Category Archives: genocide

bob herbert, genocide, nick kristof, sudan

Nick Kristof Tells the Truth — "China’s Genocide Olympics"

Nick Kristof’s New York Time’s piece — China’s Genocide Olympics — justifies the conclusion that he and Bob Herbert are the largely unsung stars of the paper’s Op-Ed Page. China gets lots of bad raps but it is its support of the outlaw Sudan Government that is both reprehensible and worthy of the censure Kristof has dealt by associating genocide with the Olympics. I appeal now for my candidate Barack Obama to say his yes to Kristof’s column.

Sudan feels confident enough with Chinese backing that on Jan. 7, the Sudanese military ambushed a clearly marked U.N. convoy of peace keepers in Darfur. Sudan claimed the attack was a mistake, but diplomats and U.N. professionals are confident that this was a deliberate attack ordered by the Sudanese leaders to put the U.N. in its place.

Sudan has already barred units from Sweden, Norway, Nepal, Thailand and other countries from joining the U.N. force. It has banned night flights, dithered on a status-of-forces agreement, held up communications equipment and refused to allow the U.N. to bring in foreign helicopters. The growing fear is that the U.N. force will be humiliated in Sudan as it was in Rwanda and Bosnia, causing enormous damage to international peacekeeping.

Another possible sign of Sudan’s confidence: an American diplomat, John Granville, was ambushed and murdered in Khartoum early this month. Many in the diplomatic and intelligence community believe that such an assassination could not happen in Khartoum unless elements of the government were involved.

When I went to UNICEF as a media consultant in 1998 my passion became the achievement of steps to stop the outlaw regime in Sudan from governing with impunity, cynically allowing those who might profit by genocidal acts to run rampant. I soon concluded that my best efforts were impotent. We got our head to visit Sudan and a page or so of good coverage. So what.

I firmly believe that there is a tipping point to power and that when people in power act with courage, things change. Both Bob Herbert and Nick Kristof tell it like it is. If anything, they operate with close attention to lines they cannot cross. One responsibility we relatively impotent blog folk can take with pleasure is making clear how accurate and telling the writings of these two are.

Nick Kristof has many allies. Mia Farrow and others have operated modestly and with extreme dedication to try to alert the world to Sudan’s evil.

Why do I speak with such obvious rancor? I do so because I have watched Sudan play their game with impunity close up. I have seen how aid workers have had to literally prostrate their ideals in order to remain in the country and to do what good they can do.

As I write. I see that The New York Times has endorsed Hillary Clinton. This is a vast and significant misjudgment. I am sure there are many Times people who are seriously depressed at this decision, made by a few but implicating many in what is assent to a politics that has been and is now divisive and without the concept or vision to do what the Obama campaign can do. I pray that the verdict of The New York Times is roundly rejected by the electorate.

I wonder if Khartoum is happy with the Times endorsement of someone who is as unlikely as her husband was to act decisively against this criminal regime.

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Stephen C. Rose Home Most Popular Pages

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benign genocide, genocide, politics

Benign or Casual Genocide

Ported and revised.

Benign or casual genocide is a way of describing the largely unprotested (accepted) death of largely-invisible millions in our world.

This is the term I believe Dr. Sachs and others at the forefront of efforts against deep poverty in the world should use. We have thus far failed to shock the “benign billions” into an acceptance even of the one percent GNP solution, which is a minimal response but vastly beyond what we are now doing.

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Benign or casual genocide is an honest name for the capitalist-philanthropic system that, in a macabre dance of mutuality, allows these terrible deaths to take place year after year.

Let the definitions be plain and simple.

By capitalist I mean to embrace the entire realm of business conducted for economic gain. The entire culture of consumer desire. The entire tendency of the world to accept this on its face as the “way things are” economically. The issue I wish to press is not guilt but truth. A true description.

Linked to this is the civilization-destroying growth of gaps between rich and middle class and down (economically) in the rich or privileged parts of the world, creating a culture of acquisition based on an acceptance of predatory principles.

By philanthropic I mean the entire complex of “not for profit” enterprises, ranging from movements and non-governmental organizations to institutions of learning to explicit “charities”, to many government agencies whose purposes are (presented as) eleemosynary. Education, health, so forth.

My contention is that we can call this partnership the engine of Benign or Casual Genocide.

Globally, it represents a failure of mammoth proportions. It need not be. At its heart lies a spiritual failure of nerve and apparent ignorance, even among our most sophisticated media, of this failure.

I am not ignoring the cries of those in media who do understand. I am lamenting the naive belief that anything less than a sea-change of global consciousness will have a remedial effect.

We casually read myriad death statistics and projections. Each year UNICEF and other agencies — ambivalent partners in this promenade — inundate us with these figures.

Even Presidents quote UNICEF.

It is a dance of hypocrisy and idiocy, given the resistance of peoples to a revaluation of the values by which we live. Proper development requires such a revaluation and it is profoundly in eddor to believe anything less.

Essentially, the world system we now have, largely uncontested, accepts Capitalism as the big engine to fuel an unequal wealth/power machine and Philanthropy as the little engine that will toot along and clean up the uglier evidences of a world where wealth, power and place continue to rule under the umbrella of hypocrisies that have been transmuted into simple “realism”.

We need to openly identify the partnership and observe that it does not work. We need to say what the solution is: The very leaders who most understand the problem need to admit that we are engaged in benign and casual genocide. We need to remove the emperor’s clothes. Until this occurs, the the great poverty experts are simply rubbing salt into the world’s gaping wounds.

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The truth of the wholesale destruction of millions (dare we add the words women and children?) is currently left to marginalized observers who are never taken seriously by media, governments or the philanthropic-educational community.

Or, even worse, the truth is the province of house prophets in these institutions who deliver ritual Jeremiads to salve conscience as nothing continues to get done.

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The name for the hegemony of Capitalism and Philanthropy is benign or casual genocide. We all contribute to this. We are all players on the stage of this sordid and terminally dehumanizing reality. The sooner we acknowledge what we are doing to the point that it convicts governments and media and mobilizes international leadership for a round of hopefully efficacious response, the better.

This is not about yelling louder. It is about saying the present system does not work.

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