Is It Better Not to Know? - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

mixedmedia · 01-07-2007, 07:16 PM

I just watched Hotel Rwanda last night and a discussion I had afterwards with my boyfriend got me to thinking...and I've continued to think about it since, so I thought I'd open the concept up to the thoughtful assemblage here.

After watching the movie, I logged on to talk to PW for a few minutes, as we do most nights, and, of course, I was deeply affected by the film so naturally the subject entered our conversation and after commenting on how much I admired the film I started talking about the Rwandan genocide in general and the things that I've learned about it from reading. About the horror of learning about the scope of the massacre for the first time and the shame I felt when I realized how utterly negligent the west's reaction to it was. That my president, Bill Clinton, was in office when it happened thus permanently dispelling my illusion that there was a compulsion towards justice and human rights in the US Democratic Party. Largely contributing to my present political state of not really trusting the efficacy and finer intentions of my chosen political party on any but a superficial, lip service level of commitment. For all the big talk and finger pointing going on towards the Bush administration and their ME Follies Grand Tour, I don't know if it is much worse than pretending to care about the fate of the citizens in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories only as long as it's a politically viable thing to do.

Which brings me to my next sub-issue. I have done a lot of reading...I've read about so much of the horribly, breathtakingly brutal ways in which mankind has turned on itself and performed the unthinkable on its once peaceful neighbors. I have seen pictures of mass slaughter, brutalized women and disfigured children. Appalling stories and images of refugee camps full of disease and deprivation. These things impact me very deeply and can haunt me literally for years causing me tears, grief, sleepless nights and GUILT. Not in a debilitating way, just to intercede in case you are wondering. I am not crippled by these thoughts. Believe it or not, I am generally a very happy and optimistic person as ridiculous as that may sound.

So, back to the conversation last night. I was relaying some of this to PW last night who is not a very political or particularly well-informed American - like so many of us - and we got to talking about whether or not it is better to know these things. At first my reaction was "of course, it's better to know." But is it really?

Here in America we are afforded a narcotic lifestyle like no other nation can match. Even our cultural lookalikes in Europe, and perhaps even Canada (maybe some of our Canadian comrades here can chime in on their own behalf), do not lead the same sheltered, consumption-obsessed lifestyle that we do. It is very easy to live your entire life here and know next to nothing about how people are suffering the unthinkable at the very same time we are shopping for the best buy on a new flat screen television for the bedroom or considering whether to go with XM or Sirius satellite radio in the new Ford Expedition parked out in the driveway. Now, of course, I am generalizing to make a point, I know not all of us can afford to live that way (I know I can't!) but still, even the most disadvantaged of us are vulnerable to our own anesthetic distractions.

After dwelling on this for the better part of a day, I have come to the conclusion (for myself) that I would rather know. If anything, being aware of these things at the very least means that one more person is paying attention. Even if, most of the time, I don't feel there is anything I can do about it BUT pay attention. These people - men, women and children - deserve to be grieved for. And I do grieve for them.

So what is your opinion?

Do you think it is better to fully comprehend the mess the world is in and accept the psychic consequences that will sometimes make you feel very sad, angry, guilty, and impotent as well as handicap your full engagement with the American way of life?

Or, to go along with the status quo, absorbing only the information disseminated to you through our media outlets because there is nothing you can do about so why torture yourself?

Or, is this all just a bunch of bleeding heart bullshit? If so it's okay, I can take it.

Ourcrazymodern? · 01-07-2007, 07:38 PM

It's never better not to know. Insulated in the midst of the continent, it seems just the land we live on. Can one feel the herbicides wreaking havoc on us, or radioactives, or even VOC's? It's never better not to know but I think we might worry too much.

Sweetpea · 01-07-2007, 07:47 PM

ignoring the injustices in the world won't make them go away.

and nothing you can do? a common and apathetic misconception. (not that you are apathetic mixedmedia, i don't think you are, rather, we have a culture of apathy)

everyone has a voice in this world, feeding that voice knowledge is the only way to make any kind of change.

What occured in Rwanda is now similarily occuring in Darfur.
one can learn further in this article: http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/aler...FSKJYAodLzLkuQ

i'm in social work, myself and my peers can't help to change every single issue in the world, I recognize that and have for a long time. It's overwhelming to want to make change on every single issue in this world.

However, what I suggested is: pick an issue that stirs you, and do your best to affect any kind of change on that issue, however small you might think your actions are, they do make a difference, write your senators, volunteer, give money, give your time, do whatever you can and spread the word on your chosen issue. Education is power.

so in short. yeah, I'd like to know about what's occuring in our world good
and bad. I owe it to myself and I owe it to my existence here.

this is not to say I don't enjoy my life and the things I have that millions in this world do not, aka. adequate shelter, clean food, medicine; not to mention such things as T.V., pets, hobbies.

the average american is so incredibly lucky in what we take for granted. I don't feel it handicaps me to know this fact, I don't feel it takes away from my enjoyment of the things I have, it does stir me to at least do my part at times to make something positive and give back the good fortune I have.

sweetpea

ASU2003 · 01-07-2007, 08:14 PM

I think that everything that happens in the world should be reported, not just the things that get ratings or promote someone's agenda.

http://www.projectcensored.org/ - There is a lot of things that don't get the coverage they deserve in the mainstream media.

The problem is trying to see both sides of an event. And determining what happened and for what reason, without letting your opinions on who is the 'better' side impacting it.

Then again, I would love to move to a nice little place far away from anybody like in Northwestern Australia and forget that there are any problems in the world.

*Plus there are still a lot of problems right here in Amnerica that we don't bother to look at.

powerclown · 01-07-2007, 08:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixedmedia

I have done a lot of reading...I've read about so much of the horribly, breathtakingly brutal ways in which mankind has turned on itself and performed the unthinkable on its once peaceful neighbors. I have seen pictures of mass slaughter, brutalized women and disfigured children. Appalling stories and images of refugee camps full of disease and deprivation.

Me too. But you might want to leave the "World Misery" section next time you visit the local Borders bookstore. Same with the "Death Channel" on cable TV. I would recommend buying a Leibovitz/Sontag/Adams/O'Keefe/Weston/Cartier-Bresson/Ritts/Sterfeld/or Mapplethorpe photobook, for starters. Next, head over to the "Humor" section and pick up something funny.

As much negativity and misery as there is (and always will be) in life, I think there is an equal or greater amount of positivity and beauty.

Why not pay some attention to the latter?

mixedmedia · 01-07-2007, 09:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown

Me too. But you might want to leave the "World Misery" section next time you visit the local Borders bookstore. Same with the "Death Channel" on cable TV. I would recommend buying a Leibovitz/Sontag/Adams/O'Keefe/Weston/Cartier-Bresson/Ritts/Sterfeld/or Mapplethorpe photobook, for starters. Next, head over to the "Humor" section and pick up something funny.

As much negativity and misery as there is (and always will be) in life, I think there is an equal or greater amount of positivity and beauty.

Why not pay some attention to the latter?

Obviously you don't know me very well or else you'd know that I am a photography enthusiast with a fully charged sense of humor. I pay attention to positive and beautiful things all the time. If you could come to my house and peruse my bookshelves you might find that they are stock full with not only books of humor and photography (I love Sally Mann and Brassai, how about you?) but great literature, poetry, fine art, films, pin ups and sex.

Do you have any comments in relation to the questions I posed or are you just here to show me a good time and leave?

Willravel · 01-07-2007, 09:37 PM

I'd rather know, and I worry about someone who'd want to block that out. Ignorance is bliss because it's always blissful before things get bad. The world around you is your responsibility, and not paying attention is a great way for the world to go to hell in a handbasket.

SirLance · 01-07-2007, 09:45 PM

Hotel Rwanda very accuratly portrays what often happens in 3rd world countries. I was with 7th Special Forces before O&I school and 3rd Special Forces after, and spent a lot of time there (I mean Central America and Africa, not necessarily Rwanda). Much the same things happen as did in SE Asia, and the Middle East. The violence is sectarian, tribal in nature, and almost a way of life.

Is it better to know? Absolutely. How else can you make informed decsions about that next appeal for your money for the poor starving orphans? Let's suppose you have to choose between two organizations, and one might be doing serious work to overcome these kinds of problems in the 3rd world. If you know what's happening, you can act, even in small ways, to help alleviate. Let's suppose you might want to invest money in a fund that does capital investment in the third world.

Knowledge really is power, it is the power to conduct yourself in a manner that helps to achieve results.

It will take time, capital investment, education, good health care, but this kind of shit can be overcome.

Better to know. Definitely.

host · 01-07-2007, 09:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown

Me too. But you might want to leave the "World Misery" section next time you visit the local Borders bookstore. Same with the "Death Channel" on cable TV. I would recommend buying a Leibovitz/Sontag/Adams/O'Keefe/Weston/Cartier-Bresson/Ritts/Sterfeld/or Mapplethorpe photobook, for starters. Next, head over to the "Humor" section and pick up something funny.

As much negativity and misery as there is (and always will be) in life, I think there is an equal or greater amount of positivity and beauty.

Why not pay some attention to the latter?

powerclown, I could not disagree with you more....consider that "beauty" never has an uphill struggle to achieve exposure,

Quote:

http://www.louvreatlanta.org/en/home/

Louvre Atlanta is an unprecedented partnership between the High Museum of Art and the Musée du Louvre in Paris that will bring hundreds of works of art from the Louvre's collections to Atlanta. Built around specific themes and periods, the High will present a series of long-term special presentations of art from the Louvre beginning October 2006 through 2009....

but here, where I live, not wanting to know, can also mean not wanting to think, not wanting to empathize....

Quote:

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/livi...lwarbride.html
Georgia was an ocean apart from the life she knew . . .
Tens of thousands of British war brides came to the United States 60 years ago. One tells how she traded London life for Southern heat, civil rights protests — and snakes

By JIM AUCHMUTEY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/11/06

.....Betty knew a little about the South. She had seen "Gone With the Wind" at Leicester Square in London, but she realized there was more to the story. She also had read Lillian Smith's controversial book about lynching, "Strange Fruit."

"My father had some reservations about me coming to Georgia," she says. "He said there was going to be a lot of trouble there."

Father was right. His daughter was living in Albany when the trouble came years later during the civil rights protests of the early '60s. At one point, some people there wanted to close the library rather than desegregate it. McKemie circulated a petition to keep it open.

"A city without a library," she says, "would have been unthinkable."...

Quote:

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...&ct=clnk&cd=26
(page 31)

.....In 1969, the DeKalb County school district was directed to desegregate its schools, and
placed under judicial supervision by the District Court for Northern Georgia. In the 17 years that
followed, DeKalb complied with the desegregation mandate by (amongst other things):
implementing a voluntary student transfer program, reassigning teachers to achieve greater racial
balance, and establishing a neighborhood school attendance plan.
87
In 1986, believing that the
DeKalb district had achieved unitary status, petitioners returned to court, asking that the district
be released from judicial oversight. In making its determination, the District Court considered
whether the district had achieved unitary status in those areas outlined in Green. They also
considered a factor not included in the Green decision, namely the relative quality of education
offered to black and white students.
88...

Quote:

http://www.uexpress.com/asiseeit/ind..._date=20020426
04/26/2002
PHOTOGRAPHS OF LYNCHINGS BEAR SOMBER WITNESS TO BRUTAL PAST

There are Americans who still wish to deny, to equivocate, to dispute the savage history of American racism. They will not want to see "Without Sanctuary," an exhibition of gruesome photographs of lynchings in the United States. It would rob them of their defenses.

The photographs -- stark in their horror, ingenuous in their brutality -- are beyond dispute, out of equivocation's reach. They will not be denied. The dead -- the tortured, mutilated dead -- will have the final word.

After opening first in New York and Pittsburgh, the exhibit, which documents a peculiar American holocaust of mostly, but not exclusively, black victims, is belatedly opening in Atlanta. The dithering, controversy and cowardice that delayed an Atlanta exhibition serve as a stark reminder of the difficulty, even in the 21st century, of confronting the cruelty and hatred in America's past, especially here in the South. This holocaust, too, has often been denied.

The pictures are part of a collection of postcards, photographs and documents collected by James Allen, a white Atlanta antiques dealer who specializes in African-American artifacts. Allen lent the collection to Atlanta's Emory University several years ago, where the items were available to scholars but inconspicuous.

The photographs remained relatively obscure until Allen pursued the publication of a book, also called "Without Sanctuary," which attracted the attention of a New York gallery owner and later the New York Historical Society. But the hugely successful New York exhibits inspired Emory only to open discussions about showing the photographs.

Perhaps the university's initial caution was justified. Here in the Deep South, where the distant past is only yesterday, these photographs tread on tender ground, across graves dug just a while ago, when grandmothers were schoolgirls. The last lynching on record in Georgia took place in rural McDuffie County in 1965.

Nor was the reluctance to confront photographic evidence of the brutality and humiliation of lynchings limited to whites. A few African-Americans, too, were reluctant to visit a brutal past not so long buried.

So, after months of public meetings, debate with Emory faculty and discussions with the Atlanta History Center, there was little agreement among institutional leaders. Some academics argued that the photographs could only be shown in "context," with lectures and panel discussions and reminders of the social mores of a distant past. Finally, Frank Catroppa, superintendent of the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site, offered its exhibition space.

They are mounted in a somber display that gives the victims the dignity they deserve. And there will be lectures and discussions over the coming months. But there is no effort to justify or explain an evil that remains beyond comprehension.

Some of the pictures seem perversely poetic -- fully clothed corpses twisting gently beneath tree limbs, as if Billie Holiday had wanted a video to accompany her gripping version of "Strange Fruit," her song about lynchings. Other photographs are gruesome, sickening shots of mutilated corpses, black men caught by a frenzied white mob, then castrated, whipped and burned, all as they dangled, helplessly, from a noose.

But the photographs that are most disquieting focus not on the black victims but on the white perpetrators and hangers-on and the atmosphere of circus and celebration that was occasioned by the mob murder of a black man or woman. Men cheer and pose beside the corpses, women grin and point, and even children stand smiling, jubilant, as they witness a scene of unspeakable cruelty. Their beaming faces bear witness to their depraved souls.

There are still those who wonder what good can come of this, what purpose can be served by an excursion into a sordid and bitter past. And there will still be those who will wish to turn their heads, avert their eyes, push quickly past this window into the hideous truths that belie America's founding myths.

But a vile past -- hurriedly and poorly buried -- still emits a stench that can be cleansed only when it is opened up and fully aired. Let us begin that cleansing with these photographs.

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for the Atlanta Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: cynthia@ajc.com.

Ironically, the "Strange Fruit" exhibit contained photographs of brutal mob killings of black and white victims from all over the U.S.

Until after WWII in the USA, these were the things that some of our grandparents were doing, and they were unabashedly posing for pictures in front of their "handiwork", and exchanging souvenir postcards that pictured the "events" in their aftermath, they took their young children to watch with them, sometimes picnicking in the vicinity, To expect the grandchildren of these people, in 1994 to petition their government to send troops to intervene in Rwandan genocide, is quite a leap, indeed !

Quote:

http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/main.html
<center><img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/97.jpg" height=400 width=500> James Weldon Johnson named the summer of 1919 the "Red Summer" for the rash of deadly riots which erupted in more than twenty-five American cities between April and October of that year. Racial tensions were at an extreme in Omaha that summer; the influx of African Americans from the South and a perceived epidemic of crime created an atmosphere of mistrust and fear that led to the lynching of William Brown.

Brown had been accused of molesting a white girl. When police arrested him on September 28, a mob quickly formed which ignored orders from authorities that they disperse. When Mayor Edward P. Smith appeared to plead for calm, he was kidnapped by the mob, hung to a trolley pole, and nearly killed before police were able to cut him down.

The rampaging mob set the courthouse prison on fire and seized Brown. He was hung from a lamppost, mutilated, and his body riddled with bullets, then burned. Four other people were killed and fifty wounded before troops were able to restore order.

This photograph was acquired from a Lincoln, Nebraska, man whose grandfather purchased it for two dollars as a souvenir while visiting Omaha in 1919. 
<img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/81.jpg"><img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/82.jpg"> <img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/83.jpg"><img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/84.jpg"> When the corpse of Brooke Hart, a San Jose youth, was discovered in San Francisco Bay on November 26, 1933, a mob materialized to punish the alleged kidnappers and murderers, Thomas H. Thurmond and John Holmes. The lynchers rammed open the jail door, assaulted the guards, and dragged Holmes and Thurmond to St. James Park, beating them into near unconsciousness. Holmes's clothes were sheared from his body, and Thurmond's pants were drawn down to his ankles. A gathering of some six thousand spectators witnessed the hanging.

Governor James Rolph's doublespeak was typical of many lynching era politicians: "While the law should have been permitted to take its course, the people by their action have given notice to the entire world that in California kidnapping will not be tolerated."</center>

mixedmedia · 01-07-2007, 10:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

ignoring the injustices in the world won't make them go away.

and nothing you can do? a common and apathetic misconception. (not that you are apathetic mixedmedia, i don't think you are, rather, we have a culture of apathy)

everyone has a voice in this world, feeding that voice knowledge is the only way to make any kind of change.

What occured in Rwanda is now similarily occuring in Darfur.
one can learn further in this article: http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/aler...FSKJYAodLzLkuQ

i'm in social work, myself and my peers can't help to change every single issue in the world, I recognize that and have for a long time. It's overwhelming to want to make change on every single issue in this world.

However, what I suggested is: pick an issue that stirs you, and do your best to affect any kind of change on that issue, however small you might think your actions are, they do make a difference, write your senators, volunteer, give money, give your time, do whatever you can and spread the word on your chosen issue. Education is power.

so in short. yeah, I'd like to know about what's occuring in our world good
and bad. I owe it to myself and I owe it to my existence here.

this is not to say I don't enjoy my life and the things I have that millions in this world do not, aka. adequate shelter, clean food, medicine; not to mention such things as T.V., pets, hobbies.

the average american is so incredibly lucky in what we take for granted. I don't feel it handicaps me to know this fact, I don't feel it takes away from my enjoyment of the things I have, it does stir me to at least do my part at times to make something positive and give back the good fortune I have.

sweetpea

Thank you, sweetpea. I do not feel entirely apathetic - I do know what you mean by the use of that term and it does not insult me. I have contributed money, written letters and talked, talked, talked about these things a lot. The only visibly constructive thing I've been able to accomplish however, is the passing on of the importance of awareness to my kids. But, of course, the sort of thoughts I am alluding to in the OP make me wonder if that truly is a good thing. (And, of course, I am talking about my older children, not the seven-year-old.) But your post helps to affirm my instinct that it is better to inform and concern yourself with the realities of our ever-shrinking world. Thanks for that.

I have also told my kids, again I am referring to the older ones, that when they are all grown, secure and on their own, I will most likely volunteer for an NGO and travel where needed to make a real, hands on contribution to people living within these desperate situations. It may sound pat, naive or disingenuous, but I am absolutely serious.

And you are absolutely right, ASU, about the problems here in the US and I will admit that not enough attention is given to them and that I myself am probably more informed about the situation in the Congo than I am with some of the most deprived areas of our own country. I don't like to, but I have to admit it. But if, when the time comes, it is apparent that I need not leave the US to help people living in dire, chaotic situations then that's where I'll be.

I'm not one who typically believes in things like fate or "having a calling," but I do know that my concern about a good quality of life and the right to live without fear for people who do not have these things occupies a heightened standpoint in my psyche. I don't want to die having always been an observer.

powerclown · 01-07-2007, 10:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixedmedia

Obviously you don't know me very well or else you'd know that I am a photography enthusiast with a fully charged sense of humor. I pay attention to positive and beautiful things all the time. If you could come to my house and peruse my bookshelves you might find that they are stock full with not only books of humor and photography (I love Sally Mann and Brassai, how about you?) but great literature, poetry, fine art, films, pin ups and sex.

Do you have any comments in relation to the questions I posed or are you just here to show me a good time and leave?

Of course I don't know you, as we've never met or spoken before. I also haven't been on here as lately as I used to be, so I beg your pardon.

As far as comments in relation to your questions, this is what I think: Yes I think it's important to be aware of world events, but I wouldn't hold it against you if you didn't. People have enough to deal with in their own, everyday lives is my point. I think most people have a certain amount of basic human decency and care about the plight of their fellow (wo)man. I agree with you that the amount of cruelty in the world can be absolutely overwhelming to comprehend at times. I read the paper, I read books, I read magazines, I watch tv...I do empathize. But what can I do, personally? I am not a millionaire, I can't hand out $40 million dollars to children starving in Africa like Oprah. I can't give millions to AIDS research like Bill and Melinda Gates. I would if I could.

The best I can do is concentrate on my immediate family and friends. They are the ones who need my attention and affection, not strangers who are 6,000 miles away in another country.

To get political for a minute, I also think that guilt plays a large part in populations of industrialized nations towards undeveloped Third World nations. People feel guilty because for no reason other than being born in a certain place, they have so much more than others. But what is that? Its Fate. Should one feel guilty because of Fate, because of circumstances completely out of one's control?

I think it would be a wonderful thing that you want to travel to other lands and help other people less fortunate. Nothing wrong with that. Of course theres also nothing wrong with people who decide to stay at home to be near friends and family, helping out in their own communities and neighborhoods.

I apologize if I came of as glib or sarcastic...

host · 01-07-2007, 10:35 PM

A month aftet the genocide in Rwanda began, Time reported the sentiment in the US and in the rest of the world, and....don't forget, it came less than a year after the American military experienced the "Black Hawk Down" episode in Somalia....and it was a mid-term election year....and Newt's contract with America did not sweep into office because of American inaction, that spring and summer, with regard to Rwanda...

Quote:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...980732,00.html
Posted Monday, May 16, 1994
The pictures are as appalling as any that have come across global television screens, yet no one is calling for direct intervention to stop the month-old killing spree in Rwanda. However troubled they might be by the scale and ferocity of the slaughter, Western nations have offered little more than emotional expressions of sympathy for the victims.

The American appetite for such missions, even in cases of dire human need, has been dulled by experiences like Somalia. "Lesson No. 1," President Clinton said last week, "is, Don't go into one of these things and say, maybe we'll be done in a month because it's a humanitarian crisis." His reluctance mirrors the public's: a TIME/CNN poll last week showed that only 34% of respondents favored doing something to quell the violence, while 51% opposed any action. Clinton confirmed that judgment with a new presidential directive on U.S. participation in peacekeeping abroad: those operations, it says, "should not be open-ended commitments, but linked to concrete political solutions."

Rwanda is an almost perfect example of the problem Clinton's directive addresses. The horrifying slaughter is another explosion in a mainly ethnically based civil war that outsiders understand imperfectly if at all -- and therefore do not know how to solve. No one is even certain what sort of diplomatic efforts might persuade the Rwandan factions to halt the bloodletting. The only obvious alternative to traditional diplomacy would be for a well-equipped army to move into Rwanda -- shooting if necessary -- and force a cease-fire. But no one is volunteering for such an army.

A U.N. peacekeeping force already in Rwanda to police an agreement last August for power sharing with Tutsi rebels in the Hutu-led government was hastily reduced from 2,600 to 470 when the massacres began and 10 Belgian blue helmets were killed. The signal sent, says a senior African diplomat, "was, Look, you are on your own. You may do whatever you want."

Sanctions, the response of choice at the U.N., are widely regarded as useless in this case: Rwanda's economy is already destitute, and people are fighting just to stay alive. As the situation worsens, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali is looking for about 8,000 troops to send into the country to stop the killing. He has asked the Organization of African Unity to take on the responsibility, but has had no response.....

Quote:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...1487-7,00.html
<a hre="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981487-1,00.html">Posted Monday, Sep. 26, 1994</a>
NO ONE COULD ACCUSE BILL CLINTON OF FAILING TO give peace a chance. Even as American warships reached their invasion stations off the shores of Haiti, and the President faced the moment when he would have to issue the order for U.S. troops to go in shooting, a tense weekend of negotiations was devoted to the possibility that strongman Raoul Cedras and the rest of the ruling Haitian military clique had finally got the message and were ready to quit. At the 11th hour, the President proved willing to talk.....

......The Administration counters with a moral argument: the U.S. should do what it can to foster democracy and remove a murderous tyranny. Well, then, say critics, why not use military force in Bosnia or Rwanda, where worse atrocities have been committed, and on a much larger scale? Because they are far away and would require a major effort entailing heavy casualties with uncertain support from allies, Clinton's aides rejoin. The U.S. has a special obligation to promote democracy and oppose tyrannous atrocity in its own hemisphere. Haiti is one place where that can be done quickly, with worldwide backing and minimal loss of life. The U.S. should indeed promote democracy among its neighbors, reply the critics, but by political, diplomatic and economic pressure, not military force. Washington has no divine commission to impose democracy on its neighbors by brute strength.

Then, embarrassingly, there is the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the sole power to declare war, though it also makes the President the Commander in Chief of the armed forces and thus able to order them into harm's way. The debates over the constitutional status of an invasion of Haiti have been wildly distorted by partisanship. Democrats who insisted George Bush had to seek congressional approval to start the Persian Gulf War -- as he finally did, successfully -- contend that an invasion of Haiti would be a much smaller, less dangerous undertaking. Comparable, in fact, to the Reagan Administration invasion of Grenada and George Bush's pre-Kuwait invasion of Panama, which the Democrats now retroactively approve. Republicans who backed those invasions even though Congress was never consulted in advance now insist the plain sense of the Constitution is that the President must not send troops into combat on his own hook if it can be avoided. Discounting for hypocrisy on both sides, Clinton's critics would seem to have the better of the argument. In the case of Haiti, the President can hardly claim he must act quickly to ward off a threat to the U.S. or to save American lives -- the two traditional excuses for shooting first and telling Congress later........

GW Bush had the backing of at least 3/4 of American voters when he ordered the invasion of Iraq, IMO, Clinton was hardly in a position, politically, after ten UN troops were killed, and the UN reduced it's force by 80 percent in the Rwandan region, just eight months after the US military fiasco in Mogadishu, Somalia, to send US troops to intervene in the civil war in Rwanda.

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogadishu

......Intense battling between these rivals and other clan-based rebel factions damaged many parts of Mogadishu in 1991-1992 and led to tens of thousands of casualties as an intense drought-induced famine ravaged rural Somalia.

A contingent of United States Marines landed near Mogadishu on December 9, 1992 to spearhead United Nations peacekeeping forces. The United Nations sought to capture warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in 1993 to enable the establishment of a transitional government. Somalis loyal to him ambushed the peacekeepers and killed 24 Pakistanis.

On October 3, 1993, the United States Army Rangers and the Army's Delta Force went on a mission to capture two of Aidid's warlords. Although the mission was successful, five American army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were shot down during the battle (two in the city [Durant's "Super 64" and Wolcot's "Super 61"] and 3 at a safe area), causing about 100 United States Army Rangers and Delta Force operators to be pinned down in the city, trying to rescue survivors and recover the dead. In this Battle of Mogadishu, the Somalis killed 18, one soldier three days later in a mortar strike and 1 Malaysian soldier and injured several dozen. Estimates put the number of Somali casualties at 500-1000 militia and civilians dead and 3000-4000 injured. The later nonfiction books Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, In The Company Of Heroes, and motion picture Black Hawk Down dramatized the events of this battle.
Aerial view of a residential area of Mogadishu, with a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter in the foreground, December 1992.
Aerial view of a residential area of Mogadishu, with a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter in the foreground, December 1992.

With these casualties, United States President Bill Clinton withdrew American forces in 1994. ........

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda

....In 1990, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda from Uganda. During the course of the fighting, top Rwandan government officials, mainly Hutu, began secretly training young men into informal armed bands called Interahamwe (a Kinyarwanda term roughly meaning "those who fight together"). Government officials also launched a radio station that began anti-Tutsi propaganda. The military government of Juvénal Habyarimana responded to the RPF invasion with pogroms against Tutsis, whom it claimed were trying to re-enslave the Hutus. In August 1993 the government and the RPF signed a cease-fire agreement known as the Arusha accords in Arusha, Tanzania to form a power sharing government, but fighting between the two sides continued. The United Nations sent a peacekeeping force named the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), under the leadership of Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire. UNAMIR was vastly underfunded and under-staffed. More details of this aspect of the conflict are starkly explained in Dallaire's 2003 book Shake Hands With the Devil.

During the armed conflict, the RPF was blamed for the bombing of Kigali. These attacks were actually carried out by the Hutu army as part of a campaign to create a reason for a political crackdown and ethnic violence. On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was assassinated when his Falcon 50 trijet was shot down while landing in Kigali.[1] It remains unclear who was responsible for the assassination — most credible sources point to the Presidential Guard, spurred by Hutu nationalists fearful of losing power, although others believe that Tutsi rebels were responsible, possibly with the help of Belgian mercenaries. Over the next three months, the military and Interahamwe militia groups killed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in the Rwandan genocide. The RPF continued to advance on the capital, and occupied the northern, the east and the southern parts of the country by June. Thousands of civilians were killed in the conflict. U.N. member states refused to answer UNAMIR's requests for increased troops and money. Meanwhile, French troops were dispatched to stabilize the situation under Opération Turquoise, but this only resulted in an exacerbation of the situation, with the evacuation limited to foreign nationals.

On July 4, 1994, the war ended as the RPF entered the capital Kigali. In the resulting Great Lakes refugee crisis over 2 million Hutus fled the country after the war, fearing Tutsi retribution. Most have since returned, although some Hutus remained in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including some militia members that became involved in the First Congo War and Second Congo War. In 1996, after repeated unsuccessful appeals to the UN and the international community to deal with the security threat posed by the remnants of the defeated genocidal forces on its eastern border, Rwanda invaded eastern Zaire in an effort to eliminate the Interahamwe groups operating there. This action, and the simultaneous one by Ugandan troops, contributed to the outbreak of the First Congo War and the eventual fall of longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.....

mixedmedia, our military is not a force of miracle workers. Tragic as the killing in Rwanda was, at the time, there was no grassroots domestic pressure upon the POTUS to involve US troops, and even if Clinton had overridden objections, the description above makes an argument for the idea that it would not have been a responsible use of US troops, given the level of unrest and the lack of support from other UN members. The lack of support from other UN members was a good argument for delaying the March, 2003, US invasion of Iraq, too.

analog · 01-07-2007, 10:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

ignoring the injustices in the world won't make them go away.

and nothing you can do? a common and apathetic misconception.

It could never, ever be better not to know. History has shown that to us, time after time.

Basically what you're pondering is whether or not it's ok to forget or to have been unaware of genocide. I don't see how anyone could say it's ok to ignore or not have known about genocide.

How could a person actually think it's better not to know something bad is happening somewhere?

mixedmedia · 01-07-2007, 11:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown

Of course I don't know you, as we've never met or spoken before. I also haven't been on here as lately as I used to be, so I beg your pardon.

My pardon is granted. No harm done.

Quote:

As far as comments in relation to your questions, this is what I think: Yes I think it's important to be aware of world events, but I wouldn't hold it against you if you didn't. People have enough to deal with in their own, everyday lives is my point. I think most people have a certain amount of basic human decency and care about the plight of their fellow (wo)man. I agree with you that the amount of cruelty in the world can be absolutely overwhelming to comprehend at times. I read the paper, I read books, I read magazines, I watch tv...I do empathize. But what can I do, personally? I am not a millionaire, I can't hand out $40 million dollars to children starving in Africa like Oprah. I can't give millions to AIDS research like Bill and Melinda Gates. I would if I could.

The best I can do is concentrate on my immediate family and friends. They are the ones who need my attention and affection, not strangers who are 6,000 miles away in another country.

I agree with you. I don't hold it against anyone who would prefer not to know. No doubt it is an easier existence. Whatever gets you through the night, it's alright, it's alright....

But it's like Pandora's Box, you know? Once you've opened it, there's no going back.

Quote:

To get political for a minute, I also think that guilt plays a large part in populations of industrialized nations towards undeveloped Third World nations. People feel guilty because for no reason other than being born in a certain place, they have so much more than others. But what is that? Its Fate. Should one feel guilty because of Fate, because of circumstances completely out of one's control?

I think I know what you're getting at, but for myself, the guilt I feel is not the guilt of living in "the land of plenty" while others are born in places where the very ground they walk on is of little to no benefit to their survival. It is the guilt of not doing enough to help. Still while fully aware that "help" is a trite word in relation to the magnitude of the world's problems.

Quote:

I think it would be a wonderful thing that you want to travel to other lands and help other people less fortunate. Nothing wrong with that. Of course theres also nothing wrong with people who decide to stay at home to be near friends and family, helping out in their own communities and neighborhoods.

I fully agree. I am not at all an "elitist" about this (for lack of a better word at 2am). I don't use these feelings to make myself feel I'm a better person than other people.

Quote:

I apologize if I came of as glib or sarcastic...

Really, it's not a problem. I appreciate your input.

And of course, I am never glib or sarcastic.

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

mixedmedia, our military is not a force of miracle workers. Tragic as the killing in Rwanda was, at the time, there was no grassroots domestic pressure upon the POTUS to involve US troops, and even if Clinton had overridden objections, the description above makes an argument for the idea that it would not have been a responsible use of US troops, given the level of unrest and the lack of support from other UN members. The lack of support from other UN members was a good argument for delaying the March, 2003, US invasion of Iraq, too.

I'm aware of the politics that went into our decision not to intervene and the politics only make me more dismayed. Here we were, we had lost less than 20 men in a battle that killed and injured thousands and that was reason enough to standby and allow the slaughter of nearly a million. And America did not support intervention? America didn't know enough about what was going on to make an informed decision about whether to intervene or not. All we knew was that there was another civil conflict going on in war-torn Africa, not the most systematic act of genocide of the latter part of the twentieth century. And a deliberate point was made to keep us uninformed. I understand all the reasons why we didn't act. I just don't like them and I hate the implications of them.

The actions of France and the UN. Those, those I do not understand.

ngdawg · 01-08-2007, 08:37 AM

I'm a major political cynic and really feel that, unless we have an economic and political 'reason' to act, we stay out of other's business.
Couple that with the Somalian fiasco, among others, and it's easy for me to see why Rwanda got little notice.
I think the reasoning behind the Haiti preparations is a veil of sorts. We have interest in Haiti, we have a large Haitian immigrant and descendent population and being in the waters off the coast keeps us in shouting distance of Cuba and Central America.
Our political and economic interests in Africa aren't nearly as numerous as they are in the Middle East or this hemisphere.
Do I think we should always be in the know? Of course, even if it's just akin to an outline of what's happening. I have a tendency to just glance over the world news in the papers I read, but I get amazed at some people when they have that look of 'huh???' when something like Rwanda is talked about.

mixedmedia · 01-08-2007, 10:15 AM

Funny, I consider myself to be a political cynic, too, but while you are cynical about our interests in intervening I am becoming more and more cynical of any political entity having the capability to intervene. Politics is rarely the functionary of a rational consensus but rather a means of streamlining chaos into a reasonable facsimile of order for public consumption. In other words, I think we are out of our own hands and don't know what the hell to do about it.

Gotta laugh. At least I do.

roachboy · 01-08-2007, 10:26 AM

last night i watched abbas kiorostami's film "abc africa"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281534/

which is mostly about the consequences of aids and malaria in uganda: among these consequences is a population of about 2 million orphan children. the film is primarily about one of the organizations that has been set up to attempt to deal with this issue---on a small scale, but in very interesting ways involving small communities of women. it is well worth watching.

i mention this because i also found the film overwhelming in terms of information: it was shot using a handheld digital camera, and much of the film is basically walking or driving through some of the communities affected. it was the hand held camera that was problematic for me: first because finding myself bouncing along to someone else' bodily rhythm made me kinda nauseous, and second because the handheld camera placed you THERE, in the space being filmed, as if you were there in real time. something about the artificial distancing mechanisms you rely on with regular film and television footage not being there in this case made the film a difficult intellectual and visceral experience---almost too much information.

i stumbled across this thread, and from the title expected it to be about personal relationships, i dont know why exactly, but there we are.

and i was thinking about this question of whether it is better to know or not know about the world, about what is happening: and it seems to me a complicated political and psychological question.

i think that you have to look, that you have to try to know what is going on around you: not to do it seems to be to consign yourself to being less than alive in some basic ways---you are certainly less than free if you do nto actively engage with the world around you. but what that engagement means is not so simple.

what you look at is to a great extent conditioned by the totality of experiences that you have had that express themselves in your basic political orientation (totality here doesnt mean that they are all somehow "present" in your mind as such, these experiences: they are mostly an accumulation of traces and references and effects)---and so what you research, what you look at ends up being caught up, from the outset, in a ciruclar relationship with your political orientation--your political orientation is simultaneously an indicator, in that it points you toward information about the world, and a distancing device, in that the discourse of politics gives you ways to order that information so you can process it without doing yourself psychological damage.

both are obviously important: they come down to the question of how you become able to look.
being able to look requires that you have ways available to you to process what you are looking at: otherwise, what you see simply burns you up.
and it is true, like powerclown said earlier, that the world is both really fucked up and really beautiful at once---and it is important to remember both. but there is no either/or: and in the end, what shapes what you are able to look at is in the end a psychological question is a political question is an information organization question is an ability to distance yourself from waht you are seeing question. if you do alot of research work, you sometimes think that you are able to get quite close to "reality"--but this is as much an effect of what the organizational systems that you use to classify/sort information as it is of any meaningful sense of proximity. what you can see, then, is a direct function of what you can hold together within your field of vision: what you can handle, what does not burn you up like icarus flying into some informational sun. and what you can handle is a function of what you can repress, what you have to repress, what it is about that which you find, that which you are looking at that you have to eliminate or make abstract in order to enable yourself to hold together anything like a coherence to what you are seeing.

i have spent many years researching modalities of social collapse, thinking and writing about vertigo as a social phenomenon. i wonder sometime about the psychological effects: what it does to me in other areas. i have to say that i do not always have a clear sense of that. doing history is strange: everything about it tends to make information into elements within some huge television show, and integrating it via narrative form contributes to a vast illusion of control/mastery over the world--as if the world is a huge text that you can pick up and read or put down and forget about: as if life is an accumulation of objects and knowing the equivalent of making lists. you can know all this is at the least problematic, maybe even false: but you use these systems anyway because, well, there isn't much choice.

maybe this has some strange effects: it helps us forget the the fact that we cannot really see very much about ourselves, about our actions and motives, about those we love, about love itself: we do not know much about our immediate environments. when we walk down a sidewalk, we take in only a very limited amount of information about what we pass through--but we have to limit information or we would not be able to move. we do not know what time is: we cannot represent it, so it slides through our logic--but we are it---but we do not know it. we do not know how the systems of biological systems that we are work, how they hold together, how they co-ordinate information. we do not know what memory is, how exactly it works, how much of our experience is made up of memory, whether and how memory is individual or social or both or neither.
so much basic stuff we do not understand.
we construct representations of the world for ourselves, but we do not think about the logic created by the acts of representing. we do not wonder about what we know and how we know it. but we think we can construct meaningful systems of information about the world. and we live in those systems. because they let us make decisions about which aspects of the many many things we do not know about or do not understand we are going to take on at a given moment. the ability to focus your attention is the ability to limit information. the ability to speak coherently is the ability to limit information and sequence it. nouns substitute categories for particularities. sentences give you the impression that there is a discrete pronoun (subject) that interacts with a world external to itself (verb) and that the world is a collection of things (direct object): is that how we operate in the world? how do you know? maybe we limit ourselves to a very significant degree when we decide that there are no fundamental problems with the ways in which we stage or represent our most basic relations to and with the world.

is it better to know or not know?
what does knowing mean?

i suspect this is now officially rambling.
so i'll stop here.

dc_dux · 01-08-2007, 10:45 AM

Not to be too politically cynical, the first thing to come to mind when I saw the thread title, "Is It Better Not to Know?" was one of Donald Rumsfeld's more celebrated responses to a question at a DoD press conference in Feb 02, shortly before the invasion of Iraq:

Quote:

Q: Could I follow up, Mr. Secretary, on what you just said, please? In regard to Iraq weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.

Rumsfeld: Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones

http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcrip...nscriptID=2636

Not related to Rwanda and the serious question posed in the OP, but unforgetable nonetheless.

mixedmedia · 01-08-2007, 11:23 AM

roachboy's remark on the importance of remembering both the great beauty in the world as well as its ugliness prompted me to wonder if there is a correlation between the two. In my experience, from what I (er) know, people who have a deep appreciation for mankind's capacity for love, kindness and artistic beauty also have a near or balanced awareness of its uglier, more brutal side.

While conversely perhaps, and I am just speculating, there are those who tend to avoid both extremes in favor of a safe and non-threatening even-keel sort of existence.

Maybe I, and others like me, are suffering from an as yet undiscovered bi-polar awareness syndrome.

And, roachboy, for a historian (am I right?) you talk like a Buddhist.

dc...very funny.

Ourcrazymodern? · 01-08-2007, 06:24 PM

Soooo, how about that agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac?

Val_1 · 01-08-2007, 06:34 PM

Not knowing is bad, IMO. You just have to know and accept that you can't change all the injustices in the world. Pick a few that you can help, and do a little (or a lot) to help change them. But, for a lot of injustices, knowledge is a huge first step.

Painted · 01-09-2007, 10:54 AM

I agree that being aware of world conflicts is better, nonviolently aiding those suffering from said conflicts is best.

However, what would you think if your son/daughter was in the first Army/Marine division landing in a war-torn, dangerous country like Rwanda? Better yet, what if you were that soldier? Would you die to protect innocent women and children? Even if it had little or nothing to do with protecting one's homeland?

mixedmedia · 01-09-2007, 11:20 AM

You pose some very good questions, thank you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Painted

However, what would you think if your son/daughter was in the first Army/Marine division landing in a war-torn, dangerous country like Rwanda?

I would like to think that the fact that my own beloved children were put into harm's way to stop genocide would not change my core gut feelings about the need to intervene in catastrophic situations like Rwanda. I've been asked similar questions before in regards to my opposition to the death penalty (ie, would I still oppose the death penalty if my child was murdered?). All I can say with certainty, (because all I can do is speculate) is that my moral conviction that we should stops bands of men with machetes from hacking to death a million innocent men, women and children is pretty absolute.

Quote:

Better yet, what if you were that soldier? Would you die to protect innocent women and children?

Yes, I would.

Quote:

Even if it had little or nothing to do with protecting one's homeland?

Absolutely. Killing for it would be the hard part.

Ch'i · 01-09-2007, 01:35 PM

The less an atrocity is known, the more likely it is to continue. It is important to be aware in every aspect of what is going on in our world, even if those aspects are morbid, or a deterrent to our moral.

Sultana · 01-09-2007, 01:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ch'i

The less an atrocity is known, the more likely it is to continue. It is important to be aware in every aspect of what is going on in our world, even if those aspects are morbid, or a deterrent to our moral.

Beautifully stated.

Ourcrazymodern? · 01-09-2007, 01:50 PM

I've never been happier that I was born in "America"!
Not knowing is the basis of not thinking.
Not being able to do sucks...

World's King · 01-09-2007, 01:59 PM

I'm sorry... what are we talking about...

I was totally not paying attention...

mixedmedia · 01-09-2007, 05:18 PM

The color and density of our pubic hair. You go first.

Ourcrazymodern? · 01-09-2007, 05:42 PM

Yes...it's better to know. A lot of the noise that surrounds us these days has to do with violence, greed, and death.
Does anybody remember a magazine that existed for only a few years in the '80's called Quest..? It was filled with positive, uplifting stuff about what was going on then, and the tone here makes me want to ask: Is such a thing even available these days?

mixedmedia · 01-09-2007, 05:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ch'i

The less an atrocity is known, the more likely it is to continue. It is important to be aware in every aspect of what is going on in our world, even if those aspects are morbid, or a deterrent to our moral.

I agree with you. But why is it important to you?

Ourcrazymodern? · 01-09-2007, 06:35 PM

There is way more than enough to pay attention to at every moment.
How do you decide what to think about, madame?

roachboy · 01-10-2007, 11:02 AM

one problem that i was tinkering with as i wrote the earlier rambling post as whether you know about the world from the viewpoint of a spectator.
i mean, you know certain things about it from a spectator's viewpoint: how events seem to interact, which leads you to a particular, mechanical view of causality--but it is not a terribly useful or interesting understanding of causality you get that way.

why do people believe as they do? what processes explain belief and how does belief get tangled up with other types of information? if you watch a film, you cant really even pose those questions coherently, simply because the way in which people are represented--as a particular, curious type of thing---erases the space for thinking in more complex terms about the psyche.

but if you start thinking in these more complex terms, you soon find that you can't represent "reality" in a naive way and be internally consistent--so ou have a choice: you can explore other ways of representing the world and in so doing find yourself not really talking to anyone any more or you can make soem kind of compromise and work with the media/forms of expression that exist.
so you also find that film stages the world much as language does, and you have to be able to communicate--and so these patterns of representation, which you can know are particular and in many ways problematic, are unavoidable: you have to use them--so what do you know? but that in itself means that you are placing arbitrary frames around what you understand and how you understand it.

so it turns out that if you remain in a naive relationship with the medium of representation that shapes your understanding, you know what the medium lets you know to a certain extent. you can pile up factoids, know a bunch of information: but what that information means, how it functions, what implications it may have, all are limited by your relationship to the media you rely on.

so you have to think about mediations and not just about outputs.
so there is even more stuff to think about.
and there are limitations on your time, on your capacities.
none of this is easy to navigate.
neither is choosing to not know at least something about the world around you, particularly if you are making an explicit choice to not know---checking out because it is too much work doesnt really seem an alternative.

i dont know what i learned from hotel rwanda.
i learned quite a lot from the documentary that came with the dvd, however: and most of that was about the extent to which what was in some ways the core of the horror cannot in any meaningful way be represented.
mostly, it came down to political stuff for me: once again realizing that people can all too easily be convinced--convince themselves--that the barrier that separates them from whatever they want requires only the elimination of a social contaminant, so that the implementation of this removal is not even killing of human beings, but the removal of something less than human. that ideologies are often dangerous. that bureaucratic systems are ideologically driven. that existing international capitalist order squanders an unbelievable amount of human life and potential and is so constructed that most who live within that system do not or cannot see that. that people are most cruel when they are unintentionally so. that maybe trying to know what the consequences of that system are can prompt people to change that system...just as trying to know these consequences can help you become really interested in sports again, or in drinking, or in forgetting.

it is hard to know atrocity.
i am not sure what knowing it means.
it is good to know how easy it can be for folk to inflict atrocity on each other.
but it does make it harder to have a light fun time of it in the world.
i dont know which is preferable.
i dont see it as a meaningful choice.

mixedmedia · 01-10-2007, 11:41 AM

My time right now is limited and I would like to comment more on this post later, but I just wanted to make clear that this film is not the first that I had heard of the Rwandan genocide. I was very familiar with it before seeing the film and had, in fact, put off adding the film to queue on Netflix because I knew it would be a difficult viewing for me and would bring up a lot of intense emotions that I was also very familiar with. Watching the film only spurred the conversation which then led to the formation of the question in the OP.

Your post is interesting though and I would like to reflect on it and get back with you.

Ch'i · 01-10-2007, 01:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixedmedia

I agree with you. But why is it important to you?

Its only by seeing the entirety an image that we can fully understand it. Understanding is the first step towards change. If we chose to ignore those things which we do not agree with, then we are creating a fantasy world. Though that world might just be perfect for one, the real world continues regardless. It is important to me to be aware of these aspects not only to understand them, but to inhibit their longevity and learn from the mistakes they create.

Ourcrazymodern? · 01-10-2007, 04:35 PM

Which, together with the rest of this, asks "What is the real world and can any individual actually know it?"

roachboy · 01-10-2007, 05:17 PM

"What is the real world?"

i dont know what you're referring to when you ask that.

"can any individual actually know it?"

i dont know if one can or not.
what would that mean?
i would think it'd be like having a memory that doesn't forget--like funes in the borges story, you wouldn't be able to move.
you could know "everything" maybe, but it wouldn't matter.

mixedmedia · 01-11-2007, 07:16 AM

roachboy,

Would you agree that there is a time for reflecting on philosphical questions such as what knowing is, the boundaries and rules of one's mind in the gathering of information and the understanding of atrocity...as well as a time for selfless action based on simple moral impulse?

I am interested in the questions you put forth on this thread, and I realize that you are at least partly musing on a theme (not commenting directly on the OP), but what is your own moral impulse when it comes to the need to act and act quickly on the behalf of others? And what place do your (our) own interests have in modulating that impulse? Just out of curiosity.

roachboy · 01-11-2007, 01:17 PM

mm: hard questions, those are.

i react to things that i take to be ethically or politically objectionable in ways that i can: generally, because i can do it, i write stuff. but it is bothersome in that there is no way to know whether what appears in print reaches anyone or does anything, so it may be more about the discharge of affect than anything else, the writing. but it is a public act (after a fashion)....

i am politically active, and that does and does not help with the sense of "doing something"....

i think that many of the events that happen out there in the world that are truly horrific come about because folk are able to compartmentalize what they see and know in ways that often ends up legitmating means/ends disjunctures. to enable this, all you really have to do is control the political context. that way you set the terms of "legimate" debate and for the most part people will dutilfully derive conclusions based on premises that they are handed without necessarily recognizing that they were handed the premises.
so what i imagine writing and teaching and other such activities to be about is making this process more difficult for people. getting in the way, fucking up the process, posing problems for and about it. suggesting alternatives sometimes. but if there arent clear alternatives, you can nonetheless say that political conditions x cause administrative systems 1,2... to act in particular ways, and that these actions have awful consequences that are only possible because BOTH the folk who operate within that system and those who operate within the same political contexts as that system do not connect phenomena together in such a way as to make it clear that these outcomes and the actions of these systems are linked.

there is a certain degree of cruelty in these operations in that they are designed to complicate how folk see what they are doing and, by extension, how they see themselves. [[ideally anyway. whether they do it or not is another matter--one can always not communicate effectively what one sets out to communicate (sometimes my posts are little more than extended demonstrations of this problem).]]

so the motive is that a happyface life within a fucked up context is in itself not desirable: that it is better to look, better to know, better to be disturbed--because most of the problems i feel inclined to talk about unfold whether folk are paying attention or not, and the only way they can be stopped is by upsetting the basis for not paying attention. most of the stuff i do in 3-d is based on the idea that a readership or an audience has to be jolted out of where they are: assaulted almost, disturbed definitely. but you also want there to be some sources of pleasure, something beautiful in the experience: without it not only would everyone leave, but i would loose interest myself. so the trick is to balance these elements against each other, so that in taking something away you are trying to give something back. it is a kind of exchange program, i guess.

because i think that there is beauty out there.

but there is also an enormous amount of stuff that is the opposite, most of which has a definite origin based in discrete choices made by actual people (and so does not come about naturally) for particular reasons, all of which are shaped by particular notions of self-interest--and by the ideological context that enables these notions of self-interest to operate as if they were coherent.
so one can keep sane by balancing the two, and try to do stuff in such a way as it involves a mix of them.
that is the idea anyway.
dunno if it always works out optimally. it probably doesnt. but getting closer is one reason to keep going with all of it.

most activity--intellectual/practical--is at variant of conceptual art.
this includes claims to empiricism: but because these claims are about the world and not about the systems that stage that world (and relations to it), it tends to be very bad conceptual art.
nothing is more tedious than that.
and translated into political reality, nothing more dangerous.

as for putting stuff here, in tfp: it is a parlor game. an intellectual diversion that sometimes has significant rewards in that i learn alot from how folk react, what they argue for and against, how they do it. but it is a parlor game nonetheless: the real stuff, such as it is, happens in the larger aether.

Ourcrazymodern? · 01-11-2007, 05:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ourcrazymodern?

Which, together with the rest of this, asks "What is the real world and can any individual actually know it?"

Idiot that I am, I ask it again.

host · 01-12-2007, 03:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ourcrazymodern?

Idiot that I am, I ask it again.

30 some years ago, we flitted about the periphery of the "real world", and sometimes even got to take an all too brief "peek" at it through a window, opening a curtain for a moment, via oral ingestion of hallucinogens, or at least, that is what we thought we were experiencing....

Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow, white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion

-Graeme Edge

01-07-2007, 07:16 PM	#1 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	Is It Better Not to Know? I just watched Hotel Rwanda last night and a discussion I had afterwards with my boyfriend got me to thinking...and I've continued to think about it since, so I thought I'd open the concept up to the thoughtful assemblage here. After watching the movie, I logged on to talk to PW for a few minutes, as we do most nights, and, of course, I was deeply affected by the film so naturally the subject entered our conversation and after commenting on how much I admired the film I started talking about the Rwandan genocide in general and the things that I've learned about it from reading. About the horror of learning about the scope of the massacre for the first time and the shame I felt when I realized how utterly negligent the west's reaction to it was. That my president, Bill Clinton, was in office when it happened thus permanently dispelling my illusion that there was a compulsion towards justice and human rights in the US Democratic Party. Largely contributing to my present political state of not really trusting the efficacy and finer intentions of my chosen political party on any but a superficial, lip service level of commitment. For all the big talk and finger pointing going on towards the Bush administration and their ME Follies Grand Tour, I don't know if it is much worse than pretending to care about the fate of the citizens in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories only as long as it's a politically viable thing to do. Which brings me to my next sub-issue. I have done a lot of reading...I've read about so much of the horribly, breathtakingly brutal ways in which mankind has turned on itself and performed the unthinkable on its once peaceful neighbors. I have seen pictures of mass slaughter, brutalized women and disfigured children. Appalling stories and images of refugee camps full of disease and deprivation. These things impact me very deeply and can haunt me literally for years causing me tears, grief, sleepless nights and GUILT. Not in a debilitating way, just to intercede in case you are wondering. I am not crippled by these thoughts. Believe it or not, I am generally a very happy and optimistic person as ridiculous as that may sound. So, back to the conversation last night. I was relaying some of this to PW last night who is not a very political or particularly well-informed American - like so many of us - and we got to talking about whether or not it is better to know these things. At first my reaction was "of course, it's better to know." But is it really? Here in America we are afforded a narcotic lifestyle like no other nation can match. Even our cultural lookalikes in Europe, and perhaps even Canada (maybe some of our Canadian comrades here can chime in on their own behalf), do not lead the same sheltered, consumption-obsessed lifestyle that we do. It is very easy to live your entire life here and know next to nothing about how people are suffering the unthinkable at the very same time we are shopping for the best buy on a new flat screen television for the bedroom or considering whether to go with XM or Sirius satellite radio in the new Ford Expedition parked out in the driveway. Now, of course, I am generalizing to make a point, I know not all of us can afford to live that way (I know I can't!) but still, even the most disadvantaged of us are vulnerable to our own anesthetic distractions. After dwelling on this for the better part of a day, I have come to the conclusion (for myself) that I would rather know. If anything, being aware of these things at the very least means that one more person is paying attention. Even if, most of the time, I don't feel there is anything I can do about it BUT pay attention. These people - men, women and children - deserve to be grieved for. And I do grieve for them. So what is your opinion? Do you think it is better to fully comprehend the mess the world is in and accept the psychic consequences that will sometimes make you feel very sad, angry, guilty, and impotent as well as handicap your full engagement with the American way of life? Or, to go along with the status quo, absorbing only the information disseminated to you through our media outlets because there is nothing you can do about so why torture yourself? Or, is this all just a bunch of bleeding heart bullshit? If so it's okay, I can take it. __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

01-07-2007, 07:38 PM	#2 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	It's never better not to know. Insulated in the midst of the continent, it seems just the land we live on. Can one feel the herbicides wreaking havoc on us, or radioactives, or even VOC's? It's never better not to know but I think we might worry too much. __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

01-07-2007, 07:47 PM	#3 (permalink)
Sweetpea Fade out Location: in love	ignoring the injustices in the world won't make them go away. and nothing you can do? a common and apathetic misconception. (not that you are apathetic mixedmedia, i don't think you are, rather, we have a culture of apathy) everyone has a voice in this world, feeding that voice knowledge is the only way to make any kind of change. What occured in Rwanda is now similarily occuring in Darfur. one can learn further in this article: http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/aler...FSKJYAodLzLkuQ i'm in social work, myself and my peers can't help to change every single issue in the world, I recognize that and have for a long time. It's overwhelming to want to make change on every single issue in this world. However, what I suggested is: pick an issue that stirs you, and do your best to affect any kind of change on that issue, however small you might think your actions are, they do make a difference, write your senators, volunteer, give money, give your time, do whatever you can and spread the word on your chosen issue. Education is power. so in short. yeah, I'd like to know about what's occuring in our world good and bad. I owe it to myself and I owe it to my existence here. this is not to say I don't enjoy my life and the things I have that millions in this world do not, aka. adequate shelter, clean food, medicine; not to mention such things as T.V., pets, hobbies. the average american is so incredibly lucky in what we take for granted. I don't feel it handicaps me to know this fact, I don't feel it takes away from my enjoyment of the things I have, it does stir me to at least do my part at times to make something positive and give back the good fortune I have. sweetpea __________________ Having a Pet Will Change Your Life! Looking for a great pet?! Click Here! "I am the Type of Person Who Can Get Away With A lot, Simply Because I Don't Ask Permission for the Privilege of Being Myself"

01-07-2007, 09:45 PM	#8 (permalink)
SirLance Junkie Location: In the middle of the desert.	Hotel Rwanda very accuratly portrays what often happens in 3rd world countries. I was with 7th Special Forces before O&I school and 3rd Special Forces after, and spent a lot of time there (I mean Central America and Africa, not necessarily Rwanda). Much the same things happen as did in SE Asia, and the Middle East. The violence is sectarian, tribal in nature, and almost a way of life. Is it better to know? Absolutely. How else can you make informed decsions about that next appeal for your money for the poor starving orphans? Let's suppose you have to choose between two organizations, and one might be doing serious work to overcome these kinds of problems in the 3rd world. If you know what's happening, you can act, even in small ways, to help alleviate. Let's suppose you might want to invest money in a fund that does capital investment in the third world. Knowledge really is power, it is the power to conduct yourself in a manner that helps to achieve results. It will take time, capital investment, education, good health care, but this kind of shit can be overcome. Better to know. Definitely. __________________ DEMOCRACY is where your vote counts, FEUDALISM is where your count votes.

01-08-2007, 08:37 AM	#15 (permalink)
ngdawg peekaboo Location: on the back, bitch	I'm a major political cynic and really feel that, unless we have an economic and political 'reason' to act, we stay out of other's business. Couple that with the Somalian fiasco, among others, and it's easy for me to see why Rwanda got little notice. I think the reasoning behind the Haiti preparations is a veil of sorts. We have interest in Haiti, we have a large Haitian immigrant and descendent population and being in the waters off the coast keeps us in shouting distance of Cuba and Central America. Our political and economic interests in Africa aren't nearly as numerous as they are in the Middle East or this hemisphere. Do I think we should always be in the know? Of course, even if it's just akin to an outline of what's happening. I have a tendency to just glance over the world news in the papers I read, but I get amazed at some people when they have that look of 'huh???' when something like Rwanda is talked about. __________________ Don't blame me. I didn't vote for either of'em.

01-07-2007, 08:14 PM	#4 (permalink)
ASU2003 immoral minority Location: Back in Ohio	I think that everything that happens in the world should be reported, not just the things that get ratings or promote someone's agenda. http://www.projectcensored.org/ - There is a lot of things that don't get the coverage they deserve in the mainstream media. The problem is trying to see both sides of an event. And determining what happened and for what reason, without letting your opinions on who is the 'better' side impacting it. Then again, I would love to move to a nice little place far away from anybody like in Northwestern Australia and forget that there are any problems in the world. *Plus there are still a lot of problems right here in Amnerica that we don't bother to look at.

01-07-2007, 09:37 PM	#7 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	I'd rather know, and I worry about someone who'd want to block that out. Ignorance is bliss because it's always blissful before things get bad. The world around you is your responsibility, and not paying attention is a great way for the world to go to hell in a handbasket.

01-08-2007, 10:15 AM	#16 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	Funny, I consider myself to be a political cynic, too, but while you are cynical about our interests in intervening I am becoming more and more cynical of any political entity having the capability to intervene. Politics is rarely the functionary of a rational consensus but rather a means of streamlining chaos into a reasonable facsimile of order for public consumption. In other words, I think we are out of our own hands and don't know what the hell to do about it. Gotta laugh. At least I do. __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

01-08-2007, 10:26 AM	#17 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	last night i watched abbas kiorostami's film "abc africa" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281534/ which is mostly about the consequences of aids and malaria in uganda: among these consequences is a population of about 2 million orphan children. the film is primarily about one of the organizations that has been set up to attempt to deal with this issue---on a small scale, but in very interesting ways involving small communities of women. it is well worth watching. i mention this because i also found the film overwhelming in terms of information: it was shot using a handheld digital camera, and much of the film is basically walking or driving through some of the communities affected. it was the hand held camera that was problematic for me: first because finding myself bouncing along to someone else' bodily rhythm made me kinda nauseous, and second because the handheld camera placed you THERE, in the space being filmed, as if you were there in real time. something about the artificial distancing mechanisms you rely on with regular film and television footage not being there in this case made the film a difficult intellectual and visceral experience---almost too much information. i stumbled across this thread, and from the title expected it to be about personal relationships, i dont know why exactly, but there we are. and i was thinking about this question of whether it is better to know or not know about the world, about what is happening: and it seems to me a complicated political and psychological question. i think that you have to look, that you have to try to know what is going on around you: not to do it seems to be to consign yourself to being less than alive in some basic ways---you are certainly less than free if you do nto actively engage with the world around you. but what that engagement means is not so simple. what you look at is to a great extent conditioned by the totality of experiences that you have had that express themselves in your basic political orientation (totality here doesnt mean that they are all somehow "present" in your mind as such, these experiences: they are mostly an accumulation of traces and references and effects)---and so what you research, what you look at ends up being caught up, from the outset, in a ciruclar relationship with your political orientation--your political orientation is simultaneously an indicator, in that it points you toward information about the world, and a distancing device, in that the discourse of politics gives you ways to order that information so you can process it without doing yourself psychological damage. both are obviously important: they come down to the question of how you become able to look. being able to look requires that you have ways available to you to process what you are looking at: otherwise, what you see simply burns you up. and it is true, like powerclown said earlier, that the world is both really fucked up and really beautiful at once---and it is important to remember both. but there is no either/or: and in the end, what shapes what you are able to look at is in the end a psychological question is a political question is an information organization question is an ability to distance yourself from waht you are seeing question. if you do alot of research work, you sometimes think that you are able to get quite close to "reality"--but this is as much an effect of what the organizational systems that you use to classify/sort information as it is of any meaningful sense of proximity. what you can see, then, is a direct function of what you can hold together within your field of vision: what you can handle, what does not burn you up like icarus flying into some informational sun. and what you can handle is a function of what you can repress, what you have to repress, what it is about that which you find, that which you are looking at that you have to eliminate or make abstract in order to enable yourself to hold together anything like a coherence to what you are seeing. i have spent many years researching modalities of social collapse, thinking and writing about vertigo as a social phenomenon. i wonder sometime about the psychological effects: what it does to me in other areas. i have to say that i do not always have a clear sense of that. doing history is strange: everything about it tends to make information into elements within some huge television show, and integrating it via narrative form contributes to a vast illusion of control/mastery over the world--as if the world is a huge text that you can pick up and read or put down and forget about: as if life is an accumulation of objects and knowing the equivalent of making lists. you can know all this is at the least problematic, maybe even false: but you use these systems anyway because, well, there isn't much choice. maybe this has some strange effects: it helps us forget the the fact that we cannot really see very much about ourselves, about our actions and motives, about those we love, about love itself: we do not know much about our immediate environments. when we walk down a sidewalk, we take in only a very limited amount of information about what we pass through--but we have to limit information or we would not be able to move. we do not know what time is: we cannot represent it, so it slides through our logic--but we are it---but we do not know it. we do not know how the systems of biological systems that we are work, how they hold together, how they co-ordinate information. we do not know what memory is, how exactly it works, how much of our experience is made up of memory, whether and how memory is individual or social or both or neither. so much basic stuff we do not understand. we construct representations of the world for ourselves, but we do not think about the logic created by the acts of representing. we do not wonder about what we know and how we know it. but we think we can construct meaningful systems of information about the world. and we live in those systems. because they let us make decisions about which aspects of the many many things we do not know about or do not understand we are going to take on at a given moment. the ability to focus your attention is the ability to limit information. the ability to speak coherently is the ability to limit information and sequence it. nouns substitute categories for particularities. sentences give you the impression that there is a discrete pronoun (subject) that interacts with a world external to itself (verb) and that the world is a collection of things (direct object): is that how we operate in the world? how do you know? maybe we limit ourselves to a very significant degree when we decide that there are no fundamental problems with the ways in which we stage or represent our most basic relations to and with the world. is it better to know or not know? what does knowing mean? i suspect this is now officially rambling. so i'll stop here. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

01-08-2007, 11:23 AM	#19 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	roachboy's remark on the importance of remembering both the great beauty in the world as well as its ugliness prompted me to wonder if there is a correlation between the two. In my experience, from what I (er) know, people who have a deep appreciation for mankind's capacity for love, kindness and artistic beauty also have a near or balanced awareness of its uglier, more brutal side. While conversely perhaps, and I am just speculating, there are those who tend to avoid both extremes in favor of a safe and non-threatening even-keel sort of existence. Maybe I, and others like me, are suffering from an as yet undiscovered bi-polar awareness syndrome. And, roachboy, for a historian (am I right?) you talk like a Buddhist. dc...very funny. __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

01-08-2007, 06:24 PM	#20 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	Soooo, how about that agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac? __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

01-08-2007, 06:34 PM	#21 (permalink)
Val_1 Addict Location: In a State of Denial	Not knowing is bad, IMO. You just have to know and accept that you can't change all the injustices in the world. Pick a few that you can help, and do a little (or a lot) to help change them. But, for a lot of injustices, knowledge is a huge first step. __________________ I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day. -Frank Sinatra

01-09-2007, 10:54 AM	#22 (permalink)
Painted Pleasure Burn	I agree that being aware of world conflicts is better, nonviolently aiding those suffering from said conflicts is best. However, what would you think if your son/daughter was in the first Army/Marine division landing in a war-torn, dangerous country like Rwanda? Better yet, what if you were that soldier? Would you die to protect innocent women and children? Even if it had little or nothing to do with protecting one's homeland? __________________ I came across a nice rack at the department store

01-09-2007, 01:35 PM	#24 (permalink)
Ch'i Artist of Life	The less an atrocity is known, the more likely it is to continue. It is important to be aware in every aspect of what is going on in our world, even if those aspects are morbid, or a deterrent to our moral.

01-09-2007, 01:50 PM	#26 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	I've never been happier that I was born in "America"! Not knowing is the basis of not thinking. Not being able to do sucks... __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

01-09-2007, 01:59 PM	#27 (permalink)
World's King Here Location: Denver City Denver	I'm sorry... what are we talking about... I was totally not paying attention... __________________ heavy is the head that wears the crown

01-09-2007, 05:18 PM	#28 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	The color and density of our pubic hair. You go first. __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

01-09-2007, 05:42 PM	#29 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	Yes...it's better to know. A lot of the noise that surrounds us these days has to do with violence, greed, and death. Does anybody remember a magazine that existed for only a few years in the '80's called Quest..? It was filled with positive, uplifting stuff about what was going on then, and the tone here makes me want to ask: Is such a thing even available these days? __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

01-09-2007, 06:35 PM	#31 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	There is way more than enough to pay attention to at every moment. How do you decide what to think about, madame? __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

01-10-2007, 11:02 AM	#32 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	one problem that i was tinkering with as i wrote the earlier rambling post as whether you know about the world from the viewpoint of a spectator. i mean, you know certain things about it from a spectator's viewpoint: how events seem to interact, which leads you to a particular, mechanical view of causality--but it is not a terribly useful or interesting understanding of causality you get that way. why do people believe as they do? what processes explain belief and how does belief get tangled up with other types of information? if you watch a film, you cant really even pose those questions coherently, simply because the way in which people are represented--as a particular, curious type of thing---erases the space for thinking in more complex terms about the psyche. but if you start thinking in these more complex terms, you soon find that you can't represent "reality" in a naive way and be internally consistent--so ou have a choice: you can explore other ways of representing the world and in so doing find yourself not really talking to anyone any more or you can make soem kind of compromise and work with the media/forms of expression that exist. so you also find that film stages the world much as language does, and you have to be able to communicate--and so these patterns of representation, which you can know are particular and in many ways problematic, are unavoidable: you have to use them--so what do you know? but that in itself means that you are placing arbitrary frames around what you understand and how you understand it. so it turns out that if you remain in a naive relationship with the medium of representation that shapes your understanding, you know what the medium lets you know to a certain extent. you can pile up factoids, know a bunch of information: but what that information means, how it functions, what implications it may have, all are limited by your relationship to the media you rely on. so you have to think about mediations and not just about outputs. so there is even more stuff to think about. and there are limitations on your time, on your capacities. none of this is easy to navigate. neither is choosing to not know at least something about the world around you, particularly if you are making an explicit choice to not know---checking out because it is too much work doesnt really seem an alternative. i dont know what i learned from hotel rwanda. i learned quite a lot from the documentary that came with the dvd, however: and most of that was about the extent to which what was in some ways the core of the horror cannot in any meaningful way be represented. mostly, it came down to political stuff for me: once again realizing that people can all too easily be convinced--convince themselves--that the barrier that separates them from whatever they want requires only the elimination of a social contaminant, so that the implementation of this removal is not even killing of human beings, but the removal of something less than human. that ideologies are often dangerous. that bureaucratic systems are ideologically driven. that existing international capitalist order squanders an unbelievable amount of human life and potential and is so constructed that most who live within that system do not or cannot see that. that people are most cruel when they are unintentionally so. that maybe trying to know what the consequences of that system are can prompt people to change that system...just as trying to know these consequences can help you become really interested in sports again, or in drinking, or in forgetting. it is hard to know atrocity. i am not sure what knowing it means. it is good to know how easy it can be for folk to inflict atrocity on each other. but it does make it harder to have a light fun time of it in the world. i dont know which is preferable. i dont see it as a meaningful choice. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

01-10-2007, 11:41 AM	#33 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	My time right now is limited and I would like to comment more on this post later, but I just wanted to make clear that this film is not the first that I had heard of the Rwandan genocide. I was very familiar with it before seeing the film and had, in fact, put off adding the film to queue on Netflix because I knew it would be a difficult viewing for me and would bring up a lot of intense emotions that I was also very familiar with. Watching the film only spurred the conversation which then led to the formation of the question in the OP. Your post is interesting though and I would like to reflect on it and get back with you. __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

01-10-2007, 04:35 PM	#35 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	Which, together with the rest of this, asks "What is the real world and can any individual actually know it?" __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

01-10-2007, 05:17 PM	#36 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	"What is the real world?" i dont know what you're referring to when you ask that. "can any individual actually know it?" i dont know if one can or not. what would that mean? i would think it'd be like having a memory that doesn't forget--like funes in the borges story, you wouldn't be able to move. you could know "everything" maybe, but it wouldn't matter. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

01-11-2007, 07:16 AM	#37 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	roachboy, Would you agree that there is a time for reflecting on philosphical questions such as what knowing is, the boundaries and rules of one's mind in the gathering of information and the understanding of atrocity...as well as a time for selfless action based on simple moral impulse? I am interested in the questions you put forth on this thread, and I realize that you are at least partly musing on a theme (not commenting directly on the OP), but what is your own moral impulse when it comes to the need to act and act quickly on the behalf of others? And what place do your (our) own interests have in modulating that impulse? Just out of curiosity. __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

01-11-2007, 01:17 PM	#38 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	mm: hard questions, those are. i react to things that i take to be ethically or politically objectionable in ways that i can: generally, because i can do it, i write stuff. but it is bothersome in that there is no way to know whether what appears in print reaches anyone or does anything, so it may be more about the discharge of affect than anything else, the writing. but it is a public act (after a fashion).... i am politically active, and that does and does not help with the sense of "doing something".... i think that many of the events that happen out there in the world that are truly horrific come about because folk are able to compartmentalize what they see and know in ways that often ends up legitmating means/ends disjunctures. to enable this, all you really have to do is control the political context. that way you set the terms of "legimate" debate and for the most part people will dutilfully derive conclusions based on premises that they are handed without necessarily recognizing that they were handed the premises. so what i imagine writing and teaching and other such activities to be about is making this process more difficult for people. getting in the way, fucking up the process, posing problems for and about it. suggesting alternatives sometimes. but if there arent clear alternatives, you can nonetheless say that political conditions x cause administrative systems 1,2... to act in particular ways, and that these actions have awful consequences that are only possible because BOTH the folk who operate within that system and those who operate within the same political contexts as that system do not connect phenomena together in such a way as to make it clear that these outcomes and the actions of these systems are linked. there is a certain degree of cruelty in these operations in that they are designed to complicate how folk see what they are doing and, by extension, how they see themselves. [[ideally anyway. whether they do it or not is another matter--one can always not communicate effectively what one sets out to communicate (sometimes my posts are little more than extended demonstrations of this problem).]] so the motive is that a happyface life within a fucked up context is in itself not desirable: that it is better to look, better to know, better to be disturbed--because most of the problems i feel inclined to talk about unfold whether folk are paying attention or not, and the only way they can be stopped is by upsetting the basis for not paying attention. most of the stuff i do in 3-d is based on the idea that a readership or an audience has to be jolted out of where they are: assaulted almost, disturbed definitely. but you also want there to be some sources of pleasure, something beautiful in the experience: without it not only would everyone leave, but i would loose interest myself. so the trick is to balance these elements against each other, so that in taking something away you are trying to give something back. it is a kind of exchange program, i guess. because i think that there is beauty out there. but there is also an enormous amount of stuff that is the opposite, most of which has a definite origin based in discrete choices made by actual people (and so does not come about naturally) for particular reasons, all of which are shaped by particular notions of self-interest--and by the ideological context that enables these notions of self-interest to operate as if they were coherent. so one can keep sane by balancing the two, and try to do stuff in such a way as it involves a mix of them. that is the idea anyway. dunno if it always works out optimally. it probably doesnt. but getting closer is one reason to keep going with all of it. most activity--intellectual/practical--is at variant of conceptual art. this includes claims to empiricism: but because these claims are about the world and not about the systems that stage that world (and relations to it), it tends to be very bad conceptual art. nothing is more tedious than that. and translated into political reality, nothing more dangerous. as for putting stuff here, in tfp: it is a parlor game. an intellectual diversion that sometimes has significant rewards in that i learn alot from how folk react, what they argue for and against, how they do it. but it is a parlor game nonetheless: the real stuff, such as it is, happens in the larger aether. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 01-11-2007 at 01:20 PM..