blessed britons

There was the general sense of callousness. Churchill permitted himself to make the remark that the Indian population bring it onto itself by breeding like rabbits. And there was another statement of his when he said that he was well aware that the Indian people were the beastliest in the world, next to the Germans. It cannot be said that the central government was full of sympathy.

— Amartya Sen

mad world

The only thing that keeps the system working at all is that the United States, the richest country in the world, has become the 'deficit of last resort'. As other countries strive to eliminate their deficits, as Japan and China continue to run huge surpluses, America is willing and able to run the huge deficits that make the global arithmetic add up. This is the ultimate irony. The financial system allows the US to live year after year far beyond its means, even as the US Treasury, year after year, lectures others on why they should not.

— Joseph Stiglitz

The Roaring Nineties

south africa

just suppose...

Submitted by antarchi on June 23, 2007 - 17:58.

Just suppose...
... that we were living in one of those 'rogue' states that human rights educators (and moral philosophers) love to latch on to - Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. How would we as 'human rights educators' respond to that? What would be the values or the 'competences' we would think it important to try to develop?
Or just suppose that we were living in Gaza / Iraq / Chechnya / Afghanistan today - or any other place around the globe where life is almost not worth living. (How) would we respond to that as human rights educators? (Or is the question quite as idiotic as it sounds)
And now: just suppose that we are living in Israel / the UK / USA / Russia / or any other country actively or passively supporting terror around the world. How, as human rights educators, should we respond to that?
Or is that an idiotic question as well?
I genuinely don't know the answer. But I can't see how we are not troubled by it; and I am surprised that it almost doesn't seem to be a question that the HRE community discusses. There are media workers against the war, military families against the war, war veterans against the war, and a few teachers against the war. Where are the human rights educators against the war?
Our defence is that we are working for the long term: that we are teaching the values that will ensure we do not go to war again. But I am not so sure... I am not sure that we can afford to (or are entitled to) refuse to work for the short term, when things are as they are; and I am also not sure that the values we concentrate on in HRE are really those which are going to best ensure that future populations stand up to governments that carry out crimes against humanity.
I am reminded of a quote from Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's wonderful book about Eugene de Kock ('Prime Evil') - 'A Human Being Died that Night':
De Kock and many of the apartheid government's operatives have said repeatedly that what kept them going - what sustained their zeal and conviction in the rightness of crushing the heads of thousands of black activists - was the tacit but powerful support they felt they were receiving from the beneficiaries of apartheid privilege - the polite churchgoers, the cultured suburbanites, the voters. It is at their feet that the responsibility for apartheid, ultimately, can be laid'.
No lesser crimes are being committed today: are we so very different in our cultured suburban educating?

foundations for apartheid

Submitted by antarchi on June 4, 2007 - 16:38.

The foundations for apartheid were laid in the policies outlined by a commission set up in 1905 by the British High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner. Asked to come up with strategies to deal with the 'Native question', the commission proposed segregation between black and white, and the creation of 'locations'for blacks on the fringes of the cities and the towns.

AI would not condemn apartheid

Submitted by antarchi on November 20, 2007 - 01:22.

you'll see a pretty good coincidence of the enemies that Amnesty International goes after and the interests of both the United States and British governments. Let's take an older example – apartheid in South Africa under the former criminal regime in South Africa. Amnesty International refused adamantly to condemn apartheid in South Africa. Despite my best efforts while I was on the board, and other board members, they would not do it. They are the only human rights organization in the entire world to have refused to condemn apartheid in South Africa. Now they can give you some cock-and-bull theory about why they wouldn't do this.

I have to tell the truth

Submitted by antarchi on November 1, 2007 - 02:18.

What do I see and hear in the Holy Land? Some people cannot move freely from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to people's souls and bodies. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.

The distance between evil and sickness

Submitted by antarchi on June 22, 2007 - 03:25.

Like sin, crime that is a gross violation of human rights almost always hides its true nature from its own self. It is by its very nature delusional: perpetrators of human rights violations redefine morality and start believing that they can commit systematic murder and other atrocities 'for the greater good.' The distance between evil and sickness is not that great. The evil component of crimes against humanity is the moral failing. The sickness aspect is the defect in perspective, the distortion in mental processing that both precedes the evil and is intensified by it.

part of the human universe

Submitted by antarchi on June 22, 2007 - 03:05.

His world was a cold world, where eyes of death stared accusingly at him, a world littered with corpses and graves - graves of the unknown dead, dismembered or blown-up bodies. But for all the horrific singularity of his acts, de Kock was a desperate soul seeking to affirm to himself that he was still part of the human universe.