a few years ago, i would have agreed with you. i would have been shocked and upset about this, and i would have been very angry about patriarchy and casteism in india. and i still am. i am much more upset about it than you know. you tell me i’m an evil person, that i’m excusing violence with complexity, and i’m writing this here to tell you that actually, the complexity only makes the violence sharper, more real. the complexity cannot erode the violence. it is the explanation, but it cannot be the excuse (credit to richard siken’s poem, snow and dirty rain, for that phrase). it cannot be the excuse, because i, we, live with this history. because i live with the knowledge that i grasped onto white amerika instead of paying attention to my history. because the violence of priding the west over a postcolonial state that the west carries the legacy of colonizing, and continues to colonize… because that violence is real. because the violence of what happened to nirupama pathak, and her fiance who remains unnamed throughout that article (because upper caste people are the only ones to talk to, didn’t you know? they’re nice and liberal, they talk about “old india”s and “new india”s and nice linear history “we shouldn’t be like this in the 21st century [we have to be more like you white western people, you’ve got it all right, yes yes we realize that now, sorry sorry]”) … because that violence is horrific. because she should not have died. because imagine what her fiance is living through now, with the knowledge that he is so wrong, so untouchable, that his lover deserved to be killed rather than marry him.
because i don’t like any entire marginalized culture, mine or anyone else’s, being completely written off. “archaic”. “conservative”. how do you know what is archaic and conservative? how do you know the history of caste violence? how do you know that history is linear and chronological, period? how do you know what changed with colonialism and what didn’t? how do you know about the oppression in pre-colonial times and the oppression in colonial times and the oppression in post-colonial times? how? how do you so easily take the apologia of upper-caste middle class privileged folks in india as the right thing, oh yes, at least they’re admitting that culture can be changed, at least they should try, blah blah blah blah. Because it makes you happy to hear that. It makes you happy to be told, over and over, affirmed, that your way is the right way. That you’ve got it all right. That you understand cultureS, so much so that you can make it one great culture monolith.
it’s very wonderfully ironic that you say “take it up with the NYT or coherently explain your point of view here”. wonderful use of the tone argument, i must say. (this is a more direct summary). also, you establish my point exactly. the point is, the new york times represents white amerika (mostly). so what you are telling me is that i, a south asian person, should have to tell the new york times to stop being racist and imperialist, because otherwise the new york times has the perfect right to do so. thank you for putting the onus on me, as a marginalized person.
[...]
and the thing is? violence is systemic. address the systemic issues, and maybe we have a fighting chance at making things better.
Via ontd_feminism: How to Write about Haiti, inspired on How to Write about Africa
For starters, always use the phrase 'the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.' Your audience must be reminded again of Haiti's exceptional poverty. It's doubtful that other articles have mentioned this fact.
You are struck by the 'resilience' of the Haitian people. They will survive no matter how poor they are. They are stoic, they rarely complain, and so they are admirable. The best poor person is one who suffers quietly. A two-sentence quote about their misery fitting neatly into your story is all that's needed.
[...]
The US Embassy and United Nations always issue warnings that demonstrations are security threats. It is all social unrest. If protesters are beaten, gassed, or shot at by UN peacekeepers, they probably deserved it for getting out of control. Do not investigate their constant claims of being abused.
It was so violent right after the January 2010 earthquake. 'Looters' fought over goods 'stolen' from collapsed stores. Escaped prisoners were causing mayhem. It wasn't necessary to be clear about how many people were actually hurt or died in fighting. The point is that it was scary.
Now many of those looters are 'squatters' in 'squalid' camps. Their tent cities are 'teeming' with people, like anthills. You saw your colleagues use these words over and over in their reports, so you should too. You do not have time to check a thesaurus before deadline.
Point out that Port-au-Prince is overcrowded. Do not mention large empty plots of green land around the city. Of course, it is not possible to explain that occupying US Marines forcibly initiated Haiti's shift from distributed, rural growth to centralized governance in the capital city. It will not fit within your word count. Besides, it is ancient history.
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And just because I want to spam no more:
( Fairy Tail spoilers up to chapter 15 )
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Writing this was painful. And took me a lot of time. Because I mostly copy and pasted html.
Just saying, United States of America.
ETA: I think what bothers me of the victimization going on is that you may dislike USian, Usonian, whatever because you find it silly or what the hell, but then you leave me, by your supposed "right to reject whatever term because THE OTHERS WILL DEFINE YOU," with no choice but to call you by my own identity when I want to talk about you. And 1) people won't know what I'm talking about because they barely know my country, 2) I will be basically saying, with all the imperialism going on, that I'm part of you! (And
You see what difference of power does to a "dilemma" like this?
DAUGHTER OF ETA: This video is very awesome. Lets join Antarctica, people. I think is sensible.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ephemere, No country for strangersFirst things first: specific points, based on the aforementioned perspective. Charles Tan talks about the "small but growing awareness of the literature of other cultures" as a "liberty that occurred only because of humanity's continued struggle for 'enlightenment'". I find this exceedingly ironic when taken in light of the past history of the Philippines and of the present state of education in the country. I was very aware of the literary classics of other cultures when I was growing up, and I don't doubt this applies to many members of my generation who had access to the same educational resources I did. Most of my books as a child were simplified versions of books by authors such as Dumas, Stevenson, Alcott, Carroll, and others. In high school we were required to make ourselves familiar with Shakespeare, Hugo, Poe, Marlowe, Steinbeck, etc; our school's reading room was dominated by British, French, and American writers. We were supposed to know the figures of speech and the literary conventions used by these writers -- so where does "small but growing" come from? We, of the upper and middle classes, who had the means to access "superior" educational materials, were immersed in this from childhood. This is not an expression of unalloyed liberty to progress further toward 'enlightenment'. It is part of an educational system that was to a large extent instituted during the American occupation, whose so-called benevolent rule has not been fully extricated from either the public consciousness or our political decisions up to this very day. It is an outgrowth of a dominance that may have been thought to have eased when we were 'granted' our independence, but has in fact never disappeared, only become more subtle in its influence on our psyches.
[...]
I also find the parenthetical remark regarding migration to the U.S. as "typically a dream" rather problematic. It is true that many Filipinos migrate to other countries, among them the U.S., for various reasons. However. These patterns are not confined to "poverty-stricken" Filipinos (many of whom are not so much struck with it as trapped in a system that encourages sick, downspiraling cycles of negative feedback from which it is excruciatingly difficult to escape). And to say that migration is a dream, even for these people, is to denigrate, with a casual, offhand remark, the human cost -- in terms of separation from family members and loved ones who can't migrate; in terms of leaving behind all one has ever known; in terms of starting over with very little; in terms, even, of not wanting to leave, except that staying has become untenable and thus going seems like the choice that will offer a better standard of living -- associated with migration. It is to trivialize the weight of the choice. Even with how difficult life is here, especially for the poor classes, leaving is not costless, it is not always a dream, and to typify it as one is insulting both to those who have gone and borne the cost of going and those who have stayed and borne the cost of staying. What is typically a dream? Living a better life. And that is not, by default, going to the U.S.
YES. Make "U.S.," Spain or another European country and you have my country.
In the case of the Philippines as it's portrayed in work written by non-Filipinos, assumptions do dominate and skew these portrayals. It isn't a rare occurrence, and the assumption isn't always so obvious as to be instantly identifiable. One assumption I find particularly galling is the idea that if something works in more developed countries such as the U.S., it should work here, too; thus an array of well-meaning foreigners touting ideas about freedom and justice and showing that if only one person is brave enough to speak out against the system, change will happen. Look, I don't doubt that speaking out is important. I don't want to diminish, in any way, the significance of courage in a society such as this. But you have to consider that the institutions here are very different from those commonly found in more developed countries. The rule of law, the democratic process, the essential functions of government -- these are broken in ways that it is very difficult to communicate to people from developed countries, because they assume that certain defaults apply.
[...]
I will not say: no foreigners allowed. That is a rather horrible thing to say considering an overwhelming tendency here to welcome foreigners with open arms and bend over backwards for them, at the cost of discriminating against our fellow Filipinos. It is a statement that assumes we have the power to say such a thing and enforce such a rule when we, well, don't. "No foreigners allowed" is a fantasy -- a short-sighted, narrow-minded, twisted fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless.
Instead I will say: this is no country for strangers. This is not a people that can be known by observation alone, without the risk of actual engagement. This is no land where you can set yourself apart and then delude yourself with claims that comprehension naturally comes with high-minded goals and noble intentions to enlighten a system whose only fundamental flaw is ignorance of your ways. This is not a place that needs more foreigners coming in to visit, then taking away with them their misconceptions and their privileged judgments -- because we have been misrepresented enough, not just in the international community but also amongst ourselves, and false categorizations and claims about who we are and where we came from and where we should go are unneeded and shouldn't be welcomed.
[...]
So (and I address this now to the theoretical audience of those on the other, privileged end of the inequality) if you, as a white person, are afraid of writing about us: then be afraid. Carry in your heart the fear of doing further injustice to a people into whose blood oppression has become so incorporated that our institutions and our media echo with the dual strains of self-loathing and adulation for those who are not us.
Dear God. I just... love it. So much.
Journalist advocacy groups called for the reopening of an investigation into the 2007 killing of a Reuters photographer and his driver after the WikiLeaks website released classified video footage on Monday of a 2007 helicopter attack in Baghdad which killed 12 people.
"This footage is deeply disturbing," said Joel Simon, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
"The video also confirms our long-held view that a thorough and transparent investigation into this incident is urgently needed," Simon added.
The video shows the camera feed from an Apache helicopter
gunship as it performs an air strike on a group of men milling around an empty Baghdad street.
The video also shows the helicopter firing on a van that arrived at the scene and was attempting to evacuate the only visible survivor of the first attack. The attack wounded two children who were inside the vehicle. Among those killed were Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.
[...] But after US ground forces arrive and find wounded children in the van the helicopter attacked, the helicopter pilots blame the Iraqis.
"Well it's their fault for bringing kids into a battle," says one.
"That's right," says another.
"I know that two children were hurt, and we did everything we could to help them. I don't know how the children got hurt," Major Brent Cummings, the executive officer of the battalion who launched the attack, told the Washington Post after the incident.
Priceless. That's all I can say.
Killings of Iraqi journalists: US says they were not war crimes
Oh. "The problems of journalism" I see. If this were the case of American civilians killed mindlessly by Iraqi soldiers...
U.S. Military Releases Redacted Records on 2007 Apache Attack, Questions Linger
The conclusions? According to an investigation by the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, the aircrew “accurately assessed that the criteria to find and terminate the threat to friendly forces were met in accordance with the law of armed conflict and rules of engagement.” The report concluded that the attack helicopters positively identified the threat, established hostile intent, conducted appropriate collateral damage assessment and received clearance to fire.
What’s more, the military indirectly blamed the reporters for being in the company of “armed insurgents” and making no effort to identify themselves as journalists. An investigating officer with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team (BCT), 2nd Infantry Division, concluded that “the cameramen made no effort to visibly display their status as press or media representatives” and added that “their familiar behavior with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents and their furtive attempts to photograph the Coalition Ground Forces made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.” A long telephoto lens, the officer says, could have been mistaken for a rocket-propelled grenade.
It’s also clear, however, that the military quickly figured out that they had inadvertently killed two Reuters employees, and that two children had been seriously wounded in the incident. During “sensitive site exploitation,” members of the ground unit recovered cameras and media cards from the scene, and were able to identify pictures shot by a Reuters employee at a coalition news conference.
Considering local challenges and harmful international interference in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the past 400 years, it takes the greatest courage to overcome fear of oppression and to act for change. The courage demonstrated by grassroots Congolese women to resist and overcome fear of their local and international oppressors is extraordinary in the history of Africa. At this moment, many Congolese women are rising and sacrificing themselves to rewrite history and to liberate themselves completely from the bondage of those who continue to oppress them, in order to give themselves and their children a chance of survival as well as a better future for new generations.
[...]Sexual violence is not cultural or traditional in the D.R. Congo but has been used as a tool of war, humiliation, destabilization and displacement of communities. Congolese women want the international community to know that that sexual violence will only end by the restoration of peace and the application of the rule of law in the DRC.
The international community, particularly the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, are invited to demonstrate a political will to end the conflict in the Great Lakes region of Africa. They are invited to demonstrate their commitment to peace by delegitimizing armed violence and ending the militarization and the support of oppressive regimes in the Great Lakes region of Africa.
the_future_modernes, Observations:If you live in a country with as much outsize world power as the United States? You need to pay serious attention its foreign policy. The US has control over whether millions of people live or die, whether they will live in utter misery as a result of pushing free trade policies that bankrupt other people's economies and leave them vulnerable to corporate exploitation and pillaging while enriching some sliver of the elite and sending a bit of cash in aid; or not. You wanna scream about immigration illegal or otherwise? You need to look at the goddamn trade policies. Look at what NAFTA did to Mexico, for instance. You might also consider the US history in Latin America of overthrowing democratically elected leftist gov't and installing or backing dictators, unleashing year of terror and death and rapes and murders and land stealing and company exploitation on people whose right to democracy was trumped by US might.
In other news, I should be studying like mad and doing homework. And bathing my dog. So see ya, people.
(Boy, I know all fandoms are like that, but this was kinda record for me.)
( And spoilers for latest Reborn chapter, the one that still hasn't come out. I don't know which number it is. )
In other news: I was googling for a correct way to phrase something for this entry and the first result for that search was actually this: Fancy a Fight? In Paraguay, Dueling is Still Legal.
Uhm, what? Excuse me? Like, really. I have no idea what you are talking about, son. Why am I seeing pictures of Jedi, fencing, and white men boxing anyway?
This is a village where some multinationals, far from levelling the global playing field with jobs and technology for all, are in the process of mining the planet's poorest back country for unimaginable profits. This is the village where Bill Gates lives, amassing a fortune of $55 billion while a third of his workforce is classified as temporary workers, and where competitors are either incorporated into the Microsoft monolith or made obsolete by the latest feat in software bundling. This is the village where we are indeed connected to one another through a web of brands, but the underside of that web reveals designer slums like the one I visited outside Jakarta. IBM claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labour producing the computer chips and power sources that drive our machines. On the outskirts of Manila, for instance, I met a seventeen-year-old girl who assembles CD-ROM drives for IBM. I told her I was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. "We make computers," she told me, "but we don't know how to operate computers." Ours, it would seem, is not such a small planet after all.
It would be naive to believe that Western consumers haven't profited from these global divisions since the earliest days of colonialism. The Third World, as they say, has always existed for the comfort of the First. What is a relatively new development, however, is the amount of investigative interest there seems to be in the unbranded points of origin of brand-name goods. The travels of Nike sneakers have been traced back to the abusive sweatshops of Vietnam, Barbie's little outfits back to the child labourers of Sumatra, Starbucks' lattes to the sun-scorched coffee fields of Guatemala, and Shell's oil back to the polluted and impoverished villages of the Niger Delta.
Very good, isn't it? Until the exact next paragraph:
The title No Logo is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!), or a post-logo logo (there is already a No Logo clothing line, or so I'm told). Rather, it is an attempt to capture an Anticorporate attitude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition.
Uhm. So let me get this straight, Klein. You write this for First World Liberal Westerners. Who just have to wake up from their comfortable lives and fight corporations. Never mind that the same Third World Activism have been doing this for decades by now. I hope I'm reading you wrong, but I'm having a feeling you see them (us?) as Those Poor People who have to be saved by White First World Westerners. We have agency, you know.
I just hope the rest of your book doesn't treat Developing Countries citizens as The Other (Object) That Has to be Saved and Protected because I would be pissed.
(To be fair, I just started reading, so I have no idea. It says hell of important things, but it just reminded me to a post I read casually today on one of the linkspams about HOW WE NEED THE POWERFUL WHITE PEOPLE BECAUSE WE HAVE TO BE PRACTICAL EVEN IF IT COSTS US OUR DIGNITY, and sorry, I don't subscribe to your magazine. Sorry again. Powerful White People? Treat other human beings as human beings. A snake isn't more important than me, I don't care how your white self may see it. That's all.)
ETA: Also, its introduction is treating Western Activism as a Salvation and totally dismissing the effect a lot of it really has in Third World communities of color (I'm just seeing the praising of White Environmentalist). But I don't know if these things will be mentioned again through the book.
ETA 2: Ah. Okay.
Most memorably, it led me to factories and union squats in Southeast Asia, and to the outskirts of Manila where Filipino workers are making labour history by bringing the first unions to the export processing zones that produce the most recognizable brand-name consumer items on the planet.
Okay. I'm still wary. "Most memorably" because it differs from the rest of the activism she mentioned by being from South-Asian people and not Westerners? You know that's weird. But still, I may have a better relationship with this than I thought. Maybe I'm just being uber-picky because I have had a bad day at on-line discussions.
deepad. She, as always, talks about a lot of things that have been bothering me lately.One of the most vicious and manipulative tools we humans have evolved is to use our individual impulses towards kindness and pity to build systems that reinforce oppressive and discriminatory practices.
"Clothe the pauper." "Heal the heathen." "Rescue the orphan." "Free the woman."
The discourse around disaster relief in Haiti has already begun to make me sick to my stomach. Because "natural disasters" are somehow painted apolitical, as though the sphere of human responsibility has been completely suspended.
This is crap, of course, because human beings and the things they do are as much a part of nature as the wind and water and earth and fire around us, and it is political when century-old housing habits evolved for a specific geological fault location get eradicated, or poverty forces urban encroachment into areas too close to the sea, or evacuation systems are ignored because the people they will save are considered expendible.
So donating money? Comes from a generous impulse, but is pretty easy to do. As Michael Maren says, "Although it's really easy to donate your dollars, it is unimaginably difficult to actually help people. The best fund raisers in the business are not the best relief workers in the business."
the_future_modernes.Shock Doctrine for Haiti:
Good to see that, in the midst of the today's confusion, someone's focusing on what really matters: making sure America's 210 years of superhuman cruelty toward Haiti continue without respite.
Catastrophe in Haiti
THE REAL state power isn't the Préval government, but the U.S.-backed United Nations occupation. Under Brazilian leadership, UN forces have protected the rich and collaborated with--or turned a blind eye to--right-wing death squads who terrorize supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas Party.
The occupiers have done nothing to address the poverty, wrecked infrastructure and massive deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters--severe hurricanes in 2004 and 2008, and now the Port-au-Prince earthquake.
Instead, they merely police a social catastrophe, and in so doing, have committed the normal crimes characteristic of all police forces. As Dan Beeton wrote in NACLA Report on the Americas, "The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of killings, rape and other violence by its troops almost since it began."
First the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have used the coup and social and natural crises to expand the U.S.'s neoliberal economic plans. [...]
So while Pat Robertson denounces Haiti's great slave revolution as a pact with the devil, Clinton is helping to reduce it to a tourist trap.
At the same time, Clinton's plans for Haiti include an expansion of the sweatshop industry to take advantage of cheap labor available from the urban masses. The U.S. granted duty-free treatment for Haitian apparel exports to make it easy for sweatshops to return to Haiti.
No surprises here. But I just wish I could say fuck to them and get over it, but of course, that's never a possibility.
And via
skywardprodigal: Wonderful Why is Haiti so poor?. But please, do not read the comments.
ciderpress, A Soliloquy on Language and Race in Seven Parts[...]My cousin was, and still is, a primary school teacher. She spent her days teaching seven year olds how to read, read, add and subtract and behave themselves in public. In the evenings, she taught an adult literacy class. The class was small -- adult literacy rates in Korea were about 98% -- but mostly made up of women in the 60s and 70s. And there, I saw a woman, with eyes that had seen a thousand years, cry with joy because she could finally write her own name.
The reason many of these women couldn't read wasn't just because of sexism and classism. The reason the literacy rate in Korea is so high isn't because Koreans are obsessed with education and doing well in tests. Instead, they stem partly from Korea's experience in the intense wave of New Imperialism wherein Western countries and Japan fought as well as colluded to share ownership of countries in East Asia.
The reason that these women couldn't read was that they were born in the early '30s and they were, in their formative years, directly affected the Japanese colonial policies and the attempt at cultural genocide and eradication of national identity during the latter part of the occupation period. These policies, which included the prohibition of teaching and usage of Korean in schools, rewriting history books to justify the occupation and forcibly changing Korean names to Japanese ones. Many young women, and children, during the Japanese occupation became the workforce as Korean men were forcibly conscripted to the Japanese imperial army to fight against allied forces in China. Many young women, after independence in '45, then went on to bear the brunt of the Korean war; they were of the hundreds of thousands displaced and living in refugee camps as the war raged on with Soviet sponsored North Korea and China driving the South Korean and American/allied forces up and down the peninsula, signalling the beginning of the 30 year Cold War between the Soviet block and the USA. And then after the destruction that left the Koreas economically ruined, their resources destroyed and a people and country still at war, these men and women were the ones who had to rebuild the country.
Then again, the narrative of Imperialism in the Korean penisula is not why I began to tell this story. I'm telling this story because telling those who are reading this the story of one little old lady, who had survived her own language and identity torn from her heart and survived being separated from her family and her home as she fled to the south as a teenager, is my way of continuing her oral history. She knew the importance and preciousness of language because it was stolen from her. It was only really then that I began to realise with an adult perspective why it was so important for me to participate, why it was so important for me to be able to participate in this kind of national, cultural, global narrative. This woman, whose story does not appear in the narrative of Western modern history, which concentrates on US lives lost in the Korean war, the liberation they brought to Korea, lives in her, all those who know her and in me.
[...]
Colonialism was state sponsored, religion endorsed, culturally approved corporate theft of native resources, labour and even people. Many white people thought that white men were doing the savages a favour, bringing culture, Jesus and the age of enlightenment. To control a country, you must control the people, paralyse collective responses and destroy national identities or empty them of socio-economic content. Colonialists actively sought to rupture the solidarity of communities. Taking away their language, an integral part of their identity, and enforcing your own and taking control words and how to use them colonises consciousness. These languages and these cultures are then treated as savage while European languages and culture are civilised. Sometimes, as a result, languages died.
This touched me deep as a Paraguayan.
I can't re-post the whole post here. But it's worth it. So go read!
See those headlines?
The Washington Post:
Afghan Civilian Deaths Present U.S. With Strategist Problems
New York Times:
Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War
Wall Street Journal:
Claim of Afghan Civilian Deaths Clouds U.S Talks
Red Cross Says "Dozens" Died in U.S Airstrikes, Eclipsing Start of Obama's Sesion with President Karzai and Zardari
Yes. This is The First World Power. Those Afghan civilians they are killing are getting in between their Public Relationships to support that war. What a bother.
Can I get angry now? Can I be completely outraged by those bastards?
