Joe,

I applaud your call. But it will not be answered. Today's illiberal, Marxist left views Christianity and Judaism as ideologies to be eradicated. They never saw the slaughter in Sudan as genocide. They say it as egg-breaking.

Joe,

I applaud your call. But it will not be answered. Today's illiberal, Marxist left views Christianity and Judaism as ideologies to be eradicated. They never saw the slaughter in Sudan as genocide. They saw it as egg-breaking.

>>Repeat after me, folks: Christians are people, too - people whose human/religious rights and sufferings are worthy of our attention.

The trick here is understanding that the evils of Christianity can be safely removed without killing Christians. Most anti-Christianity people, just like the anti-Judaism and anti-Islam folks, haven't quite figured that out yet.

>>Today's illiberal, Marxist left views Christianity and Judaism as ideologies to be eradicated.

The problem here is that the Marxists are right: Christianity and Judaism are dangerously insane worldviews whose propagation leads to great human misery. Just like Marxism.

Nobody can see that their own particular nutso religion is dangerous. If they could, they'd likely try to change it.

Here's War Nerd's take on things

Reader Safety Tip: War Nerd is a true Disciple of War. He wants more war and more killing. He likes war so much that he considers lying and deception about the true nature of war to be blasphemous. Keep that in mind.

Boy, you really love this game of "which liberal is ignoring some horror somewhere?:

Why the difference?

Let's ask Samantha Powers herself!

I think most of us who have thought about Sudan over the course of the last two decades have thought about the conflict, indeed even the potential genocide there, as being one in which the Muslim government, the National Islamic Front government has taken aim at Christians in the South, and that is where a major peace process has actually taken hold between those two entities. But what you have in Darfur, which has, has confused people, because it doesn't fit the mold of what we understand the ethnic conflict in Sudan to be about, is actually Muslim on Muslim violence.

And then:

In this instance, this Khartoum government's killing and ethnic cleansing of these African Sudanese Muslims is very, very inconvenient. It comes at a time when Washington, it seems, is on the verge of having secured a, a peace agreement between Khartoum and the Christian south that would have been a real feather in the cap of this administration.

And finally:
the title of my book is A Problem from Hell, and that was Warren Christopher's characterization of the violence in Bosnia. It was a problem from hell.

You see, Samantha Power was a reporter for U.S. News & World Report, the Economist, and the Boston Globe in Yugoslavia during the 90s. So that's why her book was primarily about Bosnia with lessons drawn from other conflicts.

The outside world had known that the Armenians were at grave risk well before Talaat and the Young Turk leadership ordered their deportation. When Turkey entered World War I on the side of Germany against Britain, France, and Russia, Talaat made it clear that the empire would target its Christian subjects. In January 1915, in remarks reported by the New York Times, Talaat said that there was no room for Christians in Turkey and that their supporters should advise them to clear out. By late March Turkey had begun disarming Armenian men serving in the Ottoman army. On April 25, 1915, the day the Allies invaded Turkey, Talaat ordered the roundup and execution of some 250 leading Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople. In each of Turkey's six eastern provinces, local Armenian notables met roughly the same fate. Armenian men in rural areas were initially enlisted as pack animals to transport Turkish supplies to the front, but soon even this was deemed too dignified an existence for the traitorous Christians. Churches were desecrated. Armenian schools were closed, and those teachers who refused to convert to Islam were killed. All over Anatolia the authorities posted deportation orders requiring the Armenians to relocate to camps prepared in the deserts of Syria. In fact, the Turkish authorities knew that no facilities had been prepared, and more than half of the deported Armenians died on the way. "By continuing the deportation of the orphans to their destinations during the intense cold," Talaat wrote, "we are ensuring their eternal rest."

But then, in 2003 she co-signed a letter in the NYRB about repression in Cuba. You see, Cubans are Catholic. And Catholics are Christians.

Here she is worried about ethnic cleansing in Burundi and Sudan:
I am very concerned about the green light that Vladimir Putin has been given regarding Chechnya. I worry about the Indonesian military offensive against Aceh. And Burundi, which shares Rwanda's ethnic demographic, is always a worry. Much abuse is currently being justified by the need to "fight terrorism." This can be a smokescreen that U.S. officials and officials and citizens in other countries should be very wary of. The Bush administration seems to be quite concerned about Burundi and, owing to the threat to the Christian population there, Sudan. But neither country is getting high level attention, and it is unclear whether the U.S. still has the legitimacy internationally to rally diplomatic or eventually military coalitions to service the cause of genocide prevention.

But ultimately, she says, you have to focus:
I think as citizens, because there are so many places (Chechnya, Indonesia, Sudan, Burundi, Zimbabwe) where one could imagine genocide, it is important to focus on one or two places and try to make whatever small but significant difference we can make by concentrating our energies.

So, she concentrated on Bosnia, finished her book, and is now concentrating on Darfur.

More from Poynter.org:

When a country's been shattered by 20 years of violence, editors get numb, Buckley suggested. "Back in the late 1990s," he said, "I would get desperate calls from aid workers, saying, 'This is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world right now.' And perhaps it was. The problem was that they were saying that every 18 months, or every couple years. So I don't doubt that there is a profound humanitarian crisis in the Sudan. I'm sure it is absolutely staggering there. But my point is that it is very difficult to keep people's attention focused on a story like Sudan, because it goes on and on."

And later:

"The definition of news," said Stephen Buckley, "and I'm going to speak in very crass terms here, is news -- is new. What's new? So when a conflict has been going on for a couple of decades, it's really hard to keep people's interest."

Things have been bad in Sudan for quite a long time. And the slaughter of thousands is hardly new. In "A Problem from Hell," Power described the current crisis in Darfur before it ever happened — confusing "ethnic conflicts"; politicians hesitant to speak too loudly, lest they disturb a sensitive political situation; corrupt governments spreading lies, excuses, and misinformation; lack of access to the affected areas — over and over again, in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere.
So there you have it.

#28050 Posted by T. J. Madison,

Hi T. J. Madison, you obviously cannot see the danger of yours:-)

>>Hi T. J. Madison, you obviously cannot see the danger of yours:-)

That's not strictly true. As I've mentioned before, my fellow atheists Mao and Stalin weren't the nicest of people.

I'd be the first to admit that my nutso religion (empiricism) is extremely dangerous. In many ways, it's the most dangerous religion in that by design, it generates the most accurate predictive models of all the world views. Thus its disciples wield incredible power. Since attempts to empirically derive moral principles often lead to ghastly conclusions, the potential for destruction on a vast scale is high.

#28056 Posted by T. J. Madison,

Thanks T. J. Madison! Just couldn't resist poking you in the eye about that but you deflected it admirably:-)

And don't forget Hitler, the pro-active evolutionist.

The map http://www.oakparkgop.org/emap.asp and statistics have been linked often. I would like to point out that in the red there are 'Christian' groups that follow the teachings of Christ to the extend that the "Average Murder per 100,000" is, you guessed it, 0.00. We should be careful about knocking success. These Christians beliefs will never lead to great human misery. They actually lead to good living, even good produce(food), good businesses, taking care of the necessities of life in abundance, etc. All I'm suggesting is that no 'Christian' group (following the teachings of Christ) gets lumped under the politicized version of which you, they and I oppose.

Praktike,

Many thanks for the display of Googling skills. Soon you will be eligible to imprint your business cards with the coveted "new media" seal of approval!

This Google cache of William Wallis' lengthy 8/21/04 Financial Times investigative report on the "Black Book" is essential background on the Darfur tragedy. I have not seen this material discussed elsewhere, though Samantha Powers may cover some of it. Alas, FT's material is subscriber-only, and the cache link will rot.

Praktike did more than just display Googling skills. The reasons for not covering Sudan earlier still seem like rationalizations to me, but they expand the dimensions of the "why no coverage" issue in interesting ways. Praktike has also gone out and documented a wider pattern of coverage by Ms. Powers. This is a worthy response to my question, and the form a proper answer needed to take.

Meanwhile... folks, follow AMac's link too. Very interesting.

AMac, you're welcome.

Joe, I look forward to your follow-up.

The trackbacks didn't work for some reason - my take is here

I'm with Joe on the rationalizations; "it wasn't convenient for me to get there and cover a million people getting murdered for religious reasons because Bosnia was more important" is lame. One would assume big media outlets like the Economist and US News had/have other reporters who could have covered it.

We're not talking 10 people, or 50, or even 500. 1,000,000 people .... that's getting into Pol Pot territory. Stalin's dictum applies, but defending that world view is not something I'd be proud to shout from the rooftops. Or in a comment section of a weblog. YMMV.

I've been thinking on what's so notable about Powers' New Yorker piece, and also the Wallis FT essay. Well, they are long, so the authors got to explore facets of the story that are usually left out. But that's not it: a few thoughts in rough-draft form follow.

There's almost a formula that the mainstream media follows for certain foreign-affairs subjects. These are the reports that cover sick, starving, or endangered third-world people in obscure places. Might be Zimbabwe, South Sudan, Nepal, North Korea, or New Guinea. Or Darfur. The premises run something like this:

--People who are not-like-us (Christian, white, and Western) are in a terrible plight.
--The situation is complicated.
--The US government's efforts to help, if any, are ineffective.
--On-the-scene NGO spokesmen have a clear view of what the US government should do to resolve the situation peacefully.
--The US isn't willing to do enough to help.
--So the brave and tragic third-worlders soldier on as best they can, into an uncertain future.

NPR reporters are masters of this genre. Here's a recent entry from Darfur (I lack audio; hope this is the right one).

Some notes on the format.

--The use of passive grammatical constructions. "Tens of thousands have been killed in the western region of Sudan, victims of ethnic cleansing and civil unrest."

--While Bad Guys are present, it's a puzzle to the reporter exactly who they are, what they are doing, and why they act as they do. Fairness and neutrality demands the use of qualifiers like "allegedly" and "claim," unless a conviction in court has been obtained, or a videotaped confession. Balance means an equal-time rebuttal for every accusation.

--At first glance the problem might seem to have local origins, but the chain of causation leads back to American, or at least Western, responsibility.

--While they are ruggedly independent free thinkers, the interviewed NGO workers and academics can all agree on some things, including the culpability of past and present US policy, and the maddening fact that the US could, even at this late date, take simple steps that would alleviate suffering and solve the problem. While the steps are simple and obvious, they are at the same time just barely outside of the scope of the report. But, as news-consumers, we can rest assured that the reporter has vetted the steps for their clear moral and practical impact.

To their credit, Powers, and also Wallis, aren't employing this post-modern reporting recipe. There actually are local circumstances that matter. People are acting with intention to starve and murder their countrymen, and they have clear reasons for doing so.

Powers understands that the Sudanese government and many of their Army and janjaweed supporters have grasped the form-over-substance failures of the mainstream media, and are able to exploit reporters' ignorance and ideological blind spots.

The Khartoum Islamists understand the value of keeping the media focus on the plight of the disposessed, the impersonal and mysterious agencies that caused it, and the urgent sympathies of the good-hearted and photogenic Westerners Who Care.

The perpetrators understand the governing principal behind hostage-taking: anything outsiders do to address the root causes of the problem will dramatically worsen the plight of today's victims.

Understanding of international issues may become a question of which readers and listeners and viewers have developed the skepticism and experience to disbelieve the corrosive 'meta-message' of much of the foreign-affairs coverage of NPR, Reuters, NBC, et al. The New Yorker is a deeply conventional Left publication, but they have done a web-log-like service in providing this honest analysis of Darfur's genocide-in-progress.

Ok. So lots and lots of people are dying in Darfur. Now, what are we, PERSONALLY, going to do about it?

Is USMC listening? How hard would it be to get a mercenary company together to defend some of these people? Can any of these people be evacuated to someplace safer? How big a pile of money would we (the people who read this blog) need to assemble to implement some limited solution to this problem?

Let's say we only manage to evacuate one guy out of this hellhole. Well, that's one more guy alive than would be otherwise.

An estimated 300,000 Somalis died of starvation during the year of civil war that followed dictator Siad Barre's 1991 ouster.

US Presidents George HW Bush and William J Clinton as much as said, "Ok. So lots and lots of people are dying in Mogadishu. Now, what are we, PERSONALLY, going to do about it?"

Somebody ought to write a book about the unintended consequences of this sort of decision.

Has succumbing to the temptations of an American-military-quick-fix siren song ever played into the hands of our enemies?

The perpetrators--Mogadishu, Darfur, elsewhere--understand the governing principal behind hostage-taking.

I'm not saying that USG military intervention is a good idea. Besides, they're a little busy now. It may also not be possible for us to "fix" the problem entirely. Maybe we could make a difference at the margins, get a few people out, keep a village or two from being sacked, help protect food shipments, etc.

Bush and Clinton only had an inept, unaccountable bureaucracy at their disposal. Surely we can do better.

T.J., you miss the point. This isn't about inept, unaccountable bureaucracies. It's about the meaning of "better."

[Ironically, perhaps, given the tone and content of other of your WoC posts, your argument for intervention in Sudan is strikingly similar to the humanitarian argument laid out by leftists Christopher Hitchens and Norman Geras in support of Bush's Iraq policy.]

For you and me, "better" means "fewer innocent people displaced, raped, and murdered, and perpetrators punished."

For the Khartoum government and their Islamist and Arab League supporters, "better" means "less Crusader meddling in dar-al-Islam."

For the ruling elites that run most world governments (and the UN), "better" means "inviolability of national frontiers respected at all costs, and US hegemonistic adventurism frustrated."

The tragedy of Darfur is not that we (the US--the West--the world) couldn't do anything about it. It's that we could, but only at the cost of initiating another B'rer Rabbit/Tar Baby round of conflict with the Islamic world.

The meta-tragedy is that so many Westerners misunderstand the actual root causes of this tragedy, while our adversaries--the ones sponsoring the ongoing robbery, murder, and rape--understand it perfectly well. As is made clear in the Powers and the Wallis articles.

Anyway, thanks for responding.

>>your argument for intervention in Sudan is strikingly similar to the humanitarian argument laid out by leftists Christopher Hitchens and Norman Geras in support of Bush's Iraq policy.

I'm not interested in government intervention in Sudan. I'm interested in our intervention in Sudan. As in you, me, Mr. Katzman, Mr. Farber, etc. The people here reading this right now. Us personally. Not Colin Powell, not George Bush. My claim is that we, the participants of this blog, should come up with a plan of action to make the situation in Sudan microscopically less awful. Otherwise all this talk about genocide will only serve to get us depressed and pissed off to no good effect.

>>For you and me, "better" means "fewer innocent people displaced, raped, and murdered, and perpetrators punished."

Yes. Exactly. We are in complete agreement here.

>>For the Khartoum government and their Islamist and Arab League supporters, "better" means "less Crusader meddling in dar-al-Islam."

Of course. These people are known scum.

>>For the ruling elites that run most world governments (and the UN), "better" means "inviolability of national frontiers respected at all costs, and US hegemonistic adventurism frustrated."

Certainly. Most of these people are also scum.

>>The meta-tragedy is that so many Westerners misunderstand the actual root causes of this tragedy, while our adversaries--the ones sponsoring the ongoing robbery, murder, and rape--understand it perfectly well. As is made clear in the Powers and the Wallis articles.

Yes, there are extremely evil people behind the Sudan situation. Yes, they know how to manipulate the situation and snow the media schmucks. The problem remains: what are we personally going to do about this? If the answer is nothing, then whay does it matter what the quality of the reporting is?

Wretchard's comments on the Ossetian schoolchild hostage situation are apropos here.

What can we personally do? First, donate to relief agencies that provide real, substantial humanitarian aid. Not only does this help people in desperate need, it frees up local capital to buy weapons and fight the Islamofascists. Second, donate to organizations that advocate on behalf of these people and against the Islamofascists. Third, do what you can to make people aware of what is happening. Send news tips to interested bloggers and journalists. (But be careful not to be a pest!) Be willing to debate the issue. Do what little things you can to move public opinion away from appeasment and toward a militant intolerance for Arab-/Islamic-barbarism. Today we can hope to microscopically reduce suffering, and in the long run to make our enemies macroscopically less alive.