One inaccuracy in your post, Ken. The Syrian opposition has been calling on foreign countries (in fact America, Britain and other Western countries) to intervene militarily to stop Assad. They have been doing so in both print and electronic media interviews. I read and heard these calls myself in the early days of the revolution and Assad's crackdown. The call for Western military intervention by the Syrian opposition intensified during the siege and bombardment of Homs and Baba Mir. In fact I distinctly recall hearing one opposition figure say that they didn't care about who would save them from Assad, especially since the military asymmetry between the revolutionaries and Assad's forces was huge, since a humanitarian crisis was unfolding and an international consensus on intervention proved elusive due to Russian and Chinese dithering. The opposition figure was answering a question put to him by a Western journalist about whether he was not concerned about the backlash and consequences of a Western military intervention. Throughout the struggle, I have heard members of the Syrian opposition in exile and at home--even opposition fighters on Syrian streets---call for military intervention by Western countries, especially America. Many of them invoked Libya as both a precedent and a model of how to do such an intervention without an occupation that would unleash unpalatable consequences afterward.
Sent from my iPad
i like that response too, toyin
and yet, and yet
think about it for a second: my savior, no matter what the ideological color, is welcome?
what if the price for saving me is to kill large numbers of innocent people whom my savior determined were enemies?
an example?
for some time, rockets have been fired from gaza toward southern israel, at times coming into communities and harming people. as we all know, israel attacked gaza in response about a year or so ago, and 1000 palestinians were killed. ten israelis were killed in that operation, some from friendly fire.
anyway, the long history of israeli's conflict with the palestinians has been of that order: the protection of israelis from palestinians has cost the palestinians dearly, and there are a number of israelis for whom the "ideological color" of their "savior" has been too red, shall we say.
similarly, one doesn't hear, even from the syrians in opposition, or the iranians in opposition, much of a push for nato to intervene or for the u.s. to send in the marines. they realize that the color of the ideology would presage a price they couldn't possibly want to pay.
ken
On 3/30/12 9:00 AM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:A good one from a response on the Chielo blog
'... at the end of the day the least that one can say is that [the] lot of the victim is so dire that he cannot quibble over the ideological colour of the ladder that will save his life.'
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 2:43 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
ok ikhide, you insisted so i read it. it is fine. i don't disagree. yet it leaves out questions that have troubled me all along.
he says, get rid of the bad baggage--not unlike your continual complaints against white liberal attitudes (why white?? is anything added there? why not American, or global north?)
anyway, it says, keep the issue of alleviating suffering in key cases before our eyes, and don't walk away.
so, who is disagreeing there?
it says, subliminally, "us white guys (ok white there) are the solution, those black guys failed--we have the knowledge, follow us"
i want an open repudiation of colonialist discourses that we are now dubbing the white savior industrial complex discourse, ultimately because it is disempowering to africans, and it means that the only solution comes from Out There, which translates into, go Over There to complete your life's goals since Here has become a Lost Cause.
secondly, there needs to be some awareness that the joint monuc fardc attempt to chase down lra last time cost hundreds of lives, many more than would have been the case had they been ignored.
i don't want to ignore them, i want kony before the dock, but i want someone to acknowledge that simplistic appeals and solutions poorly thought through might cause more damage than the thing you are trying to fix.
as for the AU initiative, i have no idea if it will cause more damage or resolve the situation. maybe no one knows. however, i do know that the thoughtless interventions in sierra leone had prices as high as the damage they were intended to stop. i am talking about ecowas and Weissman, Fabrice, ed. In the Shadow of "Just Wars where he shows that the horrors wrought by Charles Taylor (thanks Ghaddafi) were matched by the forces arrayed against him, including ecowas.
lastly, as the last email i sent concerning the continuing crisis in e congo shows, there have been more than 100, 000 people displaced in s kivu in recent fighting, in recent attacks, none by the lra.
so we can swat that mosquito, which is what the lra has now become, while continuing to ignore the elephant in the room, which is the damage wrought by the on-going trade for minerals, guns, in the region, which is made possible by the very people the KONY2012 video asks to fix the problem.
made possible how? how about more than a billion dollars worth of illegally mined gold passing through uganda last year. uganda would love to be asked to take care of the lra as long as everyone continues to ignore the greater ravages it bears responsibility for.
and none of the above even mentions their actions towards the acholi
ken
On 3/30/12 5:15 AM, Ikhide wrote:--Please, whatever you do, take time out to read Professor Chielozona Eze's perspective on the Invisible Children's KONY 2012 video. Eze, who himself survived Biafra as a child looks at the critics of the KONY 2012 video coolly in the eyes and tells them a few truth. This one is a must read. Please read and share. And while you are on his blog, subscribe to it. Eze is one of Africa's quiet literary revolutionaries, promoting the literature of Africa, one blogpost at a time. Applause. Read and share please. The world must hear of the atrocities going on in Africa while Western liberals and many African intellectuals overdose on navel-gazing.
- IkhideStalk my blog at www.xokigbo.comFollow me on Twitter: @ikhideJoin me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
-- kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
-- kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
No comments:
Post a Comment