Offensive

Just to be contrarian, the first one is offensive how and to whom? I worry sometimes that when we ask journalists not to write vividly or to always write with the proper tone of Stentorianly Serious and Sober prose, we’re making an unfair demand. This particular episode does have elements of horrific farce about it; there isn’t anyone to cheer for here.

Lets step back from the article for a second and ask why it is that America intervenes in atrocities in central Europe, but not in Africa? Why is it that we welcome refugees from Cuba, but not from Haiti? As someone recently remarked, if Elian Gonzalez had been Haitian they would have shoved him back into the ocean!

What does this have to do with the article, and why I consider it offensive? Because there is a way of writing about certain parts of the world that makes it seem as if the situation is a “natural” condition of that part of the world. They are as prone to dictatorships as they are to malaria. What point is there in the United States even stepping in to help such a backwards place?

Perhaps you think I am overreacting? But I have had many conversations with people in which they insist that such-and-such a country is prone to “tribalism” and “ethnic conflict” so there is little we can do. Most recently someone said something along these lines to me about Afghanistan.

The problem is that such a view is ahistorical. Anyone who has read Mamdani’s excellent book “Citizen and Subject” will know all that they need to know about how European colonial rule created “tribes” where none had previously existed. In communities that had complex systems of local rule, and intermarriage with people in neighboring communities, they would assign one man to be “chief” of a “tribe” and give him dictatorial power over the community. There was nothing natural about it. Similarly, in Afghanistan, there was little in the way of “ethnic” conflict in the years preceeding the Soviet invasion. However, with the Iranians funding one faction, the Pakistanis (with US $$$) another, and the Uzbeks yet another, ethnicity became much more important.

There is a way of writing about such a “horrific farce” that helps us understand it better, that places it in a context so that it seems less strange and exotic and more human and understandable. Unfortunately, in order to “write vividly” reporters feel that they must instead do the opposite, and instead make things stranger and more exotic. Especially when the people being talked about are of a slightly darker hue.