We Did Nothing
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 @ 23:33
Why the Truth Doesn’t Always Come Out When the UN Goes In
by Linda Polman (1997)
“One of the most affecting pieces of writing about man’s inhumanity this side of Primo Levi,” so the Guardian quipped, while I wonder whether the reviewer has actually ever read Levi’s works. Because to sum it up: this book is everything that Levi’s are not.
With its common horrifying-slash-absurd images of “humanitarian” movements gone wrong (as always), you get the feeling of someone who’s only dipped her toe on the beach but saying that she’s wrestled with sharks in the ocean. Her main point, i.e. that “the UN” is not an independent, all-powerful entity but one whose goals, fundings and decisions are determined by Member States (often heavily slanted to the Fabulous Fifteen (or Five)), seems like something any considerably well-read, well-informed (or just critical) person should know that I wonder how she could still get bewildered by it, let alone writing gratuitous sob stories about feeding malnourished and wounded victimes in Rwanda while humming “We are the world.”
While there’s a difference between reading about it or watching it from the tube in a safe distance and being there viewing it first hand, I still find her amazement and caricaturish reduction, especially considering her journalistic career, incredibly annoying if not unbelievably naive. There are plenty of dialogues and actions that are meant to be funny in that absurd way, but they just end up cheesy like a worse text version of Apocalypse Now.
Her other main points, the racism and how “the West is providing the canons, the Third World the fodder”, i.e. how all the dirty works were left to the “Third World” contingents because for poor countries blue helmets have become an income generating export product and they are desperate for some “recognition” are, well, “d-uh?” If say people still do need to read more than a hundred pages to tell them those facts that have been staring at their faces from TV and newspaper, then at least please spare us the cheap wanton didactism.
Buy from Amazon.com (if you insist, but I’ll send you mine if you want, gratis)
May 12th, 2006 01:10
[…] New reviews at books @ cc. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb. Challenges the common assumptions of the Victorian age as a tabloid image of homophobic hell populated by mean-spirited, fearful and envious ignoramuses from which gay people eventually liberated themselves. Jump: and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer. No-cadence stories of (moral and psychological tensions of) life in a racially-divided country written with seemingly no committed specific political ideologies. As expected of Gordimer. We Did Nothing: Why the Truth Doesn’t Always Come Out When the UN Goes In by Linda Polman. Common horrifying-slash-absurd images of “humanitarian” movements gone wrong (as always). If anyone wants the book, I’ll ship it to you gladly. The Balkans by Mark Mazower. A short but broad-ranging history book, challenging the common one-dimensional stereotype of “the Balkans”. […]