Congo - 4,000,000 dead since 1990. - "A conflict". "Blood Diamonds". etc.Iraq - 600,000 dead since 2003. - "War on Terror". "Spreading Democracy".
Darfur - 200,000 dead since 1998. - "Genocide. Worst Humanitarian Crisise of Our Time".
The Politics of "Genocide".
According to the World Food Program, about 200,000 civilians have died in Darfur, 80 percent from starvation and disease, and 20 percent from violence. Close to 700,000 have been displaced. This, the US government, calls a genocide.But 600,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 as a result of violence related to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and 3.7 million have either fled to neighboring countries or are internally displaced .
“I read about all sorts of violence against civilians,” says Mamdani, “and there are two places that I read about – one is Iraq, and one is Darfur … And I’m struck by the fact that the largest political movement against mass violence on US campuses is on Darfur and not on Iraq.” (4)
If Darfur is modest in comparison to Iraq, both are pipsqueeks compared to Congo. There, some 4,000,000 civilians have been slaughtered over several years, largely as a result of intervention by US proxies, Uganda and Rwanda.
In Somalia, 460,000 civilians have been displaced by fighting sparked by a US-backed and assisted invasion by Ethiopia (5). That invasion was aimed at ousting the popularly-backed Islamic Courts Union, which had brought a measure of stability to Somalia. “In the six months the Islamic courts (governed Somalia), less than 20 people lost their lives through violence. Now, that many die in 10 minutes,” observes Hussein Adow, a Mogadishu businessman (6).
Why is there is a Save Darfur Campaign, but no Save Congo Campaign and no Save Somalia Campaign?
Mamdani says that people in the West don’t react to the mass slaughter of civilians but to the labels their governments and media attach to them.
“Genocide is being instrumentalized by … the United States,” he explains. “It is being instrumentalized in a way that mass slaughters which implicate its adversaries are being named as genocide and those which implicate its friends or its proxies are not being named as genocide.”
Mandani calls this “the politics of naming.”
5 comments:
Why no save America?
pd said...
Why no save America?
There is. It's called "War on Terror". Which means a "War of Terror on Everybody Else."
Tricking you into supporting the hi-jacking of Sudan is part of the effort to "Save America".
My point is we should focus on our domestic issues before we go trying to "save" the world. Especially our gov't, which has a responsibility to address our issues first. MN is a prime example of that. I'm sick of our gov't doing all this charity work. I don't pay my taxes for that.
And your taxes don't go for that, directly anyways. :-)
Nothing what the U.S. does abroad is "charity work". It is a series of schemes to make the rich richer and to make us taxpayers the guarantors of the debt. The U.S. could stop meddling abroad tomorrow and bridges in Minnesota will still fall.
Then they'll use the fall to explain why roads and bridges need to be "privatized" and given to a well-connected campaign contributor to charge us oodles for tolls.
If you've got 3 1/2 hours for an education, check out this documentary -
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936&q=money+masters&total=1169&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
P,
Don't mistake the deconstruction of the "Save Darfur" hype as a call to "Save Someplace Else".
However, blindly following the Official Darfur Spin kills more black people than doing nothing at all.
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