeleine Albright’s) theories:
"To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism, which posits that a global system of stable liberal democracies would be less prone to war.
"Washington, the theory goes, should thus offer assertive leadership — diplomatic, economic, and not least, military [our emphasis] — to advance a broad array of goals: self-determination, human rights, free trade, the rule of law, economic development, and the quarantine and elimination of dictators and weapons of mass destruction (WMD)."
Perhaps the AI’s hiring of a State Department shill as executive director of its U.S. affiliate was merely coincidental to how/why its "NATO Shadow Summit " so closely mimicked the CIA’s latest propaganda assault, but….
The "CIA Red Cell," a group of analysts assigned to think "outside the box" to anticipate emerging challenges, was right to worry in March 2010 when the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) found that 80 percent of French and German citizens were opposed to continued deployment of their countries’ militaries in the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan.
Even though public apathy had, up to that point, enabled French and German politicians to "ignore their voters" and steadily increase their governments’ troop contributions to Afghanistan, the CIA’s newly-created think tank was concerned that a forecasted increase in NATO casualties in the upcoming "bloody summer … could become a tipping point in converting passive opposition into active calls for immediate withdrawal."
In a "confidential" memo, the "Red Cell" wrote: "The Afghanistan mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Berlin and Paris currently maintain the third and fourth highest ISAF troop levels, despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments, according to INR polling in fall 2009.
"Public Apathy Enables Leaders To Ignore Voters …
"Only a fraction (0.1-1.3 percent) of French and German respondents identified ‘Afghanistan’ as the most urgent issue facing their nation in an open-ended question, according to the same polling. These publics ranked ‘stabilizing Afghanistan’ as among the lowest priorities for US and European leaders, according to polls by the German Marshall Fund (GMF) over the past two years.
"According to INR polling in the fall of 2009, the view that the Afghanistan mission is a waste of resources and ‘not our problem’ was cited as the most common reason for opposing ISAF by German respondents and was the second most common reason by French respondents. But the ‘not our problem’ sentiment also suggests that, so for, sending troops to Afghanistan is not yet on most voters’ radar.
"But Casualties Could Precipitate Backlash
"If some forecasts of a bloody summer in Afghanistan come to pass, passive French and German dislike of their troop presence could turn into active and politically potent hostility. The tone of previous debate suggests that a spike in French or German casualties or in Afghan civilian casualties could become a tipping point in converting passive opposition into active calls for immediate withdrawal."
The CIA "Special Memorandum" went a step further, inviting "a CIA expert on strategic communication and analysts following public opinion" to suggest "information campaigns" that State Department polls showed likely to sway Western Europeans.
The "Red Cell" memo was quickly leaked, however, furnishing a remarkable window into how U.S. government propaganda is designed to work upon NATO citizenry to maintain public support for the euphemistically titled "International Security Assistance Force" (ISAF) waging war on Afghans. Here are some of the CIA propaganda expert’s suggestions:
"Messaging that dramatizes the potential adverse consequences of an ISAF defeat for Afghan civilians could leverage French (and other European) guilt for abandoning them. The prospect of the Taliban rolling back hard-won progress on girls’ education could provoke French indignation, become a rallying point for France’s largely secular public, and give voters a reason to support a good and necessary cause despite casualties. …
"Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission. … Media events that feature testimonials by Afghan women would probably be most effective if broadcast on programs that have large and disproportionately female audiences."
‘NATO: Keep the Progress Going!’
Amnesty International struck similar themes in announcements posted online as well as billboard advertisements on Chicago bus stops, telling "NATO: Keep the Progress Going!" beckoned us to find out more on Sunday, May 20, 2012, the day thousands of activists marched in Chicago in protest of NATO’s wars.
The billboard seemed to answer a recent Huffington Post article, "Afghanistan: The First Feminist War?"
"The feminist victory may be complete in America, but on the international stage it’s not doing so well with three quarters of the world’s women still under often-severe male domination. Afghanistan is an extreme case in point in what might be termed the first feminist war … a war that now may not be won even if Hillary Clinton dons a flack jacket and shoulders an M16 on the front lines. Still, since the Bush Administration to the present America ‘s top foreign policy office has been held by women … women who have promised not to desert their Afghan sisters."
Our curiosity was further piqued because we consider ourselves to be women’s rights and human rights proponents and also due to our own prior federal careers in intelligence and military. (Colonel Wright is retired from the State Department/US military and Rowley is from the FBI.)
So along with a few other anti-war activists, we packed into a taxi to head to the Chicago hotel where Amnesty International’s "Shadow Summit" featuring former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other female foreign relations officials was being held. We happened to carry our "NATO bombs are not humanitarian"; "NATO Kills Girls" and anti-drone bombing posters that we had with us for the march later that day.
As we arrived, an official-looking black car dropped off Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, who was to be a main speaker (on the first panel, along with former Secretary Albright; U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois; and Afifa Azim, General Director and Co-Founder, Afghan Women’s Network; along with Moderator Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Deputy Director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women and Foreign Policy Program).
Verveer cast a cold glance at us and would not answer Ann Wright’s questions as she scurried into the hotel with her aides surrounding her and us following behind. At first the hotel security guards tried to turn us away but we reminded the registration desk the Summit was advertised as "Free Admissions" and that some of us were members of Amnesty International.
So they let us register and attend as long as we promised to leave our signs outside and not disrupt the speakers. The hotel conference room was about half full. We stayed long enough to hear the opening remarks and the moderator’s first questions of Albright and the other speakers on the first panel.
All generally linked the protection and participation of Afghan women in government as well as the progress made in educating Afghan women to the eventual peace and security of the country as envisioned by the new strategic "partnership" agreement that Obama had just signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Ms. Verveer said Afghan women do not want to be seen as "victims" but are now rightfully nervous about their future. When we saw that audience participation was going to be limited to questions selected from the small note cards being collected, we departed, missing the second panel as well as kite-flying for women’s rights.
We noted, even in that short time, however, how easy it was for these U.S. government officials to use the "good and necessary cause" of women’s rights to get the audience into the palm of their collective hand — just as the CIA’s "strategic communication" expert predicted!
Secretary Albright?
Not everyone was hoodwinked however. Even before the "Summit" was held, Amnesty realized it had a PR problem as a result of its billboard advertisement touting progress in Afghanistan. An Amnesty official tried to put forth a rather lame defense blaming an accidental poor choice of wording.
But many readers (and AI members) posted critical comments and questions, including concerns about Albright’s involvement given her infamous defense of Iraqi sanctions in the 1990s, which were estimated to have caused the deaths of a half million Iraqi children, with the comment "we think the price is worth it."
Under the blogger’s explanation: "We Get It / Human Rights Now," there were comments like these:
"Could someone from AI please explain why Madeleine Albright was invited to participate in this event? We (and especially those of us who are familiar with AI) should all be able to understand that the wording on the poster was a genuine, albeit damaging, mistake. But why Ms. Albright?"
"The posters are pro-NATO and play into prevailing tropes about so called ‘humanitarian intervention’ via ‘think of the women & children’ imagery. The posters & the forum that includes Albright are neither slight slips nor without context. AI is coping heat because they have miss-stepped dramatically. There is NOTHING subtle about either the imagery nor the message!
"It is not a case of ‘oh sorry we didn’t realize it it could be interpreted that way!’ They used pro Nato imagery & slogans ahead of & during a controversial summit that has thousands protesting in the streets. Tell me again how that is not taking sides?
“They asked a notorious apologist for mass murder of children to speak on the right of women and children…tell me again: how is that not taking sides. So it is absolutely reasonable for past supporters (and board members like myself) to be asking how it is that Amnesty USA so lost its bearings they could make a critical SERIES of errors like this?"
Of course the defensive AI blog author never answered the numerous questions asking why Amnesty had chosen Madeleine Albright as their main speaker. So we will venture an answer that probably lies in the fact that all of the powerful feminist-war hawks who have risen to become Secretary of State (or are waiting in the wings) are now taking their lead from the ruthless Grand Dame who paved the way for them, Madeleine Albright — (see Coleen Rowley’s recent articles: "Obama’s New ‘Atrocity Prevention Board’: Reasons for Skepticism" and "Militarization of the Mothers: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, from Mother’s Day for Peace").
It’s also possible the highest ranks of the feminist wing of military interventionism (i.e. Madeleine Albright, Condi Rice, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, et al) are so passionate and hubristic about the nobility of their goal and "Amercan exceptionalism" that some have simply succumbed to a kind of almost religious (blind faith) type fervor.
The Road to Hell
Nossel’s and Albright’s theories are flawed in many ways but suffice it to say that democracies are actually not less prone to war. A long list of "democracies" – including Nazi Germany, the Roman Empire, the United Kingdom, France and the United States itself – disprove this assertion.
In any event, the U.S. has been terribly hypocritical in its support of "democracies" in foreign countries, often toppling or attempting to topple them (i.e. Iran’s Mossadeqh, Guatemala’s Arbenz, Chile’s Allende) in order to gain easier control of a foreign country through an allied dictatorship.
No one is going to argue that the goals of humanitarianism, preventing atrocities and furthering women’s rights around the world are not "good and necessary" (in the words of the CIA strategic communications expert). We would go so far as to say these ARE truly noble causes!
Testimonials about human rights’ abuse are often true and fundamentalist regimes’ treatment of women seems to vary only in degrees of horrible. But while it’s true that many women lack rights in Afghanistan, some would argue that it’s conveniently true. And that the best lies are always based on a certain amount of truth.
The devil, however, lies in the details of promoting equality and accomplishing humanitarianism. Most importantly the ends, even noble ends, never justify wrongful means. In fact, when people such as Samantha Power decide to bomb the village Libya , to save it, it will backfire on a pragmatic level.
It must be realized that it is the nobility of the U.S.-NATO’s motivation that – as CIA propaganda department has advised – should be relied upon to convince otherwise good-hearted people (especially women) to support (or at least tolerate) war and military occupation (now known to encompass the worst of war crimes, massacres of women and children, torture, cutting off body parts of those killed, as well as increasing mental illness, self-destructive behavior and suicides among U.S. soldiers and the corresponding cover-ups of all such horrible means).
In the decades after Vietnam, a number of military scholars identified declining American public support for that war as the main factor responsible for the U.S. "losing" Vietnam. One lesson learned and quickly implemented was to get rid of the military draft and put the wars on a credit card so fewer citizens would pay attention.
Some control also had to be gained over the type of free media (that led to trusted TV anchor Walter Cronkite broadcasting his public souring on the Vietnam War). A whole series of war propaganda systems, from planting retired generals as "talking heads" on TV to the assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deciding to "embed the media," have worked pretty well to maintain the necessary level of war momentum in mainstream media and amongst public opinion.
But now, with American polls approaching the same problematic levels as those in Europe cited by the "CIA Red Cell," we suddenly see major human rights organizations like Amnesty International (as well as others) applauding Obama’s (and the feminist war-hawks’) "Atrocity Prevention Board."
Such sleight of hand seems to work to work even better amongst political partisans. By the way, it should be noted that Congress may allow these Pentagon propagandists to target American citizens through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013. Should we connect the dots?
There are some clear lines where the laudable need to further human rights should not be twisted into justifying harsh economic sanctions that kill hundreds of thousands of children or, even worse, "shock and awe" aerial bombing that takes the lives of the women and children the "humanitarian" propagandists say they want to help.
Madeleine Albright’s response about the deaths of a half million children on 60 Minutes, that "the price was worth it," illustrates the quintessential falsity of what ethicists call "act utilitarianism" or concocting fictional happy outcomes to justify the terrible wrongful means.
It also seems that a human rights NGO, in this case Amnesty International, which had gained a solid reputation and hence the trust of those it has helped through the years, will be jeopardized in aligning itself with the U.S. Secretary of State and NATO.
This is exactly how the Nobel Peace Prize got corrupted, aligning itself with the U.S. Secretary of State and NATO, which is why Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire withdrew from the Nobel Peace forum held in Chicago during NATO.
Good NGOS and non-profits that want to maintain the trust in their humanitarian work tend to be very careful to maintain their independence from any government, let alone any war-making government. When NGOs, even good ones, become entwined with the U.S./NATO war machine, don’t they risk losing their independent credibility?
Ann Wright is a 29-year U.S. Army/Army Reserve Colonel and a 16-year U.S. diplomat who served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war. She returned to Afghanistan in 2007 and 2010 on fact-finding missions.
Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She wrote a "whistleblower" memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures. She retired at the end of 2004, and now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.
DEMOCRACY NOW! AND “PROGRESSIVE ALTERNATIVE MEDIA”: CHEERLEADERS FOR IMERIALISM AND WAR
DEMOCRACY NOW! AND “PROGRESSIVE ALTERNATIVE MEDIA”: CHEERLEADERS FOR IMERIALISM AND WAR
Posted on July 12, 2012
Syria 360°
Finian Cunningham
The major Western mainstream media outlets have been
running a “shock and awe” propaganda offensive against the Syrian
government of President Bashar Al Assad for nearly 16 months. The
misinformation has been unrelenting, monolithic, unverified, one-sided
and, frankly, increasingly preposterous.
With the suppression of mounting facts that Western
governments are waging a covert war of aggression in Syria, the Western
public is right to treat the conventional media sources with skepticism
and outright contempt. Such media are seen as “politicized” and
“unreliable”, serving a naked imperialist agenda for Western regime
change. In a word, they are damaged goods.
This is where a segment of the so-called alternative
media can play a valuable propaganda function for Western powers.
Because such media are supposed to be independent, critical,
non-corporate, the public tends to consider their reports as objective
and unbiased. One such “alternative” news service is “Democracy Now”
hosted by Amy Goodman. Goodman is seen as something of a campaigning
critical journalist shedding the light of truth on the depredations of
the US government, corporations and the Pentagon. But a closer look at
what Goodman’s “Democracy Now” is reporting on Syria shows that the
purported critical broadcaster has become a purveyor of Western
government propaganda. While the mainstream media’s propaganda function
is obvious to the informed public, Goodman’s Democracy plays a more
subtle role. Camouflaged with the trappings of critical, independent
journalism, “Democracy Now” serves to sow powerful seeds of
misinformation in a way that the “compromised” mainstream media cannot.
This misinformation from “Democracy Now” is valuable
to the ruling elite because to many of its readers it is not seen as
misinformation.
Rather, the “news” on “Democracy Now” is viewed as
reliable and representing the views of the anti-war, anti-imperialist
constituency. In this way, Goodman is a valuable asset to Washington and
Wall Street because her broadcasts can serve to disorient and undermine
a constituency that is normally opposed to Western warmongering and
imperialism. Many of the subscribers to “Democracy Now” may see through
the misinformation. Many, though, may not, and therefore will become
embedded with the imperialist agenda. The fact that Democracy Now
ratings appear to be holding up would indicate that a lot of its
followers are oblivious to the insidious effect of such misinformation. As such, Democracy Now is more valuable to the powers-that-be than, say, the New York Times or the Financial Times.
“Democracy Now” ensures that the agenda of the powerful becomes
infiltrated in a constituency that would otherwise be opposed to that
agenda.
First, let’s recap on the mainstream propaganda offensive against Syria.
Since mid-March 2011, when violence was initially
reported in that country, the Western mainstream television, radio and
press studiously ignored the evidence of covert foreign-backed
subversion and terrorism. Instead these outlets have sought to portray
the protests as part of the pro-democracy Arab Spring popular movements
that were seen in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Bahrain. The mainstream
media have run saturation coverage to demonise the government in
Damascus as a “brutal, authoritarian regime” that is cracking down
mercilessly on its civilian population demanding democratic reforms. The
narrative is monolithic in the major media outlets on both sides of the
Atlantic. Whether the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, or the
Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Le Monde, BBC, ITN, the Irish
national broadcaster RTE or the Middle East’s much-vaunted Al Jazeera –
the “story” on Syria is uncannily uniform. A noble, civilian mass-based
movement is being savagely crushed by a tin-eared dictator, so the story
goes.
Every possible smear campaign against the
Assad government has been indulged in and indeed fabricated. From the
alleged killing of innocent civilians by the national armed forces, to
the perpetration of massacres by pro-government militias, to
self-inflicted car bombs in urban centres by Assad secret services, to
the feckless shopping habits of the president’s wife. Russia Today,
Press TV, Der Spiegel and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
the Vatican News Service (Agenzia Fides), to name a few, have been
honorable exceptions in mainstream media journalism for conveying a more
accurate picture of what is really happening inside Syria – showing
that “protesters” are far from peaceful civilians, and much of the
violence is actually stemming from Western, Turkish and Arab-backed
mercenaries that have infiltrated the country. As the facts of US and
NATO-backed violence in Syria become more transparent and harder to
conceal owing to the sheer volume of covert involvement, the Western
public has rightly become more skeptical about what the mainstream media
outlets are telling them. Indeed, the blatant misinformation and lies
that are being sold as journalism is increasingly seen as contemptible.
It is all the more disquieting when a supposedly informed, alternative news service, Democracy Now, peddles such blatant misinformation – more than six weeks after the massacre occurred and after evidence has been reported that points convincingly to Western-backed perpetrators. On 9 July, Goodman broadcast an interview with Rafif Jouejati, a spokesperson for a Syrian opposition group called the Syrian Local Coordination Committees, based in Washington DC. Despite the mounting evidence of Western, Turkish and Saudi/Qatari covert operations, Goodman gave her guest a free rein to regurgitate the litany of mainstream media calumnies on Syria. Without a hint of scepticism from Goodman, her guest said:
“The bottom line is that the majority of the country is engaged in a popular revolution for freedom, for democracy, for dignity… We have mountains of evidence indicating that [Assad’s] armed forces have been engaged in systematic torture, rampant detentions, massacres across the country.”
Really? The majority of the country engaged
in a popular revolution for freedom, democracy and dignity? That sounds
more like the fanciful imagination of someone safely based in
Washington DC. By contrast, sources in Syria have confirmed that people
are terrified by Western-armed gangs running amok in their communities,
kidnapping, murdering, evicting families from their homes and burning
down business premises. According to the leaked Arab League Observer
Mission Report, which had initially been commissioned by the Arab League
at Washington’s request:
“Such incidents include the bombing of buildings, trains carrying fuel, vehicles carrying diesel oil and explosions targeting the police, members of the media and fuel pipelines. Some of those attacks have been carried out by the Free Syrian Army and some by other armed opposition groups.” (League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria, Report of the Head of the League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria for the period from 24 December 2011 to 18 January 2012,
Ironically, these fact-finding observations of the AL Observer Mission , went against the interests of its Western sponsors. It was barely reported by the mainstream media)
According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ):
“Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.”
(Neue Erkenntnisse zu Getöteten von Hula.Abermals Massaker in Syrien, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 7, 2012 translated from the German,
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/neue-erkenntnisse-zu-getoeteten-von-hula-abermals-massaker-in-syrien-11776496.html)
The FAZ report quoted above echoes eyewitness accounts collected from refugees from the Houla region by members of the Monastery of St. James in Qara, Syria. According to monastery sources cited by the Dutch Middle East expert Martin Janssen, armed rebels murdered “entire Alawi families” in the village of Taldo in the Houla region.
Also of significance is the report of Der Spiegel (March 29, 2012) entitled “An Executioner for Syria’s Rebels Tells His Story”. A system of “burial brigades” for those executed confirms an organized process of mass-murder and extra-judicial killings. This single “burial brigade”, according to the executioner’s testimony, was responsible for the arbitrary execution of 350-400 people including “prisoners” and “traitors”. The “traitors” are Sunni civilians within the occupied urban and rural areas, who express their opposition to the rule of terror of the Free Syrian Army (FSA):
“Since last summer, we have executed slightly fewer than 150 men, which represents about 20 percent of our prisoners,” says Abu Rami. … But the executioners of Homs have been busier with traitors within their own ranks than with prisoners of war. “If we catch a Sunni spying, or if a citizen betrays the revolution, we make it quick,” says the fighter. According to Abu Rami, Hussein’s burial brigade has put between 200 and 250 traitors to death since the beginning of the uprising.” (Der Spiegel, March 29, 2012)
The Vatican News Service Agenzia Fides largely confirms that the Western backed “opposition forces” rather than the Al Assad government were responsible for countless atrocities:
“In Homs, called the “martyred city”, “opposition forces have occupied two areas, Diwan Al Bustan and Hamidieh, where there are all the churches and bishoprics,” the Archimandrite told Fides. “The picture for us – he continues – is utter desolation: the church of Mar Elian is half destroyed and that of Our Lady of Peace is still occupied by the rebels. Christian homes are severely damaged due to the fighting and completely emptied of their inhabitants, who fled without taking anything. The area of Hamidieh is still shelter to armed groups independent of each other, heavily armed and bankrolled by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. All Christians (138,000) have fled to Damascus and Lebanon, while others took refuge in the surrounding countryside.
The Syrian soldiers in fact, continue to face foreign fighters, mercenaries Libyans, Lebanese militants from the Gulf, Afghans, Turks. “The Sunni Salafist militants – says the Bishop – continue to commit crimes against civilians, or to recruit fighters with force. The fanatical Sunni extremists are fighting a holy war proudly, especially against the Alawites. When terrorists seek to control the religious identity of a suspect, they ask him to cite the genealogies dating back to Moses. And they ask to recite a prayer that the Alawites removed. The Alawites have no chance to get out alive.” (Agenzia Fides, Vatican News Service, 4 June 2012)
Overblown Casualty Figures, Blamed on the Government
Goodman indulged in the overblown casualty figures from dubious Syrian opposition sources as if they were verifiable accurate data. She even sounded like Hillary Clinton in talking up the “defection” of the hapless former Syrian Brigadier General Manaf Tlass as “significant” when informed sources discount that news as a minor irrelevance.
In the interview between Goodman and her guest (whom
sources describe as belonging to a family formerly aligned with the
Syrian government), Bashar Al Assad was portrayed as an unhinged leader
who is in denial over massacres – massacres, as we have noted, that have
most likely been carried out by Western-backed death squads as
confirmed by numerous reports.
“I would like to think that we will proceed with full prosecution in the International Criminal Court. I think the longer this issue goes on and the more violence he [Assad] commits, the more likely he will wish to have a fate such as Gaddafi’s.”
Recall that the Libyan leader was lynched on a
roadside by a NATO-directed mob, and sodomised with a knife before being
shot dead. It may also be recalled that “Democracy
Now” gave prominent broadcasts supporting NATO’s intervention in Libya
and justifying the criminal subversion of that country. Going by the
latest coverage on Syria, Democracy Now is acting once again under a
“progressive” cloak as a propaganda tool for US-led imperialist
intervention. Given the misplaced respect among many of the public
seeking independent, alternative, accurate news and analysis, this
insidious role of Democracy Now is reprehensible. May it be suggested,
in the name of media transparency, that the programme be aptly renamed
“Imperialism Now”.
Democracy Now, Libya, Syria and its continued pro-intervention stance.
from Edifying Debate
Imperialism is desperately trying to expand itself by making Americans more poor, so Goodman’s support of imperialism in Libya must be checked. I am writing this not at all to embarrass Amy Goodman but to reach a greater understanding of how the American state can and will influence “independent” media to become no longer “independent” but polluted and eventually meaningless.
I sincerely hope Amy Goodman can respond to my query about her coverage of Libya and not sink any further in to the polluted mainstream of Americanism. –RF.
From BAR
Is the independent media movement's flagship radio-TV show Democracy Now! pushing the State Department and Pentagon line on Libya instead of “going where the silence is” and telling the truth without fear or favor? Are its Libyan correspondents embedded with the US-backed Libyan rebels to such an extent that they have minimized and failed to follow up persistent reports of ethnic cleansing in Libya or investigate whether alleged “mercenaries” ever existed or Khadaffi's “massacres” ever took place? - Are Democracy Now!'s Libyan Correspondents Feeding Us the State Department and Pentagon Line on Libya?
Imperialism is desperately trying to expand itself by making Americans more poor, so Goodman’s support of imperialism in Libya must be checked. I am writing this not at all to embarrass Amy Goodman but to reach a greater understanding of how the American state can and will influence “independent” media to become no longer “independent” but polluted and eventually meaningless.
I sincerely hope Amy Goodman can respond to my query about her coverage of Libya and not sink any further in to the polluted mainstream of Americanism. –RF.
From BAR
Is the independent media movement's flagship radio-TV show Democracy Now! pushing the State Department and Pentagon line on Libya instead of “going where the silence is” and telling the truth without fear or favor? Are its Libyan correspondents embedded with the US-backed Libyan rebels to such an extent that they have minimized and failed to follow up persistent reports of ethnic cleansing in Libya or investigate whether alleged “mercenaries” ever existed or Khadaffi's “massacres” ever took place? - Are Democracy Now!'s Libyan Correspondents Feeding Us the State Department and Pentagon Line on Libya?
I've been a devout listener for about 10 years and I've
urged others to listen/watch Democracy Now. But DN's blatant, outrageous,
pro-US Libya propaganda in today's edition has finally put me over the top. I'm
finally coming to terms with the sad fact that I'd better not trust Democracy
Now any more for basic honesty or integrity.
All those maudlin voices in Tripoli, supposedly celebrating
their new US-brand "freedom"! Were they hired by a PR agency or have
they just been badly fooled? Do any of them know the real story behind this occupation
and bombing campaign, for whose benefit it's being waged, or for that matter
the actual state of the campaign? Do any of them know what is being stolen from
them?
No names, no background checks, no questioning, no investigation!
Just fluffy celebration! What has befallen my beloved Democracy Now? Ruppert
Murdoch must be laughing his head off.
For me, this is a grave occasion. Unless there's a drastic
change in the right direction very, very soon, I feel obligated to advise our
WZBC listeners specifically to be wary of the honesty or integrity of anything
they see or hear on Democracy Now. I will also need to make this adjustment on
our website and on our handouts, all of which have been promoting Democracy
Now.
Stan Robinson, co-producer Truth and Justice Radio, WZBC
90.3FM Newton MA truthandjusticeradio.org (see more here)
Sunday, March 18, 2012
The Conceit of Nicholas Kristof: Rescuing sex slaves as saintliness
22 November 2011
by Laura Agustin
from the Naked Anthropologist
Some people find commercial sex or prostitution vulgar. I find Nicholas Kristof vulgar: preening, in love with himself, interfering, condescending, happy to pose grinning with brown people and claim to be saving them. A true colonial character – give me tight dresses and flashy colours any day! Since I find him nauseating, I mostly ignore him, though his Wikipedia entry makes him sound a saint (in the Rich White Man category), with prizes for ‘powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world’s often forgotten people and stirred action’ and for ‘giving voice to the voiceless’. Gag. Ashton Kutcher is way preferable.
Lately Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid alongside Somaly Mam, supposedly blow-by-blow. I am not going to complain about twitter, but the 140-character limit does foster reductionism and clichés. But more important is his claim later that thanks to him and Mam:
In Anlong Veng, Cambodia, 6 more brothels have closed since the raid I live-tweeted there that rescued a seventh-grader.
Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader. His next claim was:
In part, that’s the power of Twitter. And the fear of traffickers that they could be next to face wrath of @*SomalyMam*
Wrath? A journalist who fosters the notion of a black and white world of bad people punished by good is not a journalist at all but a man selling his own virtue – which by the way is what prostitutes were said to be doing, in the olden days.
But vulgarity and childishness are not so important in the end. The real disorder in Kristof’s blithe chirping about brothels closing is the absence of responsibility towards the people working in them: where did they go? how will they live? do they have a roof over their heads now? How can he not understand that this is just how trafficking can happen, in his own sense of the word?
Not only women who sell sex earn their livelihoods through brothels: barmen, waiters, guards, laundresses, food vendors and others are integrated into these businesses. Those who want to abolish them might at least suggest alternatives if this source of income dries up. As for actual brothel workers, whether they were happy or coerced, the stigma attached to their previous employment could make it difficult to fend for themselves afterwards without turning to unscrupulous characters unless they are very lucky. But in the fairytale land of Rescue, uncomfortable consequences don’t exist and Rescuers are always Doing Good.
A critical perspective is commoner amongst those concerned about so-called Development and Aid. I used the satirical representation at the right on a post about Rescue Tourism, and Africa is a Country also makes fun of him. If you want to read a recent smarmy article by Kristof, try Fighting Back, One Brothel Raid at a Time from 12 November at The New York Times, where he boasts of his own heroism:
But riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence; it feels like something out of the Wild West.
There it is: Rescue as cowboy thrills, a way to live out conceited notions of importance by riding rough-shod through other people’s lives.
–Laura AgustÃn, the Naked Anthropologist
_____Comments____________
Cristina on 22 November 2011 at 20:00
Nick Kristoff is really despicable.I have worked with some “former slaves” he has interviewed and featured and they shared their trafficking stories with me. Interestingly, Mr. Kristoff’s own articles and stories about these girls exaggerate and sometimes alter parts of the story, as if it its some sort of oral history or myth.
One of these girls did not want to be “the face” of trafficking. However, with some pressure that she would “share” the story of trafficking and this would help prevent others from enduring what she did pushed her to agree. However, she does not get paid for her story being rewritten and re-imagined. Meanwhile Mr. Kristoff is praised for his “daring” and “heart wrenching” journalism and he is getting PAID for this work. Shame on him.
Reply
Laura AgustÃn on 22 November 2011 at 20:23
Cristina, I have heard other such rumours about those supposedly saved by both Kristof and Mam. It’s a shame we can’t find a way to present this as ‘evidence’ of exploitative practices by Helpers and Saviours.
Reply
kato on 22 November 2011 at 21:58
Unfortunately these so called rescuers are using cases of people who are held against their will, as a weapon in an attempt to remove the rights of sex workers, thus endangering them, some of those sex workers say that they do not have any real better alternative than sex work, that they would choose to be a sex worker instead of other options that they don’t want to do.
It is extremely dangerous to use a few cases of trafficked victims as justification for society to remove sex workers rights, thus making them more endangered and discriminated against and marginalised, thus affecting their mental health and mind, body and spirit.
If a female or male wants to be a sex worker then they should at least feel comfortable and protected by rights and by the police, even if sex workers are not always liked, they still are human beings who deserve rights and they should have every right to feel safe and protected in their own chosen consentual adult sexual relationships, just like wives, girlfriends, boyfriends and husbands etc have rights in their relationships and sexual relations, then sex workers must also have equal rights to equality in consensual adult sexual relationships.
The people who want to remove sex workers in society, are not listening to sex workers wants, opinions and needs, cause they just do not care, and do not respect them for their relationship choices, farley and bindel with their judgemental attitude are two such examples of people who discriminate against sex workers.
Reply
Kris on 22 November 2011 at 22:59
I find his stories very interesting. He also reports about the DMSC in India. It turns out to be the largest human trafficking ring in the world! They have tens of thousands of sex slaves in their grasp!! That’s more than the total number of prostitutes in the Netherlands. Saban B looks like a wimp compared to these criminals, his gang only occupied 40 women during one moment. But 40 women is a lot obviously.
Reply
Laura AgustÃn on 23 November 2011 at 16:41
You may find his stories interesting, but that is the second time you have mentioned his slanderous comments about DMSC on this website. They are not true, he did not understand that organisation, as how would he? He finds what he has preconceived notions about. I will appreciate your not repeating this again. Thank you.
Reply
Tracey Tully on 28 November 2011 at 03:20
Kristof is dangerous because he is so widely-read in the English-speaking world and because he propagates memes like the one you describe. It is an absolute lie. I know workers from DMSC and they are doing some incredible grass-roots work. I feel you have to be emotionally invested in his heroic narrative to miss the clues about the toxic ideas he is presenting. His jounalismy activismy jaunt to Cambodia was a voyeuristic perversion, as are many stories about sex trafficking, not just Kristof. Though he is already a long-time offender. Would you want him near your daughter?
Reply
kato on 23 November 2011 at 00:48
Unfortunately those so called rescuers are using cases of trafficked victims as an excuse and as a weapon in an attempt to remove sex workers rights to equality in society, they try to remove those rights by using stigma and spreading misinformation.
There has been a lot of sex workers who have stated that they want to remain doing sex work, as other alternatives are just not that appealing to them, so instead of trying to take away their livelihood and using stigma and discrimination against them, why not just give them rights and better protection in society?
Many sex workers have been murdered cause of bad stigma in society and lack of rights to equality and safety.
Most sex workers agree, it is not the work itself that is dangerous, but the lack of rights to safer conditions, thats the real danger, its hard to get safer conditions with so much disinformation and hatred being spread against sex workers, by people who do not like their chosen profession.
Wives, husbands, adult boyfriend and girlfriends have equal rights to adult consensual sexual relations, sex workers should also have their equal rights to their own adult consensual sexual relations and promotion of safety and better conditions.
It is unfair to hold a huge portion of sex workers as being responsible for any cases of trafficked victims, both are seperate issues that need to be addressed in a fair, cohesive and precise way, much education also needs to be done on both issues for improving the situations of the sex worker and any trafficked victim.
Its surely not impossible to create safer environments for both issues.
But first people should realise that yes they are women and even men in society who want to be sex workers and have a livelihood out of it, and during their time as sex workers they need fair treatment.
Reply
Laura AgustÃn on 23 November 2011 at 16:44
Well-put summary of the sex worker rights position. I don’t promote the idea that there are two clearly separable groups, though, myself – it’s far more complicated than that!
Reply
kato on 23 November 2011 at 18:36
Laura the USA recently recognised that sex workers have different rights and needs to trafficked victims.
Do you have an opinion on this, curious to know?
It is true though that both issues are a bit complex
Reply
Adeyemi on 23 November 2011 at 21:20
At this time I have no critique of the work of Nicholas Kristoff as I believe the truth will emerge if actually he is exploiting the victims. However, while I agree the society must find alternative source of livelihood for the sex worker, I completely object to the notion of giving rights to commercial sex workers to continue what they do for a living. The question is how do we protect children used for sex by adults who visit brothels to solicit sex? By giving them such rights, the society would be legalizing commercial sex; it is time to abolish prostitution in it’s entirety I do not favor the mistreatment of a woman’s body in any form therefore, while the society must find an alternative form of survival for people involved, the abolitionists are right we must end prostitution and sex trafficking.
Reply
kato on 24 November 2011 at 02:43
Some sex workers have said they do not want some other alternative source of livelihood cause the alternatives do not pay as much as sex work.
If sex workers want rights, they are entitled to rights.
You are most naive if you ever think that you can abolish human exchanges where sexual services are offered in exchange for material wealth, such activity has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years stretching back to some of the earliest known civilisations, get real.
Trafficking with held victims most definetly should be fought, but not to the level where it creates trouble and danger for sex workers like in sweden where they are forced cause of restrictions into dangerous situations.
Reply
Johnpaul on 28 November 2011 at 19:32
“Some sex workers have said…”
Really, Kato? Than that ends that debate. If “some have said” than clearly we should let them go on undisturbed.
Oh, by the way, “some” of these sex workers are little children…I wonder what they have to say.
Reply
McDuff on 30 November 2011 at 07:15
We wouldn’t find out by asking Nick Kristoff. He’s never very interested in what prostitutes have to say, regardless of their age. Well, apart from prostitutes called Nick Kristoff.
Reply
marc on 28 November 2011 at 20:48
laura
i don’t want to get into the sex worker issue…but the issue of trafficking pre-adolescent girls simply has no defense.
you may be right that Nick Kristof is using an ‘Geraldo’ approach but at least he is getting the message out to millions of people…
your problem is that right or wrong, and not withstanding a short guest appearance on BBC and hanging out with Julian Assange’s legal team, no one knows who you are..
As far as Nick Kriston the Rich, White, Straight, male…I would give that issue a rest…Since, to judge from your photos you are a Rich-World, White, Woman …you fit the neo-colonalist profile too.
Reply
Laura AgustÃn on 29 November 2011 at 01:57
What problem are you talking about, marc? It doesn’t matter if I am important, it’s a blog, these are my opinions as a researcher in the field for many years. Freedom of speech, remember? And whiteness is not about skin colour, I guess I will have to write about that soon.
Also I never mentioned Geraldo, that was someone else.
Reply
Bittermuch on 6 December 2011 at 21:39
You take criticism well, Laura.
Maybe what Marc was simply stating is that he disagrees with your bashing because, unlike you, Nick is well known and is doing a really good job with the awareness factor. Freedom of speech….remember?
Reply
Gregory A. Butler on 29 November 2011 at 01:51
Marc –
It’s easy to make cheap shots at Dr Agustin.
How about we keep this story focused on the main theme.
That is, a glory-seeking affluent White man from America comes to Cambodia to impose his morality on adult Cambodian sex workers. Many of these sex workers have ended up in Cambodia’s hellish prison system thanks to Kristof’s “rescue efforts”.
That’s the bottom line, no matter what you think of Dr Agustin.
Reply
Pingback from Reality Tour of Human Trafficking in Cambodia: Yes, This Actually Exists | Faine Opines on 29 November 2011 at 18:01
Johnpaul on 29 November 2011 at 23:09
Mr. Butler,
How about we keep this story focused on the important theme.
Children are being forcibly raped.
Somebody needs to do something and Kristof is doing more to raise awareness than anyone else (yes, including you Ashton).
That’s the bottom line, no matter what you think of Mr. Kristof.
Reply
Gregory A. Butler on 30 November 2011 at 05:56
John Paul,
The issue is, Kristof’s raids are leading to adult sex workers, voluntarily employed in the trade, being arrested, beaten, robbed and raped by the Cambodian Police.
That’s the real issue here, as the vast majority of sex workers rounded up in Kristof’s raids (about a 200 to 1) ratio, are adult sex workers.
As for Nick Kristof, he’s a rich White man from the west with a messiah complex, an unhealthy obsession with young women having sex and more money than brains.
Reply
Tracey Tully on 30 November 2011 at 05:52
John Paul, we do not know if or when and where children are being forcibly raped. In case you haven’t noticed, Kristof is a liar. It’s all part of the neocolonialist mindset. If sex work was vested with labour rights, it would prevent trafficking. It is the best safeguard against it, as well as against HIV, STIs and violence. Especially state violence.
Reply
Johnpaul on 30 November 2011 at 22:27
Thanks Greg and Tracey, where do you get your statistics from and Tracey why do you say Kristof is a liar?
I heard from a lot of people that don’t like Nick Kristof but I don’t really understand where the anger comes from. Surely it can’t be for refering to one of the Cambodian children as a “Seventh grader” (which, in my opinion, is the pettiest criticism I’ve ever heard).
Reply
Gregory A. Butler on 1 December 2011 at 22:23
Kristof sets himself up as this “great White father” out to “save” the dirty fallen girls of Cambodia.
His raids lead to Cambodian women being herded into prison camps, where, according to Human Rights Watch, they are subject to beatings, rape and robbery by Cambodian police officers.
Incidentally, most of these women are ADULTS who are VOLUNTARILY working as sex workers.
That’s my beef with Kristof.
Reply
Tracey Tully on 2 December 2011 at 05:24
I am opposed to western neocolonialism in the developing world.
Reply
Casey Nelson on 30 November 2011 at 22:30
“Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader.”
This does seem something of a pedantic point, but taking it a bit further, one of the things I find odd about this characterization of the girl as a “seventh-grader” is that if she is imprisoned in a brothel, she’s not going to school, regardless of the grade. And if she is a 14-year-old that’s been trafficked from Vietnam and debt-bonded into a brothel in Cambodia, most likely by her parents, it is highly unlikely that she is from a background in which she has received any significant schooling, let alone 7 years of it. While being, as I said, a rather pedantic point, it hints, in part, that Kristof is not acting as a journalist reporting on a brothel raid and the people involved, but as a dramatist of sorts, spinning a narrative in which the details of the real-world individuals are not as important as painting a particular picture. The messy particulars of actual individuals are smoothed into characters in a narrative (which do in fact fit neatly into Twitter-size blurbs.) We are not supposed to think about the complex and difficult real world circumstances leading to girls (and women) like this ending up in brothels or as some other sort of CSW, but merely have a visceral reaction that demands simple, immediate, uncomplicated solutions.
Reply
Frank on 7 December 2011 at 16:52
I guess I came to the party a little late, but since Kristof has a movie coming out soon, this issue isn’t going away anytime soon.
marc – When you say, “I don’t want to get into the sex worker issue here…”, either you are uninformed or you are following the tack of Kristof and his cohorts who, because they cannot debate the issue of sex work straight up, have to hide behind the relatively rare 10 year old forced into prostitution to promulgate a global ban on sex work. This issue is about sex work (and imperialism) and little else.
Furthermore, taking cheap shots at Laura proves that:
1) You are losing the argument.
2) You have nothing else to add.
If you can’t handle the truth, go back to reading and listening to people like Sorvino, Hunt, and Kutcher; they have a far bigger presence on the web than people like Laura.
Lastly, regarding your “give it a rest” remark, it is pretty difficult to “give it a rest” when you have all this White ***** (in the thousands, with millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies behind them) floating around Asia trying to impose those good ‘ole superior “Western Values” on people who never asked for or want it. Saying that Laura is some sort of neo-colonialist is ridiculous.
Frank
by Laura Agustin
from the Naked Anthropologist
Some people find commercial sex or prostitution vulgar. I find Nicholas Kristof vulgar: preening, in love with himself, interfering, condescending, happy to pose grinning with brown people and claim to be saving them. A true colonial character – give me tight dresses and flashy colours any day! Since I find him nauseating, I mostly ignore him, though his Wikipedia entry makes him sound a saint (in the Rich White Man category), with prizes for ‘powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world’s often forgotten people and stirred action’ and for ‘giving voice to the voiceless’. Gag. Ashton Kutcher is way preferable.
Lately Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid alongside Somaly Mam, supposedly blow-by-blow. I am not going to complain about twitter, but the 140-character limit does foster reductionism and clichés. But more important is his claim later that thanks to him and Mam:
In Anlong Veng, Cambodia, 6 more brothels have closed since the raid I live-tweeted there that rescued a seventh-grader.
Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader. His next claim was:
In part, that’s the power of Twitter. And the fear of traffickers that they could be next to face wrath of @*SomalyMam*
Wrath? A journalist who fosters the notion of a black and white world of bad people punished by good is not a journalist at all but a man selling his own virtue – which by the way is what prostitutes were said to be doing, in the olden days.
But vulgarity and childishness are not so important in the end. The real disorder in Kristof’s blithe chirping about brothels closing is the absence of responsibility towards the people working in them: where did they go? how will they live? do they have a roof over their heads now? How can he not understand that this is just how trafficking can happen, in his own sense of the word?
Not only women who sell sex earn their livelihoods through brothels: barmen, waiters, guards, laundresses, food vendors and others are integrated into these businesses. Those who want to abolish them might at least suggest alternatives if this source of income dries up. As for actual brothel workers, whether they were happy or coerced, the stigma attached to their previous employment could make it difficult to fend for themselves afterwards without turning to unscrupulous characters unless they are very lucky. But in the fairytale land of Rescue, uncomfortable consequences don’t exist and Rescuers are always Doing Good.
A critical perspective is commoner amongst those concerned about so-called Development and Aid. I used the satirical representation at the right on a post about Rescue Tourism, and Africa is a Country also makes fun of him. If you want to read a recent smarmy article by Kristof, try Fighting Back, One Brothel Raid at a Time from 12 November at The New York Times, where he boasts of his own heroism:
But riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence; it feels like something out of the Wild West.
There it is: Rescue as cowboy thrills, a way to live out conceited notions of importance by riding rough-shod through other people’s lives.
–Laura AgustÃn, the Naked Anthropologist
_____Comments____________
Cristina on 22 November 2011 at 20:00
Nick Kristoff is really despicable.I have worked with some “former slaves” he has interviewed and featured and they shared their trafficking stories with me. Interestingly, Mr. Kristoff’s own articles and stories about these girls exaggerate and sometimes alter parts of the story, as if it its some sort of oral history or myth.
One of these girls did not want to be “the face” of trafficking. However, with some pressure that she would “share” the story of trafficking and this would help prevent others from enduring what she did pushed her to agree. However, she does not get paid for her story being rewritten and re-imagined. Meanwhile Mr. Kristoff is praised for his “daring” and “heart wrenching” journalism and he is getting PAID for this work. Shame on him.
Reply
Laura AgustÃn on 22 November 2011 at 20:23
Cristina, I have heard other such rumours about those supposedly saved by both Kristof and Mam. It’s a shame we can’t find a way to present this as ‘evidence’ of exploitative practices by Helpers and Saviours.
Reply
kato on 22 November 2011 at 21:58
Unfortunately these so called rescuers are using cases of people who are held against their will, as a weapon in an attempt to remove the rights of sex workers, thus endangering them, some of those sex workers say that they do not have any real better alternative than sex work, that they would choose to be a sex worker instead of other options that they don’t want to do.
It is extremely dangerous to use a few cases of trafficked victims as justification for society to remove sex workers rights, thus making them more endangered and discriminated against and marginalised, thus affecting their mental health and mind, body and spirit.
If a female or male wants to be a sex worker then they should at least feel comfortable and protected by rights and by the police, even if sex workers are not always liked, they still are human beings who deserve rights and they should have every right to feel safe and protected in their own chosen consentual adult sexual relationships, just like wives, girlfriends, boyfriends and husbands etc have rights in their relationships and sexual relations, then sex workers must also have equal rights to equality in consensual adult sexual relationships.
The people who want to remove sex workers in society, are not listening to sex workers wants, opinions and needs, cause they just do not care, and do not respect them for their relationship choices, farley and bindel with their judgemental attitude are two such examples of people who discriminate against sex workers.
Reply
Kris on 22 November 2011 at 22:59
I find his stories very interesting. He also reports about the DMSC in India. It turns out to be the largest human trafficking ring in the world! They have tens of thousands of sex slaves in their grasp!! That’s more than the total number of prostitutes in the Netherlands. Saban B looks like a wimp compared to these criminals, his gang only occupied 40 women during one moment. But 40 women is a lot obviously.
Reply
Laura AgustÃn on 23 November 2011 at 16:41
You may find his stories interesting, but that is the second time you have mentioned his slanderous comments about DMSC on this website. They are not true, he did not understand that organisation, as how would he? He finds what he has preconceived notions about. I will appreciate your not repeating this again. Thank you.
Reply
Tracey Tully on 28 November 2011 at 03:20
Kristof is dangerous because he is so widely-read in the English-speaking world and because he propagates memes like the one you describe. It is an absolute lie. I know workers from DMSC and they are doing some incredible grass-roots work. I feel you have to be emotionally invested in his heroic narrative to miss the clues about the toxic ideas he is presenting. His jounalismy activismy jaunt to Cambodia was a voyeuristic perversion, as are many stories about sex trafficking, not just Kristof. Though he is already a long-time offender. Would you want him near your daughter?
Reply
kato on 23 November 2011 at 00:48
Unfortunately those so called rescuers are using cases of trafficked victims as an excuse and as a weapon in an attempt to remove sex workers rights to equality in society, they try to remove those rights by using stigma and spreading misinformation.
There has been a lot of sex workers who have stated that they want to remain doing sex work, as other alternatives are just not that appealing to them, so instead of trying to take away their livelihood and using stigma and discrimination against them, why not just give them rights and better protection in society?
Many sex workers have been murdered cause of bad stigma in society and lack of rights to equality and safety.
Most sex workers agree, it is not the work itself that is dangerous, but the lack of rights to safer conditions, thats the real danger, its hard to get safer conditions with so much disinformation and hatred being spread against sex workers, by people who do not like their chosen profession.
Wives, husbands, adult boyfriend and girlfriends have equal rights to adult consensual sexual relations, sex workers should also have their equal rights to their own adult consensual sexual relations and promotion of safety and better conditions.
It is unfair to hold a huge portion of sex workers as being responsible for any cases of trafficked victims, both are seperate issues that need to be addressed in a fair, cohesive and precise way, much education also needs to be done on both issues for improving the situations of the sex worker and any trafficked victim.
Its surely not impossible to create safer environments for both issues.
But first people should realise that yes they are women and even men in society who want to be sex workers and have a livelihood out of it, and during their time as sex workers they need fair treatment.
Reply
Laura AgustÃn on 23 November 2011 at 16:44
Well-put summary of the sex worker rights position. I don’t promote the idea that there are two clearly separable groups, though, myself – it’s far more complicated than that!
Reply
kato on 23 November 2011 at 18:36
Laura the USA recently recognised that sex workers have different rights and needs to trafficked victims.
Do you have an opinion on this, curious to know?
It is true though that both issues are a bit complex
Reply
Adeyemi on 23 November 2011 at 21:20
At this time I have no critique of the work of Nicholas Kristoff as I believe the truth will emerge if actually he is exploiting the victims. However, while I agree the society must find alternative source of livelihood for the sex worker, I completely object to the notion of giving rights to commercial sex workers to continue what they do for a living. The question is how do we protect children used for sex by adults who visit brothels to solicit sex? By giving them such rights, the society would be legalizing commercial sex; it is time to abolish prostitution in it’s entirety I do not favor the mistreatment of a woman’s body in any form therefore, while the society must find an alternative form of survival for people involved, the abolitionists are right we must end prostitution and sex trafficking.
Reply
kato on 24 November 2011 at 02:43
Some sex workers have said they do not want some other alternative source of livelihood cause the alternatives do not pay as much as sex work.
If sex workers want rights, they are entitled to rights.
You are most naive if you ever think that you can abolish human exchanges where sexual services are offered in exchange for material wealth, such activity has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years stretching back to some of the earliest known civilisations, get real.
Trafficking with held victims most definetly should be fought, but not to the level where it creates trouble and danger for sex workers like in sweden where they are forced cause of restrictions into dangerous situations.
Reply
Johnpaul on 28 November 2011 at 19:32
“Some sex workers have said…”
Really, Kato? Than that ends that debate. If “some have said” than clearly we should let them go on undisturbed.
Oh, by the way, “some” of these sex workers are little children…I wonder what they have to say.
Reply
McDuff on 30 November 2011 at 07:15
We wouldn’t find out by asking Nick Kristoff. He’s never very interested in what prostitutes have to say, regardless of their age. Well, apart from prostitutes called Nick Kristoff.
Reply
marc on 28 November 2011 at 20:48
laura
i don’t want to get into the sex worker issue…but the issue of trafficking pre-adolescent girls simply has no defense.
you may be right that Nick Kristof is using an ‘Geraldo’ approach but at least he is getting the message out to millions of people…
your problem is that right or wrong, and not withstanding a short guest appearance on BBC and hanging out with Julian Assange’s legal team, no one knows who you are..
As far as Nick Kriston the Rich, White, Straight, male…I would give that issue a rest…Since, to judge from your photos you are a Rich-World, White, Woman …you fit the neo-colonalist profile too.
Reply
Laura AgustÃn on 29 November 2011 at 01:57
What problem are you talking about, marc? It doesn’t matter if I am important, it’s a blog, these are my opinions as a researcher in the field for many years. Freedom of speech, remember? And whiteness is not about skin colour, I guess I will have to write about that soon.
Also I never mentioned Geraldo, that was someone else.
Reply
Bittermuch on 6 December 2011 at 21:39
You take criticism well, Laura.
Maybe what Marc was simply stating is that he disagrees with your bashing because, unlike you, Nick is well known and is doing a really good job with the awareness factor. Freedom of speech….remember?
Reply
Gregory A. Butler on 29 November 2011 at 01:51
Marc –
It’s easy to make cheap shots at Dr Agustin.
How about we keep this story focused on the main theme.
That is, a glory-seeking affluent White man from America comes to Cambodia to impose his morality on adult Cambodian sex workers. Many of these sex workers have ended up in Cambodia’s hellish prison system thanks to Kristof’s “rescue efforts”.
That’s the bottom line, no matter what you think of Dr Agustin.
Reply
Pingback from Reality Tour of Human Trafficking in Cambodia: Yes, This Actually Exists | Faine Opines on 29 November 2011 at 18:01
Johnpaul on 29 November 2011 at 23:09
Mr. Butler,
How about we keep this story focused on the important theme.
Children are being forcibly raped.
Somebody needs to do something and Kristof is doing more to raise awareness than anyone else (yes, including you Ashton).
That’s the bottom line, no matter what you think of Mr. Kristof.
Reply
Gregory A. Butler on 30 November 2011 at 05:56
John Paul,
The issue is, Kristof’s raids are leading to adult sex workers, voluntarily employed in the trade, being arrested, beaten, robbed and raped by the Cambodian Police.
That’s the real issue here, as the vast majority of sex workers rounded up in Kristof’s raids (about a 200 to 1) ratio, are adult sex workers.
As for Nick Kristof, he’s a rich White man from the west with a messiah complex, an unhealthy obsession with young women having sex and more money than brains.
Reply
Tracey Tully on 30 November 2011 at 05:52
John Paul, we do not know if or when and where children are being forcibly raped. In case you haven’t noticed, Kristof is a liar. It’s all part of the neocolonialist mindset. If sex work was vested with labour rights, it would prevent trafficking. It is the best safeguard against it, as well as against HIV, STIs and violence. Especially state violence.
Reply
Johnpaul on 30 November 2011 at 22:27
Thanks Greg and Tracey, where do you get your statistics from and Tracey why do you say Kristof is a liar?
I heard from a lot of people that don’t like Nick Kristof but I don’t really understand where the anger comes from. Surely it can’t be for refering to one of the Cambodian children as a “Seventh grader” (which, in my opinion, is the pettiest criticism I’ve ever heard).
Reply
Gregory A. Butler on 1 December 2011 at 22:23
Kristof sets himself up as this “great White father” out to “save” the dirty fallen girls of Cambodia.
His raids lead to Cambodian women being herded into prison camps, where, according to Human Rights Watch, they are subject to beatings, rape and robbery by Cambodian police officers.
Incidentally, most of these women are ADULTS who are VOLUNTARILY working as sex workers.
That’s my beef with Kristof.
Reply
Tracey Tully on 2 December 2011 at 05:24
I am opposed to western neocolonialism in the developing world.
Reply
Casey Nelson on 30 November 2011 at 22:30
“Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader.”
This does seem something of a pedantic point, but taking it a bit further, one of the things I find odd about this characterization of the girl as a “seventh-grader” is that if she is imprisoned in a brothel, she’s not going to school, regardless of the grade. And if she is a 14-year-old that’s been trafficked from Vietnam and debt-bonded into a brothel in Cambodia, most likely by her parents, it is highly unlikely that she is from a background in which she has received any significant schooling, let alone 7 years of it. While being, as I said, a rather pedantic point, it hints, in part, that Kristof is not acting as a journalist reporting on a brothel raid and the people involved, but as a dramatist of sorts, spinning a narrative in which the details of the real-world individuals are not as important as painting a particular picture. The messy particulars of actual individuals are smoothed into characters in a narrative (which do in fact fit neatly into Twitter-size blurbs.) We are not supposed to think about the complex and difficult real world circumstances leading to girls (and women) like this ending up in brothels or as some other sort of CSW, but merely have a visceral reaction that demands simple, immediate, uncomplicated solutions.
Reply
Frank on 7 December 2011 at 16:52
I guess I came to the party a little late, but since Kristof has a movie coming out soon, this issue isn’t going away anytime soon.
marc – When you say, “I don’t want to get into the sex worker issue here…”, either you are uninformed or you are following the tack of Kristof and his cohorts who, because they cannot debate the issue of sex work straight up, have to hide behind the relatively rare 10 year old forced into prostitution to promulgate a global ban on sex work. This issue is about sex work (and imperialism) and little else.
Furthermore, taking cheap shots at Laura proves that:
1) You are losing the argument.
2) You have nothing else to add.
If you can’t handle the truth, go back to reading and listening to people like Sorvino, Hunt, and Kutcher; they have a far bigger presence on the web than people like Laura.
Lastly, regarding your “give it a rest” remark, it is pretty difficult to “give it a rest” when you have all this White ***** (in the thousands, with millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies behind them) floating around Asia trying to impose those good ‘ole superior “Western Values” on people who never asked for or want it. Saying that Laura is some sort of neo-colonialist is ridiculous.
Frank
I.F. Stone, court scribes and pseudo-journalism
Posted on March 13, 2012
by Matt Carr
I’m currently reading a collection of pieces by the outstanding radical journalist I.F. Stone (1907-1989), which rather amazingly, you can download for free here. Stone was a socialist and a fiercely independent journalist who was most famous for I.F. Stone’s Weekly, a newsletter which he wrote, produced and edited himself for 17 years.
Based in Washington, Stone had a close-up view of the U.S. political establishment, and he was a harsh and unrelenting critic of governmental lies, deceptions and abuses of power, and a lucid observer of the political pathologies resulting from America’s transformation into a ‘national security state’ during the Cold War.
The Best of I.F. Stone is well worth reading in full or dipping into, not only because Stone an elegant, erudite and witty writer, but also because he was a journalist, whose independence of mind put many of his fellow-professionals to shame, and whose observations about his profession are also highly relevant to the court scribes of our own era.
In an essay written in 1963 entitled About Myself, Stone once summed up his philosophy behind the Weekly in the following terms:
I felt that if one were able enough and had sufficient vision one could distill meaning, truth and even beauty from the swiftly flowing debris of the week’s news. I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context called ‘the insignificant trifle’ – the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried conversation which illuminated the reality of the situation.
Stone frequently broke investigative scoops that other journalists missed – or preferred not to touch – despite the fact that his sources were generally in the public domain. He prided himself on his independence and believed that it gave him a very different vantage-point to the more co-opted journalists who were also based in Washington, regardless of the fact that
I made no claim to inside stuff – obviously a radical reporter in those days had few pipelines into the government. I tried to give information which could be documented so the reader could check it for himself. I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible.
Stone compared his role as ‘a guerilla warrior, swooping down in surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy’ to journalists who worked for privately owned agencies and papers, in terms that are not exactly unfamiliar to our own times:
The reporter assigned to specific beats like the State Department of the Pentagon for a wire service of a big daily newspaper soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line; if a big story breaks at 3 a.m, the press office may neglect to notify him while his rivals get the story. There are as many ways to flatter and take a reporter into camp – private-off-the-record dinners with high officials, entertainment at the service clubs.
Stone would undoubtedly have appreciated the Internet and the new powers it has given to ‘citizen-journalists’ who are not beholden to their corporate owners or employers. But he would probably not have been surprised by elite government insiders like Nick Robinson or Andrew Marr; by the likes of Alastair Campbell or Andy Coulson; by ‘hackgate’ or the Leveson Inquiry’s revelations about police ‘terror briefings’ to News International.
Stone would undoubtedly have recognized – and been appalled by – the Pentagon’s attempt to manipulate and control public opinion through ‘information operations’ on the Internet, through embedded war reporting and the granting of privileged access to on-message correspondents, or by planting sock-puppet military analysts in the mainstream media.
But if Stone was an astute observer of the ways in which governments manipulate and seek to manage the flow of information, he was also extremely critical of the reporters and editors who ‘let themselves be managed,‘ and whose attitude towards their government were often strikingly conformist as a consequence.
In this sense he would also find that very little has changed since the days when mainstream American newspapers – unlike Stone himself – failed to challenge McCarthyism. Today, too many journalists are little more than stenographers for power, and too many uncritically echo official lines and transmit messages delivered from on high or frame their reporting in accordance with the requirements of governments.
The result is a nominally ‘free’ media that – despite its global reach – is often as strikingly obedient and susceptible to manipulation as the newspapers and wire agencies of Stone’s era.
And in these conformist times, Stone is an inspirational example of that rare phenomenon: a real journalist who acted according to his principles rather than his career prospects and refused to allow himself to be managed.
____________________________
See also:
I. F. Stone: ‘All Governments Are Run by Liars’
from TakeApart
America’s first blogger has been dead since 1989.
We need more like him.
Go to a sports bar, a boomer dinner party, an Occupy Wall Street campout, a meeting of the Young Republicans of Palo Alto, lunch at Barney’s, a hipster hair salon, or to the quad of almost any journalism school in the United States of America or elsewhere. Drop the name I. F. Stone in conversation. The response will be about the same in every place: I. F. Who?
The question is something like an outrage. When I. F. Stone was alive, making history by challenging the narratives of his era’s entrenched history-makers, he was among the most controversial public figures of the time. Stone’s struggles and victories against complacency and deception deserve to be remembered, and emulated. In fact, in this day of cozy media corporate synergy and news as infotainment, it’s a borderline crime that a major motion picture is not rolling out for Oscar contention, immortalizing the exploits of a lone man who held entire governments to account for their actions.
"Stone’s gimlet eye for despots, bigots and hypocrites, big and small, was just as pointed back home in the United States of America."
At the risk of outlasting the attention spans of your interlocutors, you clarify: Born Isador Feinstein Stone in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 24, 1907; muckraking journalist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Camden Courier-Post and New York Post. In the early 1930s, I. F. “Izzy” Stone was one of the first public voices raised in America against the influence of an obscure and obstreperous failed German landscape painter—Adolf Hitler.
Stone’s gimlet eye for despots, bigots and hypocrites, big and small, was just as pointed back home in the United States of America. He left the New York Post in 1939 and wrote for a series of left-leaning political publications, which folded one after another. In 1953, tired of having his employers die out from under him, Stone founded his own paper.
I. F. Stone’s Weekly was, basically, a newsletter published from Stone’s kitchen table. The paper ran until ill health forced the self-described “radical journalist and scholar” to put it to bed in 1971. Although Stone’s DIY newssheet never had a circulation above 70,000, it ranked 16th in a 1999 New York University poll to determine the Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century, honored with the best of Edward R. Murrow, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, H. L. Mencken, Seymour Hersh, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and the entire New York Times.
A passion for truth, a profound distrust of authority (“All governments are run by liars” is an oft-repeated and oft-applicable quote), a fearless contempt for bullies, and indefatigable research and verification distinguished I. F. Stone’s reporting. Unfazed at being blacklisted, he led the attack on McCarthyism and racial discrimination in the U.S., and he was the first journalist to debunk the official version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident (a misrepresented altercation that escalated into the Vietnam War).
Because of his complete editorial independence as a one-man operation, I. F. Stone has been called America’s first political blogger—despite the fact that the Internet wasn’t invented until long after Izzy had retired. (Explore I. F.’s full legacy at the Official Website of I. F. Stone, a thorough tribute run by his son, Jeremy J. Stone.)
Dear Western journalist,
Sharmine Narwani:
An associate of St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University,
from her blog
Please cease using the argument that the reason you are writing crap about Syria is because “media is not allowed there.” The Arab League report lists 147 media outlets – Arab and foreign – working in Syria in January, 2012. I and a few others who were there at the time were not even on the list. Ahead of me in line at the border was the CBC crew, who was on that list. Perhaps the reason you have such a hard time getting in is because you need to wait – like CBC Suzy – for visas for 47 staff and support staff members, including people to hold your over-sized coffee cup as you interview an opposition gunman in that special breathless way you do it. Of course you need a translator for that too, because otherwise you wouldn’t have a fucking clue if you were in Idlib or Homs now, would you?
You are delighted to air shaky cell phone footage from a person you have never met at the top of the news hour, but balk when there are 50,000 cell phone witnesses at a pro-regime rally. “Media is not allowed in” you explain condescendingly. Tell us then, what explains your inability to ask the most elementary of questions when you do write your Syria stories every day, anyway, from outside? You know, questions that go something like this: “How do you know how many people died today? How do you know their names? Who verified this? Where did the explosion take place? How do you know who was responsible for the explosion? Why do you support Bashar al Assad? Why do you not support the militarization of the conflict? Why do you not support the internationalization of the conflict? Why do you not support sanctions against Syria? Who kidnapped your father? Who shot your uncle? Who killed your child? Who was the sniper?”
None of us have ever heard a major western journalist ask any of those questions. They are questions that 1) ask for evidence, 2) are addressed to a pro-regime Syrian and 3) are asked of domestic opposition figures. Oh yes – we need you to be in Syria to “verify” things for us precisely because you publish “unverified” stories every day and seek to inject “balance” into the Syrian story…in much the same way you do the Palestinian-Israeli story and the Israeli-vs-Iranian nukes one, and the Saudi Arabians-are-moderate-Arabs one – and that one really poignant story about how Muslims are “collateral damage” who become “terrorists” when they shoot back.
The idea that Joe Journo needs to be in Syria to tell the world (and Syrians) what is going on, is YOU on colonial crack.
Take your time,
Syria
An associate of St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University,
from her blog
Please cease using the argument that the reason you are writing crap about Syria is because “media is not allowed there.” The Arab League report lists 147 media outlets – Arab and foreign – working in Syria in January, 2012. I and a few others who were there at the time were not even on the list. Ahead of me in line at the border was the CBC crew, who was on that list. Perhaps the reason you have such a hard time getting in is because you need to wait – like CBC Suzy – for visas for 47 staff and support staff members, including people to hold your over-sized coffee cup as you interview an opposition gunman in that special breathless way you do it. Of course you need a translator for that too, because otherwise you wouldn’t have a fucking clue if you were in Idlib or Homs now, would you?
You are delighted to air shaky cell phone footage from a person you have never met at the top of the news hour, but balk when there are 50,000 cell phone witnesses at a pro-regime rally. “Media is not allowed in” you explain condescendingly. Tell us then, what explains your inability to ask the most elementary of questions when you do write your Syria stories every day, anyway, from outside? You know, questions that go something like this: “How do you know how many people died today? How do you know their names? Who verified this? Where did the explosion take place? How do you know who was responsible for the explosion? Why do you support Bashar al Assad? Why do you not support the militarization of the conflict? Why do you not support the internationalization of the conflict? Why do you not support sanctions against Syria? Who kidnapped your father? Who shot your uncle? Who killed your child? Who was the sniper?”
None of us have ever heard a major western journalist ask any of those questions. They are questions that 1) ask for evidence, 2) are addressed to a pro-regime Syrian and 3) are asked of domestic opposition figures. Oh yes – we need you to be in Syria to “verify” things for us precisely because you publish “unverified” stories every day and seek to inject “balance” into the Syrian story…in much the same way you do the Palestinian-Israeli story and the Israeli-vs-Iranian nukes one, and the Saudi Arabians-are-moderate-Arabs one – and that one really poignant story about how Muslims are “collateral damage” who become “terrorists” when they shoot back.
The idea that Joe Journo needs to be in Syria to tell the world (and Syrians) what is going on, is YOU on colonial crack.
Take your time,
Syria
Syria and the western media: peddling mythologies in the garden of good and evil
Western journalists have learnt nothing from 10 years of spinning the '9/11' wars and have collectively abandoned their analytical and critical faculties when it comes to Syria.
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By Matt Carr
Infernal Machine
15 March 2012
Armed rebels in Homs
Objective analysis of the brutal conflict in Syria has been generally conspicuous by its absence over the last 12 months, where the mainstream media has generally followed the narratives propagated by their governments with all the independence and perspicacity of trained seals.
One of the few exceptions is the political analyst and blogger Sharmine Narwani. An associate of St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University, Narwani has been a remorseless and forensic critic of the inadequacies in western media coverage of Syria, and she has penned a typically stinging indictment on her blog, entitled ‘Dear Western journalist‘, which laments the failure of so many reporters to do their job properly. In it Narwani asks her colleagues:
What explains your inability to ask the most elementary of questions when you do write your Syria stories every day, anyway, from outside? You know, questions that go something like this: “How do you know how many people died today? How do you know their names? Who verified this? Where did the explosion take place? How do you know who was responsible for the explosion? Why do you support Bashar al Assad? Why do you not support the militarization of the conflict? Why do you not support the internationalization of the conflict? Why do you not support sanctions against Syria? Who kidnapped your father? Who shot your uncle? Who killed your child? Who was the sniper?”
She goes on to point out that:
None of us have ever heard a major western journalist ask any of those questions. They are questions that 1) ask for evidence, 2) are addressed to a pro-regime Syrian and 3) are asked of domestic opposition figures.
Narwani’s outrage is entirely justified. Despite the abundant evidence of media manipulation, spinning, distortion and deception during the ’9/11 wars’ of the last decade, western journalists appear to have collectively abandoned their analytical or critical faculties when it comes to Syria, to a degree that is really quite staggering.
The BBC has been particularly bad: its coverage consists almost entirely of the kind of Fergal Keanian heart-tugging/atrocity stories that I heard the other day from…Fergal Keane, without any attempt to weigh up the sources of these reports or whether they might be true .
I am not an apologist for the Assad regime and I am not trying to argue that these atrocities were all invented (though some of them certainly have been), but given that many of them come via opposition sources such as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, there should be room for a degree of scepticism and fact-checking at the very least.
Obviously, it is not possible to verify all sources in the midst of an armed conflict, but Narwani has done some fact-checking of her own, and shown what can be done when the will is present. But for the most part this willingness has not been present. Most journalists simply take it for granted that the regime is always lying and the opposition is always telling the truth. Nor is there any reference to the fact that the opposition in Syria – or at least some sections of it – is an armed opposition, which has also carried out killings, kidnappings, and bombings of its own.
At times the refusal to admit this is quite incredible. In all the coverage of the siege of Homs, for example, I cannot recall a single reference to the fact that there were armed fighters in the city. Even reporters who were actually there presented a scenario in which the Syrian armed forces appeared to be killing civilians for the sake of it.
Paul Conroy, the wounded photographer who was evacuated from the city, described the siege as a ‘systematic slaughter‘ and insisted that ‘ this is not a war, it’s a massacre’. This begs the question of why the Syrian army would need to besiege and bombard a city for three weeks if there were not armed fighters inside the city who were actively resisting them.
Once again, I am not trying to justify the brutality of the regime’s response. But the fact that Conroy and his colleagues (at least the ones that I saw and heard), chose not to mention the armed opposition in the city or the weapons and tactics it was using is really astounding.
But then again, it isn’t. Because, as Narwani eloquently points out, western reporters, like their governments, appear to have taken sides in Syria without even knowing what side they are on.
They have, for the most part, accepted a fairytale version of the Syrian conflict in which a) an utterly evil dictator is slaughtering a peaceful and unarmed opposition that represents the ‘Syrian people’ in its entirety, b) crimes and atrocities are only committed by one side and c) the interests of the ‘international community’ in Syria are entirely driven by a humanitarian desire to ‘stop the violence.’
To say that this narrative does not fully encapsulate the complexities of the conflict would be an understatement. It isn’t surprising that governments whose essential goal in Syria is regime change should be peddling this version of the conflict. But the fact that so many journalists and media outlets are uncritically and unquestioningly peddling the same mythologies, is a depressing reminder that press freedom and the absence of censorship is not always synonymous with independent thought or even basic journalist standards.
Share |
By Matt Carr
Infernal Machine
15 March 2012
Armed rebels in Homs
Objective analysis of the brutal conflict in Syria has been generally conspicuous by its absence over the last 12 months, where the mainstream media has generally followed the narratives propagated by their governments with all the independence and perspicacity of trained seals.
One of the few exceptions is the political analyst and blogger Sharmine Narwani. An associate of St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University, Narwani has been a remorseless and forensic critic of the inadequacies in western media coverage of Syria, and she has penned a typically stinging indictment on her blog, entitled ‘Dear Western journalist‘, which laments the failure of so many reporters to do their job properly. In it Narwani asks her colleagues:
What explains your inability to ask the most elementary of questions when you do write your Syria stories every day, anyway, from outside? You know, questions that go something like this: “How do you know how many people died today? How do you know their names? Who verified this? Where did the explosion take place? How do you know who was responsible for the explosion? Why do you support Bashar al Assad? Why do you not support the militarization of the conflict? Why do you not support the internationalization of the conflict? Why do you not support sanctions against Syria? Who kidnapped your father? Who shot your uncle? Who killed your child? Who was the sniper?”
She goes on to point out that:
None of us have ever heard a major western journalist ask any of those questions. They are questions that 1) ask for evidence, 2) are addressed to a pro-regime Syrian and 3) are asked of domestic opposition figures.
Narwani’s outrage is entirely justified. Despite the abundant evidence of media manipulation, spinning, distortion and deception during the ’9/11 wars’ of the last decade, western journalists appear to have collectively abandoned their analytical or critical faculties when it comes to Syria, to a degree that is really quite staggering.
The BBC has been particularly bad: its coverage consists almost entirely of the kind of Fergal Keanian heart-tugging/atrocity stories that I heard the other day from…Fergal Keane, without any attempt to weigh up the sources of these reports or whether they might be true .
I am not an apologist for the Assad regime and I am not trying to argue that these atrocities were all invented (though some of them certainly have been), but given that many of them come via opposition sources such as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, there should be room for a degree of scepticism and fact-checking at the very least.
Obviously, it is not possible to verify all sources in the midst of an armed conflict, but Narwani has done some fact-checking of her own, and shown what can be done when the will is present. But for the most part this willingness has not been present. Most journalists simply take it for granted that the regime is always lying and the opposition is always telling the truth. Nor is there any reference to the fact that the opposition in Syria – or at least some sections of it – is an armed opposition, which has also carried out killings, kidnappings, and bombings of its own.
At times the refusal to admit this is quite incredible. In all the coverage of the siege of Homs, for example, I cannot recall a single reference to the fact that there were armed fighters in the city. Even reporters who were actually there presented a scenario in which the Syrian armed forces appeared to be killing civilians for the sake of it.
Paul Conroy, the wounded photographer who was evacuated from the city, described the siege as a ‘systematic slaughter‘ and insisted that ‘ this is not a war, it’s a massacre’. This begs the question of why the Syrian army would need to besiege and bombard a city for three weeks if there were not armed fighters inside the city who were actively resisting them.
Once again, I am not trying to justify the brutality of the regime’s response. But the fact that Conroy and his colleagues (at least the ones that I saw and heard), chose not to mention the armed opposition in the city or the weapons and tactics it was using is really astounding.
But then again, it isn’t. Because, as Narwani eloquently points out, western reporters, like their governments, appear to have taken sides in Syria without even knowing what side they are on.
They have, for the most part, accepted a fairytale version of the Syrian conflict in which a) an utterly evil dictator is slaughtering a peaceful and unarmed opposition that represents the ‘Syrian people’ in its entirety, b) crimes and atrocities are only committed by one side and c) the interests of the ‘international community’ in Syria are entirely driven by a humanitarian desire to ‘stop the violence.’
To say that this narrative does not fully encapsulate the complexities of the conflict would be an understatement. It isn’t surprising that governments whose essential goal in Syria is regime change should be peddling this version of the conflict. But the fact that so many journalists and media outlets are uncritically and unquestioningly peddling the same mythologies, is a depressing reminder that press freedom and the absence of censorship is not always synonymous with independent thought or even basic journalist standards.
Thursday, March 08, 2012
On the western NGO's proclivity to "help" Africa.
This IC campaign is a perfect example of how fund-sucking NGO’s survive. “Raising awareness” (as vapid an exercise as it is) on the level that IC does, costs money. Loads and loads of money. Someone has to pay for the executive staff, fancy offices, and well, that 30-minute grand-savior, self-crowning exercise in ego stroking—in HD—wasn’t free. In all this kerfuffle, I am afraid everyone is missing the true aim of IC’s brilliant marketing strategy. They are not selling justice, democracy, or restoration of anyone’s dignity. This is a self-aware machine that must continually find a reason to be relevant. They are, in actuality, selling themselves as the issue, as the subject, as the panacea for everything that ails me as the agency-devoid African. All I have to do is show up in my broken English, look pathetic and wanting. You, my dear social media savvy click-activist, will shed a tear, exhaust Facebook’s like button, mobilize your cadre of equally ill-uninformed netizens to throw money at the problem.
Cause, you know, that works so well in the first world.
....
If there was a prize for the NGO who best commodifies white man’s burden on the African continent, and more specifically in Uganda, Invisible Children
On Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 Campaign.
Siena Anstis
March 7, 2012
If there was a prize for the NGO who best commodifies white man’s burden on the African continent, and more specifically in Uganda, Invisible Children would win.They recently struck again with a new video and campaign titled “Kony 2012.” I was surprised to see it popping up everywhere on my Facebook feedback yesterday: clearly, their social media tactics are to be admired. Their underlying message – which is, of course, more important – is not to be.
I think it would be useful for persons unfamiliar with the issues featured in the movie and with the difficulties of poverty porn messaging to read up on some past blogs about Invisible Children before sharing this film. A friend has circulated a list of links providing critique from bright and well-qualified individuals speaking on these issues:
Wronging Rights is headed by two human rights lawyers who, for many years, have been on top of the development and humanitarian aid debate, as well as international justice. A few thoughts on the previous Invisible Children “Abduct Yourself” campaign from their blog:
First, organizations like Invisible Children not only take up resources that could be used to fund more intelligent advocacy, they take up rhetorical space that could be used to develop more intelligent advocacy. And yeah, this may seem like an absurdly academic point to raise when talking about a problem that is clearly crying out for pragmatic solutions, but, uh, the way we define problems is important. Really, really important. Choosing to simplistically define Congolese women as “The Raped” and Ugandan children as “The Abducted” constrains our ability to think creatively about the problems they face, and work with them to combat these problems.
Second, treating their problems as one-dimensional issues that can be solved by a handful of plucky college students armed only with the strength of their convictions and a video camera doesn’t help anyone. These gets back to something very simple and very smart that Alanna Shaikh wrote a few months ago: “Bad development work is based on the idea that poor people have nothing. Something is better than nothing, right? So anything you give these poor people will be better than what they had before.”
Over on Texas in Africa, the blog has previously hosted two students who have provided some additional thoughts on Invisible Children. The students made a good faith effort to get in contact with Invisible Children and get both sides of the story on their former abduction campaign:
This is a symptom of the larger problem at hand. Not only does IC fail to base its decisions on what Ugandans think is best for them, the organization also make efforts to explain away any dissent. IC has become a brand with machine guns and cameras as its apparent logo and celebrity filmmakers as the protagonists against the evil LRA. The war is no longer about the people versus the LRA; it has transformed itself into something far too sensationalized and, at times, seemingly insincere. Poole, Russell, and Bailey v. Kony.
… And this is why we are as concerned as we are. IC has great potential and opportunity to do good. The organization has successfully motivated masses of young people to be globally and politically active. Advocacy, however, does not end at trendy t-shirts and cool graphics.
While I could reiterate what bad advocacy looks like and why we do not want nor need it, Texas in Africa has provided a thoughtful list of issues to consider as well. There is little I could add to it and I strongly suggest you read the whole post here.
Unmuted has also posted an excellent critique of this new video. An extract:
The dis-empowering and reductive narrative: the Invisible Children narrative on Uganda is one that paints the people as victims, lacking agency, voice, will, or power. It calls upon an external cadre of American students to liberate them by removing the bad guy who is causing their suffering. Well, this is a misrepresentation of the reality on the ground. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of child and youth advocates who have been fighting to address the very issues at the heart of IC’s work. Want evidence? In addition to the organizations I list above, also look at Art for Children, Friends of Orphans, and Children Chance International. It doesn’t quiet match the victim narrative, does it? I understand that IC is a US-based organization working to change US policy. But, it doesn’t absolve it from the responsibility of telling a more complete story, one that shows the challenges and trials along side the strength, resilience, and transformational work of affected communities.
Revival of the White savior: if you have watched the Invisible Children video and followed the organization’s work in the past, you will note a certain messianic/savior undertone to it all. “I will do anything I can to stop him,” declares the founder in the video. It’s quite individualistic and reeks of the dated colonial views of Africa and Africans as helpless beings who need to be saved and civilized. Where in that video do you see the agency of Ugandans? Where in that Video do you see Jacob open his eyes wide at the mere possibility of his own strength, as Jennifer Lentfer of How Matters describes here? Can we point out the problem with having one child speak on the desires, dreams, and hopes of a whole nation? I don’t even want to mention the paternalistic tone with which Jacob and Uganda (when did it become part of central Africa by the way?) are described, not excluding the condescending use of subtitles for someone who is clearly speaking English.
Finally, a few words of my own. My impression is that the movie is being used as means for Invisible Children to (i) stay relevant and (ii) raise more funding. Capturing Kony and the focus on international justice is a good excuse. Regardless of this opinion, running campaigns to raise awareness is not necessarily damning in itself (and, indeed, in many cases should be commended). Rather, as all the writers above suggest, the manner in which it is done is very important. A few comments on this new video.
The issue with social media is really highlighted by Invisible Children. The number of “likes” on your Facebook page is not necessarily related to the quality of information you share. Social media allows making anything viral, quickly. People often do not look into the substance of the message, or even watch the video you are sending. Once you become a brand, you can do anything. Invisible Children has successfully become a brand, but is sharing information that is far from nuanced and based on emotional reactions. It fails to paint the full picture. In addition to what Unmuted and others have said, I’d like to add the following thoughts:
My main concern is that Gulu – and Uganda - has gone through some incredible changes. The economy is booming. The region is re-stabilizing. While Kony’s men continue to kill, rape and slaughter elsewhere, Gulu is not a static, unchanging place. Neither is Uganda, neither is the continent. Portraying a region like Gulu as such, and sending the mass message that the whole continent reflects this, is damaging. It undermines possibilities of investment. It clouds story of entrepreneurship, success and innovation. This goes hand in hand with saying “I work in Africa.” Lumping the continent as one messy area.
When it comes to the ICC indictment of Kony, the film clip fails to consider the difficulties that such an international indictment can have and what alternative effects an offer like amnesty might have had. There have been major debates about the peace versus justice debate (an interesting and recent reflection on this is available here), which not only have an impact on how we conceive of the Kony indictment, but also of the ICC as an institution. When it comes to supporting American troops in Uganda, it fails to consider the wider systemic problems that are likely contributing to a failure to arrest Kony and which have little to do with whether the US sends a few soldiers abroad or not. Surely Invisible Children’s audience is not so simplistic that being presented with these critical questions would kill their messaging? I think Musa Okwonga, writing in the Independent, highlights the tension between the need to draw attention to these issues, while using sophisticated techniques:
I understand the anger and resentment at Invisible Children’s approach, which with its paternalism has unpleasant echoes of colonialism. I will admit to being perturbed by its apparent top-down prescriptiveness, when so much diligent work is already being done at Northern Uganda’s grassroots. On the other hand, I am very happy – relieved, more than anything – that Invisible Children have raised worldwide awareness of this issue. Murderers and torturers tend to prefer anonymity, and if not that then respectability: that way, they can go about their work largely unhindered. For too many years, the subject of this trending topic on Twitter was only something that I heard about in my grandparents’ living room, as relatives and family friends gathered for fruitless and frustrated hours of discussion. Watching the video, though, I was concerned at the simplicity of the approach that Invisible Children seemed to have taken.
The thing is that Joseph Kony has been doing this for a very, very, very long time. He emerged about a quarter of a century, which is about the same time that Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni came to power. As a result the fates of these two leaders must, I think, be viewed together. Yet, though President Museveni must be integral to any solution to this problem, I didn’t hear him mentioned once in the 30-minute video. I thought that this was a crucial omission. Invisible Children asked viewers to seek the engagement of American policymakers and celebrities, but – and this is a major red flag – it didn’t introduce them to the many Northern Ugandans already doing fantastic work both in their local communities and in the diaspora. It didn’t ask its viewers to seek diplomatic pressure on President Museveni’s administration.
About ten minutes into the video, the narrator asks his young son who “the bad guy” in Uganda is; when his young son hesitates, he informs him that Joseph Kony is the bad guy. In a sense, he let Kony off lightly: he is a monster. But what the narrator also failed to do was mention to his son that when a bad guy like Kony is running riot for years on end, raping and slashing and seizing and shooting, then there is most likely another host of bad guys out there letting him get on with it. He probably should have told him that, too.
There is another aspect about this particular video and campaign that I, and others, find disturbing. Invisible Children says it will be targeting “culture makers.” Not one of these individuals have significant, vested interests in the African continent (let alone Uganda). Not one person is from Uganda or the wider region. Encouraging a diversity of voices, and providing a platform for new African leaders – whether political, economic, or social – would help highlight that the continent is not just Kony, war and rape and would provide a valuable, wider messaging. The bottom line with poverty porn messaging is that it paints leaders who are struggling in their communities to tackle these problems as hopeless and useless. Keep the American “culture makers,” but why not also provide Ugandan leaders with a platform from which to speak?
In closing, I think the ‘we must start somewhere’ and the ‘better than nothing’ arguments are really tricky. The thing with Invisible Children is that they are not just starting from nowhere and they aren’t just doing nothing. They affect a huge contingent of people around the world. Through extensive fundraising, they have incredible resources. They have a strong foundation and could present a more nuanced and respectful campaign if they wanted to. With that said, I guess I think it is a shame that, after all this time and with their experience, they (i) believe their listeners do not want more answers to the complicated questions and (ii) that they have not considered including and uplifting leaders from the communities which they talk about who could provide a more honest and in-depth picture.
Regardless, I’d like to thank Invisible Children for giving us yet another opportunity to discuss how destructive bad advocacy can be. Here’s an opportunity to challenge ourselves, particularly those who work in development and aid communication, to try and collectively brainstorm how we can generate important stories and campaigns, while sending messages that are empowering, accurate and thought-provoking. It is also an opportunity for each of us to personally dig a bit deeper into the challenge of Kony and the LRA and become more familiar with these issues in a respectful way.
My first suggestion would be to start listening and engaging with the following individuals:
Rosebell Kagumire
TMS Ruge
Maureen Agena
Ssozi Javie
Siena Anstis
March 7, 2012
If there was a prize for the NGO who best commodifies white man’s burden on the African continent, and more specifically in Uganda, Invisible Children would win.They recently struck again with a new video and campaign titled “Kony 2012.” I was surprised to see it popping up everywhere on my Facebook feedback yesterday: clearly, their social media tactics are to be admired. Their underlying message – which is, of course, more important – is not to be.
I think it would be useful for persons unfamiliar with the issues featured in the movie and with the difficulties of poverty porn messaging to read up on some past blogs about Invisible Children before sharing this film. A friend has circulated a list of links providing critique from bright and well-qualified individuals speaking on these issues:
Wronging Rights is headed by two human rights lawyers who, for many years, have been on top of the development and humanitarian aid debate, as well as international justice. A few thoughts on the previous Invisible Children “Abduct Yourself” campaign from their blog:
Second, treating their problems as one-dimensional issues that can be solved by a handful of plucky college students armed only with the strength of their convictions and a video camera doesn’t help anyone. These gets back to something very simple and very smart that Alanna Shaikh wrote a few months ago: “Bad development work is based on the idea that poor people have nothing. Something is better than nothing, right? So anything you give these poor people will be better than what they had before.”
Over on Texas in Africa, the blog has previously hosted two students who have provided some additional thoughts on Invisible Children. The students made a good faith effort to get in contact with Invisible Children and get both sides of the story on their former abduction campaign:
This is a symptom of the larger problem at hand. Not only does IC fail to base its decisions on what Ugandans think is best for them, the organization also make efforts to explain away any dissent. IC has become a brand with machine guns and cameras as its apparent logo and celebrity filmmakers as the protagonists against the evil LRA. The war is no longer about the people versus the LRA; it has transformed itself into something far too sensationalized and, at times, seemingly insincere. Poole, Russell, and Bailey v. Kony.
… And this is why we are as concerned as we are. IC has great potential and opportunity to do good. The organization has successfully motivated masses of young people to be globally and politically active. Advocacy, however, does not end at trendy t-shirts and cool graphics.
While I could reiterate what bad advocacy looks like and why we do not want nor need it, Texas in Africa has provided a thoughtful list of issues to consider as well. There is little I could add to it and I strongly suggest you read the whole post here.
Unmuted has also posted an excellent critique of this new video. An extract:
The dis-empowering and reductive narrative: the Invisible Children narrative on Uganda is one that paints the people as victims, lacking agency, voice, will, or power. It calls upon an external cadre of American students to liberate them by removing the bad guy who is causing their suffering. Well, this is a misrepresentation of the reality on the ground. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of child and youth advocates who have been fighting to address the very issues at the heart of IC’s work. Want evidence? In addition to the organizations I list above, also look at Art for Children, Friends of Orphans, and Children Chance International. It doesn’t quiet match the victim narrative, does it? I understand that IC is a US-based organization working to change US policy. But, it doesn’t absolve it from the responsibility of telling a more complete story, one that shows the challenges and trials along side the strength, resilience, and transformational work of affected communities.
Revival of the White savior: if you have watched the Invisible Children video and followed the organization’s work in the past, you will note a certain messianic/savior undertone to it all. “I will do anything I can to stop him,” declares the founder in the video. It’s quite individualistic and reeks of the dated colonial views of Africa and Africans as helpless beings who need to be saved and civilized. Where in that video do you see the agency of Ugandans? Where in that Video do you see Jacob open his eyes wide at the mere possibility of his own strength, as Jennifer Lentfer of How Matters describes here? Can we point out the problem with having one child speak on the desires, dreams, and hopes of a whole nation? I don’t even want to mention the paternalistic tone with which Jacob and Uganda (when did it become part of central Africa by the way?) are described, not excluding the condescending use of subtitles for someone who is clearly speaking English.
Finally, a few words of my own. My impression is that the movie is being used as means for Invisible Children to (i) stay relevant and (ii) raise more funding. Capturing Kony and the focus on international justice is a good excuse. Regardless of this opinion, running campaigns to raise awareness is not necessarily damning in itself (and, indeed, in many cases should be commended). Rather, as all the writers above suggest, the manner in which it is done is very important. A few comments on this new video.
The issue with social media is really highlighted by Invisible Children. The number of “likes” on your Facebook page is not necessarily related to the quality of information you share. Social media allows making anything viral, quickly. People often do not look into the substance of the message, or even watch the video you are sending. Once you become a brand, you can do anything. Invisible Children has successfully become a brand, but is sharing information that is far from nuanced and based on emotional reactions. It fails to paint the full picture. In addition to what Unmuted and others have said, I’d like to add the following thoughts:
My main concern is that Gulu – and Uganda - has gone through some incredible changes. The economy is booming. The region is re-stabilizing. While Kony’s men continue to kill, rape and slaughter elsewhere, Gulu is not a static, unchanging place. Neither is Uganda, neither is the continent. Portraying a region like Gulu as such, and sending the mass message that the whole continent reflects this, is damaging. It undermines possibilities of investment. It clouds story of entrepreneurship, success and innovation. This goes hand in hand with saying “I work in Africa.” Lumping the continent as one messy area.
When it comes to the ICC indictment of Kony, the film clip fails to consider the difficulties that such an international indictment can have and what alternative effects an offer like amnesty might have had. There have been major debates about the peace versus justice debate (an interesting and recent reflection on this is available here), which not only have an impact on how we conceive of the Kony indictment, but also of the ICC as an institution. When it comes to supporting American troops in Uganda, it fails to consider the wider systemic problems that are likely contributing to a failure to arrest Kony and which have little to do with whether the US sends a few soldiers abroad or not. Surely Invisible Children’s audience is not so simplistic that being presented with these critical questions would kill their messaging? I think Musa Okwonga, writing in the Independent, highlights the tension between the need to draw attention to these issues, while using sophisticated techniques:
I understand the anger and resentment at Invisible Children’s approach, which with its paternalism has unpleasant echoes of colonialism. I will admit to being perturbed by its apparent top-down prescriptiveness, when so much diligent work is already being done at Northern Uganda’s grassroots. On the other hand, I am very happy – relieved, more than anything – that Invisible Children have raised worldwide awareness of this issue. Murderers and torturers tend to prefer anonymity, and if not that then respectability: that way, they can go about their work largely unhindered. For too many years, the subject of this trending topic on Twitter was only something that I heard about in my grandparents’ living room, as relatives and family friends gathered for fruitless and frustrated hours of discussion. Watching the video, though, I was concerned at the simplicity of the approach that Invisible Children seemed to have taken.
The thing is that Joseph Kony has been doing this for a very, very, very long time. He emerged about a quarter of a century, which is about the same time that Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni came to power. As a result the fates of these two leaders must, I think, be viewed together. Yet, though President Museveni must be integral to any solution to this problem, I didn’t hear him mentioned once in the 30-minute video. I thought that this was a crucial omission. Invisible Children asked viewers to seek the engagement of American policymakers and celebrities, but – and this is a major red flag – it didn’t introduce them to the many Northern Ugandans already doing fantastic work both in their local communities and in the diaspora. It didn’t ask its viewers to seek diplomatic pressure on President Museveni’s administration.
About ten minutes into the video, the narrator asks his young son who “the bad guy” in Uganda is; when his young son hesitates, he informs him that Joseph Kony is the bad guy. In a sense, he let Kony off lightly: he is a monster. But what the narrator also failed to do was mention to his son that when a bad guy like Kony is running riot for years on end, raping and slashing and seizing and shooting, then there is most likely another host of bad guys out there letting him get on with it. He probably should have told him that, too.
There is another aspect about this particular video and campaign that I, and others, find disturbing. Invisible Children says it will be targeting “culture makers.” Not one of these individuals have significant, vested interests in the African continent (let alone Uganda). Not one person is from Uganda or the wider region. Encouraging a diversity of voices, and providing a platform for new African leaders – whether political, economic, or social – would help highlight that the continent is not just Kony, war and rape and would provide a valuable, wider messaging. The bottom line with poverty porn messaging is that it paints leaders who are struggling in their communities to tackle these problems as hopeless and useless. Keep the American “culture makers,” but why not also provide Ugandan leaders with a platform from which to speak?
In closing, I think the ‘we must start somewhere’ and the ‘better than nothing’ arguments are really tricky. The thing with Invisible Children is that they are not just starting from nowhere and they aren’t just doing nothing. They affect a huge contingent of people around the world. Through extensive fundraising, they have incredible resources. They have a strong foundation and could present a more nuanced and respectful campaign if they wanted to. With that said, I guess I think it is a shame that, after all this time and with their experience, they (i) believe their listeners do not want more answers to the complicated questions and (ii) that they have not considered including and uplifting leaders from the communities which they talk about who could provide a more honest and in-depth picture.
Regardless, I’d like to thank Invisible Children for giving us yet another opportunity to discuss how destructive bad advocacy can be. Here’s an opportunity to challenge ourselves, particularly those who work in development and aid communication, to try and collectively brainstorm how we can generate important stories and campaigns, while sending messages that are empowering, accurate and thought-provoking. It is also an opportunity for each of us to personally dig a bit deeper into the challenge of Kony and the LRA and become more familiar with these issues in a respectful way.
My first suggestion would be to start listening and engaging with the following individuals:
Rosebell Kagumire
TMS Ruge
Maureen Agena
Ssozi Javie
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