passivity

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?

remembrance is horribly artificial. Trawling the web for information is an unhealthy way of living. It either feels sick, and one feels sick; or else one manages to detach oneself and then everyone else's contributions seem sick, voyeuristic - remembering only for the sake of remembering.

those who can remember have to be able to forget if they are to be able to lead normal lives; and those who have already 'forgotten' have probably done so deliberately. So i am really beginning to wonder why I have started this. it is only making me sick and will never reach the only people who need to see it because they will be the ones who turn the page to look for something else.

how are you meant to strike a healthy balance between being aware of the horrific things we allow to happen by our passivity and believing in a move towards a world and a view of humankind in which those things don't happen?