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My Cancer is Arbitrary. Congo's Atrocities are Very Deliberate
Illness and treatment only reinforced my determination to shake global indifference to the terrible violence in Congo
Cancer is scary, of course, and painful. It tends to interrupt one's entire life, throw everything into question and push one up against that ultimate dimension and possibility of dying. One can rail at the gods and goddesses: "Why? Why now? Why me?" But, in the end, we know those questions ring absurd and empty. Cancer is an epidemic. It has been here for ever. It isn't personal. Its choice of the vulnerable host is often arbitrary. It's life.
For months, doctors and nurses have cut me, stitched me, jabbed me, drained me, cat-scanned me, X-rayed me, IV-ed me, flushed me and hydrated me, trying to identify the source of my anxiety and alleviate my pain. While they have been able to remove the cancer from my body, treat an abscess here, a fever there, they have not been able to even come close to the core of my malady.
Three years ago, the Democratic Republic of Congo seized my being. V-Day, a movement to stop violence against women and girls, was invited to see firsthand the experience of women survivors of sexual violence there. After three weeks at Panzi hospital in Bukavu, where there were more than 200 women patients, many of whom shared their stories of being gang-raped and tortured with me, I was shattered. They told me about the resulting loss of their reproductive organs and the fistulae they got - the hole between their vagina and anus or vagina and bladder that no longer allowed them to hold their urine or faeces. I heard about nine-month-old babies, eight-year-old girls, 80-year-old women who had been humiliated and publicly raped.
In response, taking the lead from women on the ground, we created a massive campaign, - Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource: Power to Women and Girls of DRC - which has broken taboos, organised speak-outs and marches, educated and trained activists and religious leaders, and spurred performances of The Vagina Monologues across the country, culminating this month with a performance in the Congolese parliament. V-Day activists have spread the campaign across the planet, raising money and consciousness. In several months, with the women of Congo, we will be opening the City of Joy, a community for survivors where women will be healed in order to turn their pain to power. We have also sat and pleaded our case at Downing Street, the White House, and the office of the UN secretary general. We have shouted (loudly) at the Canadian parliament, the US Senate, and the UN security council. Tears were shed; promises were made with great enthusiasm.
As I have lain in my hospital bed or attempted to rest at home over these months, it is the phone calls and the reports that come in daily from the DRC that make me ill. The stories of continued rapes, machete killings, grotesque mutilations, outright murdering of human rights activists - these images and events create nausea and weakness much worse than chemo or antibiotics or pain meds ever could. But even harder to deal with, in the weakened state that I have been in, is knowing that despite the ongoing horrific atrocities that have taken the lives of more than 6 million people and left more than 500,000 women and girls raped and tortured, the international power elite appear to be doing nothing. They have essentially written off the DRC and its people, even after continued visits and promises.
The day is late. It is almost 13 years into this war. The Obama administration, as in most situations these days, refuses to take a real stand. Several months ago I visited the White House to meet a high official to engage the first lady in our efforts to end sexual violence in Congo, believing that her solidarity would galvanise attention and action. I was told, essentially, that femicide was not her "brand". Mrs Obama, I was told, was focusing on childhood obesity.
It surprised me that a woman with her capabilities lacked ambidextrous skills (or was it simply interest and will that was absent?). Then we have Secretary Clinton, who at least after much pressure visited the DRC almost a year ago, and made promises that actually meant a huge deal to the people. They were excited that the US government might finally prioritise building the political will in the Great Lakes region to end the war there. But, of course, they are still waiting. And then there is the UN. The anaemic and glacial pace and the death-like bureaucracy continue to allow and, in the case of Monuc and the security council, even help facilitate a deathly regional war.
Two weeks ago, in Kinshasa, one of Congo's great human rights activists, Floribert Chebeya Bahizire, was brutally murdered. In the same week, at Panzi hospital the family of a staff member were executed. A 10-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl were gunned down in their car on their way home. Murdering and raping of the women in the villages continues. The war rages on. Who is demanding the protection of the people of Congo? Who is protecting the activists who are speaking truth to power? At a memorial service last week in Bukavu, a pastor cried out: "They are killing our mammas. Now they are killing our children. What have we done to deserve this? Where is the world?"
The atrocities committed against the people of Congo are not arbitrary, like my cancer. They are systematic, strategic and intentional. At the root is a madly greedy world economy, desperate for more minerals robbed from the indigenous Congolese. Sourcing this insatiable hunger are multinational corporations who benefit from these minerals and are willing to turn their backs on the players committing femicide and genocide, as long as their financial needs are met.
I am lucky. I have been blessed with a positive prognosis that has made me hyper-aware of what keeps a person alive. How does one survive cancer? Of course - good doctors, good insurance, good luck. But the real healing comes from not being forgotten. From attention, from care, from love, from being surrounded by a community of those who demand information on your behalf, who advocate and stand up for you when you are in a weakened state, who sleep by your side, who refuse to let you give up, who bring you meals, who see you not as a patient or victim but as a precious human being, who create metaphors where you can imagine your survival. This is my medicine, and nothing less will suffice for the people, for the women, for the children of Congo.
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49 Comments so far
Show AllIt is troubling to see no response (yet) to this AWFUL subject.
"Law and Order" actually did a good job of bringing this horrific truth to America's mainstream viewers in a story where a rape survivor from Congo was witness to a crime in an NYC apartment building. She tried to help the woman being attacked, and knew that if she testified, she might be sent back to the country where further rapes were probable.
Although some in this forum seem incapable of connecting the dots, the obscenity of such rampant rapes in parts of Africa mirrors the obscenity of torture, and both seem to pleasure too many people. I state that because Robert Jensen's research into modern pornography (a huge selling item on the Internet) exposes the disgusting fact that many get OFF on degrading women's bodies in grotesque and damaging ways.
When young women have their vaginas literally blown out of them, this region being the place where LIFE takes root, and thus inherent in its sacredness to any people that truly respect life, the misogyny on display represents an evil beyond measure.
The U.N. has published statistics that state that about half the world's women will know some form of violence (from male partners or strangers) during the course of their lifetimes.
That so many men in this forum, prepared to rage about acts of aggression on the part of Israel could CARE LESS about this equal wound to humanity (albeit the FEMALE side of that equation) mortifies me.
Until YOU recognize the carnage done to each and all, to target one nation as the great evil is bogus, and does not entitle you to any presumption of owning the moral high ground.
From the moment patriarchal religion condemned the female to a lesser (spiritual, economic, social) status, the sacred and HOLY union between the male and female was broken. With only men empowered to define the structures and mores of society, too much went missing. Without sensitivity, heart, feelings, and the capacity to connect (outgrowths of the maternal-infant NURTURE LIFE bond)... the distortions of society have grown to the point where making weapons and USING them, to the tune of killing thousands and thousands of mostly civilians each and EVERY year, is considered the norm! With such statistics taken for normal, it's not hard to understand why sexual battery to women is not considered any big deal, or worth posting about.
I know a few guys in this forum do care. For the rest of you, you don't realize the extent to which Mars rules has gotten to "you's." The prejudice screams out into this thread, devoid of responses.
Given that most of Africa does not have access to the internet and by extension the type of pornography available there , I can only conclude pornography is a sympton of what is wrong rather then a cause.
This is about the use of force and VIOLENCE in order to have POWER over the other. The consequences of embracing such a belief system at the level of the individual are these rapes. The consequences at the level of the State the mass killings to bombs and bullets.
Any society that embraces force and violence in order to maintain its POWER is one that is doomed to decay morally and spiritualy.
GW NORTH: Achetypal energy does not require transmission over the Internet. The fabric of matter, which in all its poetry is a weave between Yin and Yang, is badly tattered. The savage acting out of hatred towards the feminine life-sustaining cavity is a sort of lightning rod that is apparently picking up the misogyny radiating under the radar EVERYWHERE. It's spoken most explicitly in the languages of porn, torture, and that species of warfare that now guarantees that an estimated 90 percent will be civilian causualties (women & children), a/k/a collateral damage.
It's that Hundredth Monkey thing... and when people feel no power, when their resources are stolen by outsiders, when their tribal circles get savagely ripped apart, and their members sold into slavery, the remains of all that battery reverberates down the line to the least powerful: women and children. It is a naked atavistic rage.
Some have asked me if Mars has any positive applications. There are many. In its positive, Mars expresses as the supreme force of life, that which awakens all creatures in spring. It is also the power intended on the part of the strong to PROTECT those who are weaker. Instead, Mars has turned on the least amongst us... it's even seen in the type of nations bombed back to the Stone Age.
MAIREAD: More militarism is not the answer, although I appreciate the chivalry behind your improvised prescription for help.
The goddess is alive. Wicca is one of the fastest growing forms of spirituality in the US. Women's Spirituality is a sparkling source of hope, and of the force of change.
Begin. Be with her, be with us. Paula Gunn Allen. Charlene Spretnak. Carol P. Christ. "Reweaving the world: The Emergence of Ecofeminism", Starhawk.
Begin the journey.
In Her Name.
Begin the journey? Are you speaking to me? I have been on the journey for 40 years. I don't resonate with Starhawk. Maybe she's evolved since I read one of her books.
Approximately 1977 I purchased a paperback copy of "Against Our Will: Men Women and Rape" by Susan Brownmiller. After reading it, I waited until my daughter was in high school, then passed it to her. I replaced mine with a first edition hard copy, and since the mid 1990s have enjoyed occasional email exchange with Susan.
My daughter is now in her 15th year of her Wiccan journey. As she loops by I throw her a PBJ sandwich and a plastic container of juice with that tiny straw wheeeeeeee.
Who else remembers this song - one of my daughter's favourites - about a girl attending college in London, who takes the train to visit her boyfriend at another institution?
Clatter, the milkman at my doorstep,
Bustle, my neighbor at her tea,
In all the world no one’s so glad to see the sun as me……
Angeline is always Friday,
Angeline is spring forever.
Winter Angeline could never be.
Mister Wilson, old and smiling,
lifts his cap as she is passing,
Bowing her politely on to me.
The week has gone its lonely way.
I’ve waited for my only
Day away from shadows,
In her sunlight I can tell her “I love you,
Angeline”.
Angeline is always Friday,
suitcase on the rack above,
She hasn’t even read her magazine.
Angeline is counting stations,
‘til the one where I am standing,
Waiting for my only Angeline.
The week has gone its lonely way.
I’ve waited for my only
Day away from shadows,
In her sunlight I can tell her “I love you,
Angeline.”
Clatter, the milkman at my doorstep,
Bustle, my neighbor at her tea,
In all the world no one’s so glad to see the sun as me…….
More militarism is not the answer, although I appreciate the chivalry behind your improvised prescription for help.
---------------------------------
Rose, my suggestion isn't militarism, nor chivalry, nor improvised.
Siouxrose__Looks like it is time for one of we guys to comment on this. It is unbelievable that women can be treated in this manner, as in this country we worry about animals being mistreated unnecessarily. Most of the problem can be blamed on mob violence, which causes people to behave in ways they would not do on their own. However there is absolutely no excuse, and our government needs to get involved in stopping that, or we are also guilty by shutting our eyes to it. Our leaders have become so self involved and conscious only of staying in office that we seem to have lost the principles we once had.
KERNEL: Thank you for caring. You still have a soul.
When men of a society will resort to such measures in order to assert their "authority" , they are beyond all salvation.
How can this possibly be made right even generations from now? How did "we" arrive at this place? Society has gone from the Sacred feminine to the scared and scarred women and children in a few thousand short years.
The sea is seen as the "womb" of all life and it being murdered as we speak just as the bodies of the women of the Congo are defiled. There seems to be a fascination with death.
Do "we" hate ourselves that much?
GW NORTH: If Commondreams ever sponsored a Luau, you're one of the men to whom I'd place a lei. (I hope I spelled that correctly.)
You see with a universal soul, one that transcends gender, all the better.
Rose, what's going on in Africa is almost too big to think about. There are so many males there from pre-teen up who have no discernible humanity at all that the mind, to save itself, turns away.
I can't imagine any viable solution other than to send every soldier and marine from every NATO and SEATO country to Africa with orders to hunt down and summarily kill every armed African male over the age of maybe 8 who's not clearly a peacekeeper. Nothing less (okay, maybe imprisonment--if we could build a big enough prison) will do because certain European colonial powers did nothing but exploit the land and people, giving nothing at all in return.
Their one-sided exploitation created monsters, and what we have now is vicious, deeply ignorant, superstitious children who are uncaring and uncared-about and who behave worse than non-humans because they prey on their own kind. They believe in magic. They think fscking a virgin will cure AIDS. They think their dicks will drop off if they don't perform certain rituals. They don't care about anyone's wellbeing but their own, and they've no idea how to take care of themselves except by killing and plunder.
They are too far gone to be rehabilitated except for the tiny number who, seeing their fellow-predators being executed without mercy, have enough left to understand what they must do to save themselves.
But no matter how horrible things are in Africa, it doesn't let the Zionists off the hook. *THEY* have had every possible advantage handed to them on a plate, with parsley. Yet like the pathological greedy everywhere, they still demand MORE without limit.
All rapists, everywhere, need to be castrated.
Sometimes, sad to say, violence is the answer.
I do not see massive killing of Congolese males, including children, by white man NATO troops as a solution to anything in Congo. It is more like a continuation of the degradation that the West has imposed on Congo for the last 100 years. Congolese women should determine the solution to their plight. Perhaps they do not want white men coming in and hunting down their sons like animals. If violence is to be the answer, then Congolese women should be given guns and trained to use them for self-protection under the supervision of other African women. Perhaps the mines of foreign companies should be blown up and the owners should be expelled.
NATO, US, French, British, and Belgian troops are in no way part of the solution. We should not be marching in there like the arrogant assholes we are and slaughtering people again in the name of saving women. Imperialism savaged these countries and laid the basis for the sickening chaos that now exists. Further imperialism is not going to help anyone there.
I am re-posting part of something I just wrote on a similar thread.
"...Congo ... has been serially brutalized by outsiders for over a century, first by King Leopold over rubber [read King Leopold's Ghost - you will not believe what went on], then by France and the other imperialists over precious minerals, and now by the electronics industry over coltan. Of course with physical brutality there is also spiritual degradation, the sowing of division and the snuffing out the will of the people when they choose self-rule and democracy. As with Iran, whose oil we covet, the democratic leaders (Mossadegh, Lumumba) were deposed by outside forces in my lifetime in order to secure the "rights" of European and US firms to take things without paying a fair price, or any price.
The situation in Congo, the subsequent rule of savage dictators like Mobutu in the service of the CIA and western corporations had an especially damaging effect on the people who had little experience with a national identity and politics. Civil violence has been fomented for decades, disguising fights for wealth as tribal disputes. Men in the Congo have been systematically uprooted from their villages, maimed and murdered in order to turn them into obedient miners and workers. Over the last decades the entire food delivery infrastructure of Congo along the river has been allowed to decay, stranding the uprooted people far away from their farms and without a means to obtain food.
Many of the berserking gangs in Congo are made up of teenage boys who were orphaned by the mass slaughter of their parents by government thugs and by hunger and untreated disease. There are no orphanages in most regions. These children have never had parental care and guidance. Their life lesson has been that the brutal ones are the winners, and their only apparent option for a meal is to join with gangs fighting over mineral rights oon behalf of the rival owners."
Joe
Training and arming the women for self-defence might well be an ideal solution, Joe (I have some doubts, since, except for those with money or without families, women around the world already have their time fully occupied with caregiving, homemaking, etc).
But let's say we can get past the barrier of time/energy limits: what about the women and girls who will be raped, maimed, and killed while the world's military-training cadres arm and train them?
I suggest the use of the world's military forces because they already have everything they need to do the job, and it would make a good reversal of their role supporting oppression and predation by the elites.
Not that any of the bloviating we do here will change a cursëd thing.
Your posts have a level of urgency and anger that fits the horror of the situation in Congo, especially for women and girls. I would add that young children of both sexes are abandoned to their own resources in a nightmare of want and violence. Even well-meaning and peaceful fathers have few pathways open to caring for and protecting their families.
People of the world need to do something, but look what happens when US and Western troops are the "solution" such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. Even stable cultures get torn apart, kleptocrats are enabled and the public suffers massive deaths from guns, bombs, untreated disease, food and water shortages. Many of the victims are women and children.
Africa has several courageous and honest women's organizations. I think they should be consulted and funded to formulate and implement solutions. If governments will not do it, perhaps we should raise funds privately. Poor women know how to work miracles with just a little money.
Joe
Africa has several courageous and honest women's organizations. I think they should be consulted and funded to formulate and implement solutions. If governments will not do it, perhaps we should raise funds privately. Poor women know how to work miracles with just a little money.
-----------------------------------
Like most women, my life remains fully overcommitted (I feel guilty for taking time out to post at CD). But if you have time to program-manage the effort and make it work, Joe, by all means count me in as a contributor - I'll find my share somewhere.
I have no expectation that those women's groups can solve the problem, but whatever they could do would probably be better than the current nothing.
In psychotherapy, Ardent, doing the kind of thing Ensler is so proud of is called "making progress". Some people spend decades, even a lifetime "making progress" without ever doing what's called "solving the problem". Less-ethical psychologists own nice holiday homes, yachts, and fine cars because of people "making progress".
I suspect Ensler feels that getting the Vagina Monologs performed before parliament was an example of "speaking truth to power". And, of course, more "progress". What a great ego trip. But how dim would someone have to be to truly think the members of parliament didn't know about the atrocities until this woman and her cohort came and told them? My guess? Pretty dim!
"Solving the problem" requires that the problem be seen and understood without flinching.
In this case, we have males going around raping, maiming, and killing women and girls ad libitum, at random, and without hesitation, remorse, or retribution. That's the problem.
It's not ignorance on their part; they can't be taken aside and reformed by having the situation explained to them ("Oh, thank you, Missy. I had no idea that women and girls don't like being raped and chopped up. I'll be good from now on, honest I will."), so to solve the problem requires that they be permanently *prevented* from doing it again.
There aren't many ways to do that: (1) assign full time bodyguards to all women and girls; (2) lock up all members of one of the groups forever; or (3) kill all the members of one of the groups. That's about it. Now, since you seem to feel that my post was "incoherent" and "imperialist", two words whose definitions you evidently need to look up, why don't you tell us what YOU would do.
(I wonder whether I would think you less silly and annoying if you ever bothered to even spell my name correctly.)
I honestly don't see anything she wrote here as a call for military intervention.
The message I got from it was her New-Agey self-satisfaction about "speaking truth to power", and a sort of vague hope that she could pressure some uncaring member of the uncaring US government to do some unspecified something, perhaps pressure the equally uncaring DROTC government to somehow stop the atrocities.
The solution needed is intervention by *armed police*, because the perps are criminals not a military force. But there aren't enough spare police in the whole world, which leaves only the world's militaries with even the possibility of having the requisite force to solve the problem.
Further down this thread there's an article that appears (I read in haste) to want to redirect our attention to the perps of a different problem: the western, corporate plunder of the land. To me, that's western liberal arrogance writ large: "Don't pay attention to the atrocities committed by local human-shaped reptiles against innocent local human victims, focus on the *wealth* predation by *western corporations*, the problem *we* care about."
But the only way to stop the raping, maiming, and killing of women and children is to focus on *that* problem, understand it, and do what's needed. Which is police-type action. There's no "imperialism" about my analysis because there's no idea of empire-building contained in it.
It's much more akin to saying that when passers-by witness a murderous attack, there is only one real way to solve the problem: immediately act together to disable or kill the attacker. Nothing less will do.
Reasoning with the attacker, vowing to send a letter to the editor, deciding to meet with the chief of police, form a neighborhood watch, convene a study group, consider the attacker's motives and history ...they're all worse than useless, they're abdicatory non-responses to the real, immediate problem of the innocent victim's life or death.
You might consider studying the history of "humanitarian intervention" before you make gung-ho comments that tend to lead to knee-jerk military responses. Here's an online book which is the standard scholarly work on the topic by Sean Murphy, 'Humanitarian Intervention: The United Nations in an Evolving World' (it was his PhD thesis, he now works for the State Department):
http://books.google.com/books?isbn=0812233824
A representative sample of what he found are the three—and only—cases of the phenomenon in the interwar period of last century:
————————————————————————
When Japan invaded Manchuria in September 1931, it initially characterized the intervention as necessary to protect Japanese nationals and businesses from acts of violence by Chinese military forces. As time passed and Japanese troops remained in Manchuria, the rationale shifted to an emphasis on a duty to protect the inhabitants of the region generally, Japan argued that:
It was Japan's clear duty to render her steps of self-defense as little disturbing as possible to the peaceable inhabitants of the region. It would have been a breach of that duty to have left the population a prey to anarchy—deprived of the apparatus of civilized life. Therefore, the Japanese military have, at considerable sacrifice, expended much time and energy in securing the safety of persons and property in the districts where the native authorities had become ineffective. This is a responsibility which was thrust upon them by events, and one which they had as little desire to evade.
————————————————————————
In October 1935 Italian forces invaded Ethiopia from their neighboring colony, Somaliland. The League of Nations condemned the invasion and imposed sanctions on the basis that Italy had violated its obligations under Article 12 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Italy argued to the League that:
The Italian government had abolished slavery in the occupied territories, giving to 16,000 slaves that liberty from which they would have awaited in vain from the Government of Addis Ababa, despite the clauses of the Covenant and the undertakings assumed at the moment of its admission as a member of the League of Nations. The liberated populations see in Italy, not the aggressor state, but the power which has the right and the capacity of extending that high protection which the very Covenant of the League of Nations, in its Article 22, recognizes as the civilizing mission incumbent upon the more advanced nations.
————————————————————————
Adolph Hitler's decree of March 16 on the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia asserted that the Czechoslovak state and its rulers had not succeeded in organizing the different national groups present in Bohemia and Moravia, which in turn had led to "continuous disturbances in these regions," which were of "decisive importance" to Germany's own peace and security "and to the general welfare and the general peace." The preamble to the declaration ended with the following:
Filled with earnest desire to serve the true interests of the peoples dwelling in this area, to safeguard the national individuality of the German and Czech peoples, and to further the peace and social welfare of all, I therefore order the following, in the name of the German Reich, as the basis for the future common inhabitants of these regions.
————————————————————————
Something else to consider is that those pushing for "military solutions" might not be motivated by entirely worthy sentiments, as has been conclusively shown of organizers of the mass-marketed 'Save Darfur' campaign:
http://www.amazon.com/Saviors-Survivors-Darfur-Politics-Terror/dp/0307377237
————————————————————————
You also won't ever hear calls for UN intervention, or even presence of UN peacekeepers, on another conflict from the author of this very article, a conflict in which UN personnel are killed with impunity by one side. Could it be because her own partner is from the outlaw state that has a long history of deliberately targeting UN personnel? Or, is it just because she emphathizes with citizens of that state whose armed forces have no problem dropping white phosphorus on schoolyards, counseling them on how "the suffering of the powerful is different than the suffering of the weak". For those of her partner's fellow citizens who remain unmoved by appeals to humanity, she tries to cajole them by appeals to utilitarian reason ("the occupation is not working"). No wonder she was awarded the "Lion of Judah" award for services to that same racist state:
http://vfpdissident.blogspot.com/2007/01/eve-ensler-lion-of-judah.html
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0995/9509083.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5217176.stm
Read my most recent reply to Ardent: you're making the same error in logic.
That some self-interested actions are falsely labeled as humanitarian doesn't mean all actions labeled humanitarian are self-interested. And it's rather un-social, even anti-social, to presume that they are.
We need *more* pro-social activity, not less. Atomising us through infection with fear, hate, shame, guilt, and other negative emotions is *extremely* serviceable to the elites. We should be on the watch for such attempts so that we can repudiate them before they can get even a toe-hold's worth of mindshare.
You seem to hold logic in high regard (twice dismissing the claims of
others by appeals to logic), but unless you can come up with facts and
examples, I'm afraid it'll be hard to take your opinions
seriously. Once more, as you didn't bother at all to engage with the
literature I cited, perhaps you can find examples to support your
claim—which sounds to me analogous to the proposition that logically
there's nothing to stop foxes making excellent chicken coop guards—
in this fine review of another recent book on the topic:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/154/26076.html
You misunderstand me.
You (and Ardent) made an assertion based on faulty reasoning. You're in an identical position, mutatis mutandis, to those guys in 1902 who pontificated that heavier-than-air vehicles can't fly because none of them had flown yet.
That's the only fact I need. What *you* have to do is demonstrate that no successful humanitarian intervention is possible because it violates physical law.
All your literature amounts to (I'm guessing, from the illogical position you take and the fact that you think your literature can somehow overcome that lack of logic) is a litany of failures. But past failure doesn't imply impossibility the way you apparently think it does. I offer the aeroplane as evidence.
The left really needs to get out of this obsession with black and white manichean dichotomies, where leftists immediately adopt the opposite position, and end up apologising for and defending indefensible things.
Just because of Iraq etc, it doesn't mean that whenever someone like Eve Ensler tries to do something about some situation in some other country, it is a call for invasion.
In any case, Congo has effectively been invaded and occupied for more than a decade already.
As for this,
"This American woman, Eve Ensler, sees great success in getting a performance of 'The Vagina Monologues' before the Congo Parliament! I'm just amazed at what this person finds as being politically important?"
Do you consider what happens to half of the population to be politically important?
What you're doing is saying that it's bad to advocate a certain action to solve a terrible problem because governments claim to be solving a terrible problem in order to fig-leaf their naked self-interest.
I certainly agree that the self-interested usually do claim a beneficent purpose for their selfish acts.
But it's a logical error to believe that makes everyone self-interested who claims a beneficent purpose.
And the suggestion is frankly dangerous that we shouldn't advocate anything that could be hijacked by scum for their purposes. It would keep us completely silent, or limited to trivia.
First I need to address Eve Ensler's condition.
I'm sorry that cancer is so arbitrary.
Having said that, I also need to say that if I ever was diagnosed with cancer, I'd go out and give myself a second chance. I see three major branches of alternative medicine and all of them have clusters of terminal patients that should have died years ago. Too many doctors write each individual patient off as "spontaneous remission", which is just as unfair as a cigarette company writing off each individual smoker's illness as "spontaneous lung cancer".
The first branch is energy work. One Reiki group reported that they dissolved a soft tissue tumor in 15 minutes with an ultrasound machine recording their progress as the tumor melted away. The timing was kind of coincidental. One Chinese hospital has a group picture of about 80 "incurables" all smiling on the hospital's front porch steps. There are dozens of modalities and brand names, including faith healers. I'm not going to pick one above the others.
The second branch is food and nutrition. These people also have lots of pictures of case studies of huge cancer tumors all going in reverse. Terminal cancer patients show up at the clinics, they get better and go home. This group argues that whenever the human body gets extremely fresh food and gets its nutrients, as opposed to nutrition-free junk food, the body gets healthy and ends all of the cancer tumors on its own.
The third branch is Chiropractic and body work, but I don't know that much about the field.
I just have to spread these hopeful possibilities. Sometimes these methods don't work for people, but often as not they do. If the medical doctors happen to have a "sure thing" cure, I'd try it. Otherwise, I'd take a free second chance at life if it were available and it didn't hurt too much.
Here's an alternative take by someone who knows something about Congo and it's history on Eve Ensler's black and white (no pun intended) take on the "pornography of violence" in "the dark continent":
allthingspass.com/uploads/html-230THREE%20CHEERS%20for%20Eve%20ENSLER[8].htm
Also, on the (very) rare occassions that an African is allowed to
speak their mind, their concerns seem very different from those
of busybody do-gooders working the wheels of the
"Humanitarian/Industrial Complex" from their high rent offices in
places like Manhattan and London:
In addition to providing raw materials, labor, and markets for
finished products, Africa also cleanses the conscience of
Africanist scholars, evangelists and missionaries, the rock and
roll musicians who want to save Africa through orphan adoption,
and philanthropists with Mother-Theresa complexes.
intercontinentalcry.org/africa-does-not-need-more-western-philanthropy
I hope everyone will take the time to read the article you posted.
Keith Harmon Snow wrote that article a few years back and for those of us who have been talking about and reading in-depth the horrors visited upon the Congo and the surrounding regions, putting things in context, Harmon's response was cool drink to Ensler's misrepresentation of how events have unfolded.
Here's a longer snippet from the article titled: "Congo: Three Cheers for Eve Ensler?"
THE GLAMOUROUS GENOCIDE
Who is responsible for the brutality?
According to Glamour and Vanity Fair, it is always those rag-tag Rwandan genocidaires who fled justice in Rwanda, or those ruthless Congolese soldiers from the heart of darkness, and the loose assortments of obviously "loose" civilians, and even the U.N. peacekeepers who, in the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC), are men from India, Uruguay, Nepal, Pakistan and in Darfur, Sudan, it is those damned Janjaweed-Arabs on horseback, you know, the usual dark-skinned subjects.
And there is no mention whatsoever of the deeper realities and responsibilities of white people and predatory capitalism. Where is the discussion of the backers behind this warfare? Who sells the weaponry? Who produces it? Who photographs the UNICEF poster children and peddles the images of suffering in the Western press for billion dollar profit-driven campaigns that do not in the end uplift the people who they claim to care about?
Why are there gala UNICEF "fundraising" benefits-the Annual Snowflake Ball-in New York hotels with white-tie U.S. Presidents as honorary ambassadors and state department officials from the National Security Council-and $10,000 tickets-held by and for officials who remain silent about genocide in Ethiopia or northern Uganda or the U.S.-backed coup d'etat that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 or Zaire (Congo) in 1996?
What we know to be true is that Eve Ensler was lucky to get this article in Glamour at all. The magazine is a travesty of violence against women-cosmetics, luxury aids, "health" and "beauty" products, liposuction, breast implants and sexually seductive advertising peddling the "perfect" female body and great American culture of sexual violence-and yet Glamour offers a platform for Ensler's message about sexual brutality of unprecedented human proportions.
What's going on here? There is a reason these stories proliferate and it is not about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Glamour's publishers do not care about the suffering of black people. It is pure Western white supremacist propaganda serving to underscore the accepted narratives of Central Africa and assist in the consolidation of power over the region, but this is neither seen nor appreciated by white "news" consumers.
What Eve Ensler and Glamour have not addressed are the warlords behind the warlords, the corporations and white collar crime which is never-or selectively, now and then expeditiously, if ever-reported on the pages of Glamour, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, or the other promoters of popular propaganda brought to us by the Conde Naste corporate empire.
Behind the warfare always blamed on Africans, behind the warlords' deadly battles, are other warlords and corporations from Western countries. The reason people-U.S. and Canadian citizens-are unaware of the issues involved is because of publications like Glamour and the corporations that control them. Ensler's article begins to look like an advertisement for UNICEF and the so-called "humanitarian" AID industry, which is itself part of the problem, because it remains silent about corporate plunder, "humanitarian" organizations partnering with the corporate exploiters, shared directorships with mining, defense, petroleum and other multinational interests. UNICEF and "not-for-profit" organizations like it are in the business of perpetuating their own survival, the vanguard of transnational capital.
...
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1201/1/
Thank you mcoyote, for articulating this issue in a way that rings true to me. You also wrote a comment in Mark Morford's latest article and I hope you don't mind that I have copied it here because it bears repeating. In fact, I wish it could be shouted from the rooftops of every techno-dependent home:
"How many Congolese must die to illuminate one hand-held computer game? Nobody knows, but five million have already been slaughtered in the greatest mineral extraction grab in the history of the planet. The best known mining companies and richest men in the world are directly complicit in ten years of genocide in Central Africa, where chaos is deliberately imposed as a cover to smuggle billions of dollars in minerals out of the country. Local government officials, small but greedy players in the systemic looting of their own country, have no clue as to which companies actually have contracts to do business in Congo. When billions can be scoured from the earth through slave labor, law ceases to exist.
The holocaust in the Congo is a collective crime by all of the Euro-American mineral extraction industries and the governments that serve them.
Five million Congolese have died in the last decade or so in order to make billionaires even richer. If there were such a thing as international law, this holocaust in the Democratic Republic of Congo should have already resulted in the public hanging of hundreds of the world's richest men - and rightfully so. If the Nuremberg laws that sent ten Nazis to the gallows for crimes against humanity and peace were applied to the Congo, we could quite easily find the names of the defendants in the columns of the world's financial press - the richest men on the face of the earth. These men conspired to murder millions so that there would be constant war in Central Africa - but no law to inhibit theft on the grandest industrial scale imaginable.
It is a war for coltan. It is a massacre for technology. It is impossible for me to get anyone's attention on this. I have tried on discussion board's, leafletting, tabling and people just look away.
Noone wants to face the reality of how their daily habits fuel the slaughterhouse."
=======================
Who is calling you all the time,
All day- all night?
It is me calling you oh techno-man of the West wondering why you come to kill me.
Why do you seem to think the thunder in my ground is for you to steal?
Why do you think my life of fourteen-year-old prostitution-death-by-twenty is here to serve your need to know where you are all the time when you never know where you are any of the time?
Is this okay for you to force me into servitude for your colonial consumerism?
I know its long distance and collect but really who is paying the price here?
***************************************************************************************
junebug asks mcoyote: Who wrote this poem above that you posted?
I actually dream of a world without technology or the internal combustion engine. The forest calls. It's this type 0, hunter-gatherer blood of mine. It's the oldest blood on the planet. I envision typing my last words on this laptop sometime soon, burying it under a pile of fallen leaves and drifting into the mists and mosses of my ancestors hunting grounds. Trust is a beautiful thing.
I wrote that poem junebug.
You are free to re-post or read it in any setting anywhere and anytime you wish.
Did you read Ensler's article? I suspect not. From the article:
"At the root is a madly greedy world economy, desperate for more minerals robbed from the indigenous Congolese. Sourcing this insatiable hunger are multinational corporations who benefit from these minerals and are willing to turn their backs on the players committing femicide and genocide, as long as their financial needs are met."
Yes, I read the article. I suggest you re-read it as well as read her older articles. Once you've done this also read the 100+ other articles that I have over the last 5 years or so on the reality and history of what is happening in The Congo.
Once you've done this get back to me.
Eve Ensler has in no way at no time given context to what is happening and ultimately gives us a misrepresentation of how what has been happening came to pass.
I too suggest people read this article. IT the same old , wherein Western Multinationals finance murder and plunder in order to gain control over a nations resources.
DRC’s “war” after the Second Congo War is among other things driven by the control of conflict minerals and other natural resources as well as tribal animosities. The West including the US are quiet about the atrocities committed within Congo for the DRC government is pro-West and allows the West to exploit the natural resources such as coltan (source of tantalum), Cassitelite (source of tin) and wolfamite(source of tungsten) which are indispensable for the modern civilization: hearing aids, pacemakers. airbags, GPS, ignition system, anti-lock breaking system laptop computers, mobile phones, video game consoles, video cameras, digital cameras, any products which have tin, any electronic devices which have circuit boards and wide variety of electronic devices including Blackberris - all these items require at least one of the above elements.
One way to mitigate the conflict is for the world to boycott all these devices which use the conflict minerals from Congo.
The Congo Conflict Minerals Act of 2009 introduced by Sam Brownback(R-KS) in 04/09 which requires electronics companies to verify and disclose their sources of cassiterite, wolframite, and tantalum is languishing in committee since 04/09.
This tragedy will not be solved until “those-who-let-us-exploit their-coveted-natural-resources- and-population-as-cheap-source-of- labor-and-let-us-build-our-military-bases-are-our-friends” policy is changed.
I'd need a long time to say something really useful about gang-rapes in lawless zones such as the Congo.
My father probably committed statutory rape. He lost his job and disappeared. The rest of my family never saw him again, ever. Decades have passed and he's still alive.
The reason that the U.S. isn't the Congo is first, that we're not a war zone with battalions of young men cooped up in barracks or out killing. For many of us, women date men because we're steady relationship / marriage material, where we have trust-based relationships.
Second, because there are consequences to rape. My father apparently continued until he got caught.
I'm sorry you and your sibs and mum had to go through that. I'm sure you could have done without the social, emotional, and economic burdens his behavior imposed on you all.
What's it to be? The Lysistrata method or shall we identify Y chromosomes very early on and terminate?
There are additional comments on CD from me and others about rape following the article "Sex Death Apocalypse iPhone 4".
Joe
Why the Congo? The DRC is home to 80% of the world's coltan reserves. Coltan is used to make pinhead capacitors - an essential component in mobile phones.
Congo is proof that those nations that claim to be the civilized powers of the world are in fact the opposite; they are the guardians and bankrollers of hell. While these men live, let no one dare speak of morality as anything other than a wishful hypothetical. Certainly, it does not exist anywhere in Congo.
Blood tantalum
It is a far cry from the drama of the "No blood on my cell phone" campaign that a group of NGOs and religious communities have launched in Europe to lobby for an embargo on so called "blood tantalum", the colombo-tantalite ore that comes from the war zones in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Tantalum is essential in the manufacture of electrical components known as pinhead capacitors.
These regulate voltage and store energy in mobile phones, tens of millions of which have been sold in the past few years.
1. The Congo is a central storehouse of strategic minerals for the functioning of modern society, particularly as it relates to the mining and technology sectors.
2. The Congo sits in the heart of Africa and is bordered by NINE other countries, therefore as the Congo goes so does the rest of Africa.
3. The Congo has a history of being pillaged and the people being used as fodder in a rush for natural resources. The Belgian king, Leopold II, ruled over a death chamber from 1885 - 1908, when conservative estimates put the number of Congolese dying as a result of Leopold's personal rule at 10 million. During Leopold's era the resources at the root of the suffering of the Congolese were ivory and rubber, today it is coltan, tin, diamonds, gold and copper to name a few.
4. Western nations under the auspices of the cold war assassinated an elected nationalist leader (Patrice Lumumba) and put in place a brutal dictator (Mobutu Sese Soko) and propped him up for 37 years while he brutalized the Congolese people and systematically stole the riches of the country.
==========
Worth its Weight in Gold
Coltan - which is found in 3 billion-year-old soils, like those in the Rift Valley region of middle Africa, western Australia and central Asia - has become a critical raw material in high-tech manufacturing. The tantalum extracted from the ore is used mainly to make tantalum capacitors, tiny components that manage the flow of current in electronic devices. Many semiconductors also use a thin layer of tantalum as a protective barrier between other metal coatings. The metal, which is also found in other minerals and can be extracted as a byproduct of tin refining, is used in the airline, chemical, pharmaceutical and automotive industries as well.
The market for the material is huge. Last year, about 6.6 million pounds of tantalum was used around the world, 60 percent finding its way into the electronics industry, where it can be found in products like mobile phones, computers, game consoles and camcorders. (The United States is the largest consumer of tantalum in the world, accounting for 40 percent of global demand.)
In 2000, demand for tantalum capacitors exploded in tandem with the mobile phone and PC markets, causing a severe shortage. Tantalum ore prices shot up, with per-pound charges for refined powder climbing from less than $50 to a peak of over $400 at the end of last year. Today, with demand softening worldwide, prices have fallen to around $100 a pound.
In response to the increased demand, coltan miners all over the world increased production. In the Congo region, both legitimate and rogue coltan merchants joined the rush. The boom brought in as much as $20 million a month to rebel groups, as well as independent factions, who were trading coltan mined mostly from northeastern Congo, according to the U.N. report. That money helps fuel the war.
"The holocaust in the Congo is a collective crime by all of the Euro-American mineral extraction industries and the governments that serve them."
Clearly, it is time to dump the cellular telephone. I don't need to be all that accessible anyway.
I bought one for emergency/travel use. I don't expect ever to buy another.
I also bought a headset, since microwaving my brain doesn't appeal. Seeing how many people unconcernedly keep their little RF generators clamped to their heads, I can't help but wonder what sort of horrors are in our future.
Something you don't want to hear or know.
Rape is a characteristic of the animal kingdom. It was coded into the DNA of living creatures before the arrival and reign of the dinosaurs. One motto of Nature is: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Since Nature does not pity one gender more than another it has seen no reason to fix rape. For DNA, it works. It works by an intricate combination of biochemistry and neuronal wiring of the ancient brain stem. The only animal force older than rape is aggression for killing and eating, and aggression rapidly became useful for successful copulation. If we could get into a Time Machine and go back a million years to thwart one single act of primate rape - - what would we find when we return the Time Machine to the present? Human beings? How many? This has been a popular theme of science fiction.
Recently evolved Homo Sapiens have a neocortex which is tissue thin and weakly connected to the paleocortext yet is expected to amend the wrongs of yesterbillions. Codes of "humanity and decency" battle almost three BILLION years of evolution.
HEADS UP. During that time the phenomenon of MALE rape became established in many species, pinapeds among them. A defeated Beachmaster sea lion or walrus will usually bleed to death from being repeatedly sodomized by younger males - who do not divide into "bad males" and "good males".
I have a base level of genuine compassion for women victims of rape. But I reserve my highest level of compassion for female rape victims who have the ability to 1) disconnect male rape from spurious identity, 2) feel the same empathy for a male as a female victim of rape, 3) admit that forcible, unwanted, internal violation by some object other than a penis is rape. THEN we have a basis to talk.
"We have met the enemy and they are US" - Walt Kelly. Forget Speccial Penis Cops. Rape is going to continue to characterize Homo sapiens unless and until our species goes extinct due to cosmic accident or nukes, or when the object we call the Sun goes Supernova. I wish this was not so.
Trylon
More context:
Guns, Money and Cell Phones
By Kristi Essick
The Industry Standard Magazine
Issue Date: Jun 11 2001
The demand for cell phones and computer chips is helping fuel a bloody civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The substance for sale wasn't cocaine or top-grade opium. It was an ore called Columbite-tantalite - coltan for short - one of the world's most sought-after materials. Refine coltan and you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. It sells for $100 a pound, and it's becoming increasingly vital to modern life. For the high-tech industry, tantalum is magic dust, a key component in everything from mobile phones made by Nokia (NOK) and Ericsson and computer chips from Intel (INTC) to Sony (SNE) stereos and VCRs.
Worth its Weight in Gold
Coltan - which is found in 3 billion-year-old soils, like those in the Rift Valley region of middle Africa, western Australia and central Asia - has become a critical raw material in high-tech manufacturing. The tantalum extracted from the ore is used mainly to make tantalum capacitors, tiny components that manage the flow of current in electronic devices. Many semiconductors also use a thin layer of tantalum as a protective barrier between other metal coatings. The metal, which is also found in other minerals and can be extracted as a byproduct of tin refining, is used in the airline, chemical, pharmaceutical and automotive industries as well.
The market for the material is huge. Last year, about 6.6 million pounds of tantalum was used around the world, 60 percent finding its way into the electronics industry, where it can be found in products like mobile phones, computers, game consoles and camcorders. (The United States is the largest consumer of tantalum in the world, accounting for 40 percent of global demand.)
The demand for coltan is not going away. As global consumers continue to crave the newest cell phone and the latest computer, high-tech companies will continue to pay top dollar for tantalum capacitors, and their suppliers will continue to take tantalum from wherever it is available. Whether an unregulated industry can effectively police itself based on good faith and written assurances is questionable. But one thing is sure: The links between the cell phones and computers we use every day and the devastation taking place now in the Congo can no longer be ignored.
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa.asp
_________________
Those who don't have the time to go through the entire article or dig into history books, might consider going through the 3 minute long video below. They'll be sure to recognize the men greeting the dictator of Congo in their office over a 30+ year long period between 1:53 and 2:00:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkRrMsSUJ0I
http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/congo.htm
ARMS TRADE RESOURCE CENTER
REPORTS - Weapons at War - January 2000
Deadly Legacy:
U.S. Arms to Africa and the Congo War
by William D. Hartung and Bridget Moix of the Arms Trade Resource Center
...
Major Findings
Finding 1 – Due to the continuing legacies of its Cold War policies toward Africa, the U.S. bears some responsibility for the cycles of violence and economic problems plaguing the continent. Throughout the Cold War (1950-1989), the U.S. delivered over $1.5 billion worth of weaponry to Africa. Many of the top U.S. arms clients – Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC) – have turned out to be the top basket cases of the 1990s in terms of violence, instability, and economic collapse.
Finding 2 – The ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) is a prime example of the devastating legacy of U.S. arms sales policy on Africa. The U.S. prolonged the rule of Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Soko by providing more than $300 million in weapons and $100 million in military training. Mobutu used his U.S.-supplied arsenal to repress his own people and plunder his nation’s economy for three decades, until his brutal regime was overthrown by Laurent Kabila’s forces in 1997. When Kabila took power, the Clinton administration quickly offered military support by developing a plan for new training operations with the armed forces.
Finding 3 – Although the Clinton administration has been quick to criticize the governments involved in the Congo War, decades of U.S. weapons transfers and continued military training to both sides of the conflict have helped fuel the fighting. The U.S. has helped build the arsenals of eight of the nine governments directly involved in the war that has ravaged the DRC since Kabila’s coup. U.S. military transfers in the form of direct government-to-government weapons deliveries, commercial sales, and International Military Education and Training (IMET) to the states directly involved have totaled more than $125 million since the end of the Cold War.
Finding 4 – Despite the failure of U.S. polices in the region, the current administration continues to respond to Africa’s woes by helping to strengthen African militaries. As U.S. weapons deliveries to Africa continue to rise, the Clinton administration is now undertaking a wave of new military training programs in Africa. Between 1991-1998, U.S. weapons and training deliveries to Africa totaled more than $227 million. In 1998 alone, direct weapons transfers and IMET training totaled $20.1 million. And, under the Pentagon’s Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, U.S. special forces have trained military personnel from at least 34 of Africa’s 53 nations, including troops fighting on both sides of the DRC’s civil war – from Rwanda and Uganda (supporting the rebels) to Zimbabwe and Namibia (supporting the Kabila regime).
Finding 5 – Even as it fuels military build-up, the U.S. continues cutting development assistance to Africa and remains unable (or unwilling) to promote alternative non-violent forms of engagement. While the U.S. ranks number one in global weapons exports, it falls dead last among industrialized nations in providing non-military foreign aid to the developing world. In 1997, the U.S. devoted only 0.09% of GNP to international development assistance, the lowest proportion of all developed countries. U.S. development aid to all of sub-Saharan Africa dropped to just $700 million in recent years.
...
I. INTRODUCTION
In 1998, Africa suffered 11 major armed conflicts, more than any other continent. For the first time since 1989, Africa is the world’s most war-torn region.[1] In this decade alone, 32 African countries have experienced violent conflict, and many of those face continuing civil war or the looming threat of renewed fighting.[2] Notably, most of the African countries engaged in serious conflict over the past fifty years have also been the recipients of U.S. weapons and training. Throughout the Cold War (1950-1989), the U.S. delivered over $1.5 billion worth of weaponry to Africa.[3]
Military aid and training, covert weapons shipments, and political and financial backing poured in, as the war against communism was played out on African soil. In the process, the U.S. propped up corrupt dictators, armed some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, and fueled violent conflict. In fact, many of the top U.S. arms clients of the Cold War – Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, and Zaire (now the DRC) – have turned out to be the top basket cases of the 1990s in terms of violence, instability, and economic collapse.
Often, the U.S. offered weapons and military assistance to a repressive government with one hand while raising the other in the name of securing democracy and promoting stability. Inevitably, somewhere down the line the regime collapses, and U.S. policy-makers are left struggling to re-write their lines. Once a new government takes power, the cycle reemerges with the same old offers of U.S. military training to help "secure democracy." Despite the astounding regularity with which the policy of arming African governments has failed, U.S. policy-makers have been unable (or unwilling) to develop effective non-military forms of engagement.
...
Not surprisingly, the U.S. has provided weapons and training to most of the players in the Congo conflict.