I've been reading Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda on and off for a couple of months now. I go through these intermittent reading periods because after a few chapters or so, I honestly have to stop and put it down because it's so wretchedly disheartening and infuriating. It's so incomprehensible to me. I like his treatment of it -- half relentless facts and half personal musings, because that's something I can appreciate. You can't possibly deal with this kind of stuff without looking within yourself and adjusting your beliefs about humanity and civilization. And I'm going to run the risk of sounding really naive now, so bear with me if you intend to read on.
I saw Gen. Romeo Dallaire a few months ago at the Chan. It had been an impossibly long day for me, so I'm ashamed to say that I was struggling to keep awake for the middle bulk of it. He started off talking about how nuclear weaponry -- the very concept of it and how it's continually being developed and proliferated, its unforgivable history, and the way it's currently being leveraged politically -- speaks of the deplorable state of humanity today. The bulk of his speaking time was devoted to the issue of child soldiers and the collective failures and frailties that are inevitably entrenched in the very idea of it. At the very end, during the question-and-answer session, a woman came up to the mic and told him that one of her sons would soon be deployed into Afghanistan (and that this was a decision on his part that Dallaire's book and experiences greatly contributed to), and asked him how she could possibly stay sane in the midst of all this. But, more importantly, she challenged his assertion that the the possibility and the reality of the "greater good" should justify the "individual sacrifices" of families and nations. Earlier on, Dallaire spoke at great length and with great conviction on how the international community is obligated to intervene in times of great crisis.
I don't know how I feel about that, strictly speaking. I mean, I support it. I support providing services and resources to stituations and circumstances that demand it, I support the idea of global justice and universal human rights. This is why the idea (farce) of neoliberal discourse was so appealing to me, because it could prop up the exigencies of transnationalism so neatly, because I liked the idea of global citizenship and international opportunities. I support the idea of "helping people out," the ideals behind it, if you can look beyond all that mess of religious rhetoric that gets forced down its conceptual throat (and everyone else's). I support that. But at the same time, I find it distinctly impossible. Like communism. National boundaries, even in the face of all this "flat world" rhetoric, are as stringent as ever, I find. National identities are changing, but territorialism is as formidable as ever (see media whorage of U.S. immigration issue). The enforced sanctity of local cultures feeds into this whole idea that the world is naturally and irrevocably segmented and even a little irreconcilable. But the thing is, the criteria are changing, social hierarchies are being restructured and values redefined. It's the boundaries that haven't changed. The world may be a little flatter, but it's a conditional flatness, an inclined plane skewed in favour of the transnationally powerful. I don't know who I want to trout-slap more, Thomas Friedman or Sam Huntington. (Maybe Pat Robertson.)
Dallaire ultimately pinned it on "political will." Holding governments and government actors accountable to their actions, and ensuring that the motivations and mandates of the intervention are valid -- these sort of things would do such "individual sacrifices" justice. Seeing the mission through, to its glorious yet somehow demeaning end, this would ensure that all expended efforts -- human, economic, military -- would not have been spent in vain. That sort of thing; half-measures and half-hearts undermine all incarnations of progress. Dallaire's military background clearly rears its helmet-clad head in that answer.
But so does his experience in Rwanda, only its helmet has a machete sticking through it.
I don't think I'm emotionally/intellectually mature enough to really say anything about these things yet though. And, really, what do I know? What can I possibly say that won't make me look ignorant and constrained by my own warped, little world view?
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