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Nov. 30th, 2002 12:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
microbieThe divide between Us and Them yawns wider, even as situations show that the world is more complicated than cowboys and Indians. In the aftermath of the attacks in Kenya, there are many analyses of the Israeli response and their recovery from the shock. I wonder, though, why we can't have equal coverage of the Kenyan response and recovery? Kenyans made up most of the victims, and they have no well-armed commandos to ensure their safety.
Several articles also note the hapless investigation by Kenyan law enforcement. I take this to mean that the U.S. never did help them improve their security measures after the embassy attack a few years ago. I don't mean to imply that the U.S. should police the world, but there are other things we could have been doing, such as promoting democracy, opening up the society with independent and free presses, and encouraging economic development. Sadly we have done none of those things, and even more sadly, we don't seem to care about the deaths of Them.
Several articles also note the hapless investigation by Kenyan law enforcement. I take this to mean that the U.S. never did help them improve their security measures after the embassy attack a few years ago. I don't mean to imply that the U.S. should police the world, but there are other things we could have been doing, such as promoting democracy, opening up the society with independent and free presses, and encouraging economic development. Sadly we have done none of those things, and even more sadly, we don't seem to care about the deaths of Them.
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Date: 2002-11-30 11:23 am (UTC)I'd add that it's perfectly reasonable and not (I think) morally objectionable that we feel some deaths (a family member, a lover, a close friend) more keenly than others. What needs examination is who ends up where on this "gradient of mourning," and what politics are implied (because a politics is *always* implied, one way or another) by the placement.
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Date: 2002-11-30 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-11-30 03:17 pm (UTC)An article by a man who lived in Kenya. Fuad Nahdi
Friday November 29, 2002
The Guardian
Yesterday's attacks in Kenya were shocking, but hardly surprising. Like Bali in Indonesia, Mombasa was once an idyllic tropical island. Now it is simmering with anger, consumed by hatred and sucked into the global mayhem that is "the war against terror".
On my last visit in August it was obvious that the entire community had undergone a massive change. For the first time I felt a stranger in the town I was born in and among the relatives and friends I grew up with.
But the process that has converted Mombasa - once associated with the Swahili song Hakuna Matata (No Problem, theme song of the Lion King) - into the latest theatre of conflict in the terror wars is a complex mixture of global politics, negligence and religion.
Thirty years ago, this predominantly Muslim and ethnically mixed town was a model of communal harmony and co-existence. Western visitors to the Old Town were almost forced to stop and share a cup of tea. Today, they need armed police escorts to guide them around the old alleys and sites.
Nigeria where the deaths came from protests over a newspaper article and the Miss World Pageant pointed out that muslim schools were more receptive, kinder easier going 20 years ago. I think various administrations forgot Africans and plated geopolitics while the Palestinian and other crises built and the graduates of the more militant places have had more axes to grind and new toys and a harder edge...
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Date: 2002-11-30 09:10 pm (UTC)It will be awful if Africa becomes the proxy battleground for the war on terrorism the way it was for the Cold War.
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Date: 2002-11-30 05:43 pm (UTC)I do think that Mandela's charge that racism is at the root of all western policy is spot on.
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Date: 2002-11-30 09:14 pm (UTC)As someone who didn't grow up in the time of slavery or Jim Crow laws, I'm amazed at the lengths politicians go to rationalize the irrational.
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Date: 2002-12-01 07:29 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-12-01 01:59 pm (UTC)I have noted the other historians on your list (also Raymond Williams - my host in Canberra last week used to work with him in Cambridge, so we were talking about him and his influence). My own categories tend to be more generic.
We had a White Australia Policy until the early 1970s (although quite a few managed to creep in under various loopholes). And Aborigines did not become citizens until 1967!!! It seems to me that despite Equal Opportunity and Anti-Discrimination laws that we now have, the present bunch of political leaders have slid back into a more subtle way of implementing the same thing - particularly since the mid-1990s rise of the radical right.
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Date: 2002-12-01 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-12-01 09:30 pm (UTC)