Sake health center, Goma, Eastern Congo. Jan 2006. Young woman, a victim of rape, waits to give birth. Rape is frequently used as a weapon of war. Tens of thousands of women and girls have been raped since fighting broke out in 1998. Credit: Tineke D’haese/Oxfam
I wrote this yesterday:
…the explosive growth of the Internet over the last ten years took place, in large part, on the backs of a specific group of poor women of color. And most people who use the net are to at least a small degree complicit in those women’s suffering, which renders all online political purism somewhat ridiculous. I’ll explain in tomorrow’s post.
I was referring to this:
It had been no secret that nearly all sides in the Congo’s complex civil war resorted to systematic rape among civilian populations, and estimates were as high as a quarter million victims of sexual assault during the four-year-long conflict. But once fighting died down, victims began coming out of the jungles and forests and their condition was worse than anyone had imagined. Thousands of women had been raped so brutally that they had fistulas. They wandered into hospitals soaked in their own urine and feces, rendered incontinent by their injuries. “Pastors would say to me, ‘Jo, I can’t preach because the church is too smelly,” says Dr. Jo Lusi, a gynecologist and medical director at HEAL. (He and Lyn Lusi are husband and wife.) “No one wanted to be around them. These women were outcasts even more than rape victims usually are. They would say to me, ‘Dr. Jo, am I just a thing to throw away when I smell bad?’ “
What does the horrifying rape war in the Congo — still in progress, despite widespread reports to the contrary — have to do with Internet-based political purism? What, in fact, does it have to do with the Internet at all?
The answer: tantalum, a valuable metal which you are most likely using to read this blog.
Tantalum is a metal with a number of properties that make it very useful in hi-tech applications. It’s relatively easy to refine. It has an extraordinarily high melting point: 3738°C. Its compounds include some of the hardest materials known to science. And most importantly for our purposes, tantalum has electrochemical properties that make it very useful in building highly stable, very small, very heat-resistant capacitors for low-voltage applications. Mobile phones contain tantalum capacitors, as do pagers and iPods. So do laptops, digital cameras, and a lot of desktop computers.
Tantalum reserves exist in Australia, Canada, and Brazil, with more than 50 percent of the world supply coming from just two Oz mines. Southeast Asia and the Arabian Peninsula also hold significant tantalum deposits. And the Congo Basin has a lot, four-fifths of the world’s supply by some estimates, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with some across the border in Rwanda as well. In the Congo basin, tantalum is found in sand deposits containing a mineral called colombo tantalum, locally referred to as “coltan.”
With the boom in consumer electronics starting in the late 1990s, tantalum demand rose worldwide. So did its price. Coltan went from 40 bucks a pound in January 2000 to $380 that December. That kind of money is a huge draw in a place like the Congo Basin, and miners flocked to the east DRC in a Congolese version of the California Gold Rush, complete with shantytowns, destructive placer mines, and depredations on the local wildlife by hungry miners.
Except that California in the 1850s didn’t have more than a dozen warring militias fighting for control of the gold. Armed factions within the DRC, and a few from neighboring countries such as Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Uganda, moved in to seize control of most of the mines, lured by the potential wealth. It paid off. At one point the Rwandan army, which functioned as an intermediary between militias and metals dealers, pocketed $250 million over a period of 18 months.
The militias included some of the most callous people in Africa: the interhamwe, the Rwandan paramilitary group that fomented that country’s monstrous genocide, being one example. Freelance miners were removed from their own operations and forced at gunpoint to work in militia-controlled mines. War raged back and forth as militias fought for control of the mines, conflict raging and abating as the world price of tantalum fluctuated. The price went up, and militas forced more people into slave labor. The price went down and the free workers had no money, some of them joining the militias in order to eat. A Lancet study [PDF] found 600,000 additional deaths attributable to the war in the 16 months following January 2003: 1,200 people a day.
Rape was a weapon used by every group of combatants in the area. Rape was explicitly used as a tactic of terror to demoralize the locals, as a way of punishing a village for supporting rival militias, as a way of rewarding troops for victories or boosting morale after defeats. Some of the rape victims, generally those between ages 8 and 20, were kidnapped and forced to work as “mine wives,” supplying mine workers with coerced sex and domestic labor. Some were killed outright. And some were allowed to survive, grievously injured, often exposed to HIV, and left to contend with social attitudes that cast rape victims as unclean.
It’s unlikely that the war in the Congo would have taken place if not for the region’s valuable minerals. Coltan is just one of the minerals at issue: there’s gold as well, plus diamonds, copper, tin, and cobalt. (The price of tin has gone up of late due to its use in lead-free solder in electronics, reviving hostilities in the southeast part of the DRC.) Conflict over resources has existed in the Congo for years, from the days when King Leopold ran a genocidal regime to extract rubber from the region’s forests. But without the coltan market, the horrendous, largely ignored African World War — so called for the involvment of half a dozen nations in the conflict — would likely never have happened.
And as Canadian writer Paul Harris notes,
[T]he Western media consistently reported, when they noticed at all, that the civil war in DRC was the result of tribalism, an African conflict by Africans themselves. That is largely fiction. Although there are tribal conflicts and the normal strains of pastoral versus farming communities in DRC, the civil war arose out of the machinations of various outside parties: Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and the numerous multinational corporations and individuals who have their fingers in the huge mineral wealth of DRC. Citizens of Germany, Canada, Britain, France, and the United States are well-known players in Congo and there is good reason to suspect that a frank and honest inquiry into what has occurred during the past five years in DRC would point fingers in some very uncomfortable directions.
As the Newsweek article quoted at the beginning of this post says, that rape war continues today, despite many reports to the contrary.
The rapes—and new reports of fistula damage—have not stopped. Even now, “It is still happening, even today,” says HEAL’s medical director, Doctor Lusi. “Every space we have in the hospital is very, very busy with people.” Most of the dozen or so militias in the country have signed on to peace terms, and their battles with each other and with the Congolese Army have mostly stopped since the arrival of United Nations peacekeepers. But many of the armed groups—even those that have made peace—continue to attack civilians, especially in rural areas. “They won’t go ahead and fight each other, [but] they attack that village that supports the other group,” says Lyn Lusi. “This is a horrible perpetual movement of militias. They join after their families are killed, sometimes right in front of them. They see their women raped, and then they go and do the same thing. It’s a cycle of violence.”
To sum up:
– We bought computers, digital cameras and wireless PDAs, making the blog world as we know it possible (among other things)
– we thus consumed 25¢ or so worth of tantalum in each device
- there were hundreds of millions of us buying the stuff
- the boosted price of tantalum attracted murderous rapist thugs to the DRC’s coltan mines
- Congolese women paid, and are still paying, the price.
It’s not just the women of the Congo who suffer, to be sure: men have suffered mightily, some of them raped as well. And rape is ubiquitous in war, historically speaking. But the severity, and the scale, of the targeting of women in the east DRC sets this war apart as especially brutal, especially misogynistic.
Which provides a bit of an interesting perspective to the blog wars about whether you can be a real feminist if you blog about lipstick — on a network built on a foundation of rape war. Or to the claims that blogging about racism and sexism is a diversion from anti-war organizing — on a network built on a foundation of rape war.
The Congo Rape War is probably the most severe taint the internet suffers, but it’s just one. Chinese rivers flow undrinkable and foul downstream from chip factories, but the people downstream have no other water, so they drink it anyway. E-waste recycling is growing but is still basically a joke, nibbling away at the edges of the gigantic tech waste stream, which generally winds up leaching toxic chemicals into places where people live who can’t afford to move away from landfills.
I am not, as one clueless commenter suggested yesterday, saying that just by using the net, we’ve “been oppressing a ’specific group of poor women of color’ for 10+ years now.” Maybe I should say that, but I’m not saying that. Blogs are here, tainted with Original Sin as they may be, and we may as well try to use them for good. Not using them won’t unrape anyone. But political purism is neither helpful nor appropriate here. The “priority purity” I wrote about yesterday is just one form of political purism. There are many others to be found in the blog world. Whether that purity is ideological or strategic in nature, claiming it online can only be done by the ignorant.
Oh, and by the way: Doctors Without Borders is one of many groups helping women who’ve been victimized in the Congo war. They could use your help.
This post is soooo stupid. If you want to call for better corporate practices in the Congo, please do so. And if you want to point out how ordinary computer users have unwittingly bought supplies from unscrupulous sources and have suggestions about how to improve, by all means go ahead. But this nonsense about “original sin” and this pathetic attempt to guilt me is obscene.
OK, we’ve got the obligatory misplaced accusation of guilt-tripping out of the way right up front. Thanks, Mavis: we can move on to discussing the actual post now.
Mavis, you’re invited to get a fucking grip. But thanks for proving Chris’s point.
Sheelz, I think Mavis forgot that this is a Cat’lic-Hatzoring blog and that all mentions of original sin are thus sardonic, if not sarcastic.
Great post Chris.
Thanks for dragging my attention back to the war. I hadn’t heard much about the resource rush (though I do vaguely remember having heard something about it previously), but you did a good job of tying it all together.
Now, I’ll add–I find myself really conflicted in these situations. I’m very sensitive to consumerism, yet I have a real aversion to embracing consumer choice as the major catalyst for change. It’s too piecemeal IMO. Yet I do think that it’s important that we are cognizant of things like this, defensive whining on the part of people who’d rather not be bothered with it aside. Some perspective would certainly be refreshing on that end.
Really–I’d love to have every consumer item be stickered with a true cost estimate–how many resources were used, how people were exploited, and how much it will cost to dispose of it and how much harm it will do once disposed of (and who gets hurt in that process). Yeah, maybe it’s “guilt” but it’s about goddamn time that people woke up to the fact that we don’t get things from the stuff fairy. Atrocities like the Congo Rape War are so often hidden, and it happens–or is intensified–for reasons that can only be described as trite.
Not to harp on my pet political project either, but Air Serv (www.airserv.org) is another non-profit organization that helps in the Congo region (normally, flying in the same doctors without borders and the medicine).
Anyone want a bite of these apples?
Seriously, have you all read Mahmood Mamdani’s When Victims Become Killers? Because it supplements Chris’s analysis nicely, putting the Rwanda genocide in regional and historical context….
Count me as conflicted too, S. I mean, on the one hand, most of us didn’t know. On the other hand, whose fault was that? The information has been out there almost since it started, as witness the “recycle your cell phones to save the gorillas” thing early this decade. On the third hand, it was only a few cents per tech toy. On the fourth hand, a lot of those tech toys were bought just to have the latest cool toy: I know I picked up a few things to replace old ones that still worked, but were unfashionably slow.
The UN, incidentally, stepped in early to try to restrict the coltan trade, compiled a report on the main corporate offenders, and then suppressed it at the urging of the nations from which those offenders came. We’re talking major industrial powers here.
The conflict in the Congo, one of the longest-running and horrific wars in the world, gets ignored not only by the mainstream media but also, largely, by the Left (who should at least be up in arms about U.S. complicity in murdering the Congo’s best chance at peace and self-determination).
Thanks for posting this.
I knew about the fighting in DRC (which I still think of as “former Zaire”) over mineral resources, but I figured it was over diamonds, gold, and such. I didn’t know about the tantalum. And I didn’t know about the connection to the boom of the Information Age.
As someone who makes a living in computers and internet stuff, this distresses me greatly.
I am very glad to see Medecins Sans Frontieres on the case, though. That may just be my favorite charity group in the world.
:lets out a long breath at the end of reading this:
Thank you for posting this, Chris. This is something I never knew about…horrifying.. but thank you.
gotta say though, it makes it easier for me to go, “you know what? I don’t need a new mobile phone/ipod/laptop as much as consumer lust tells me I do.”
While I sympathize with the arguments made in this piece (yea, it’s a little guilty, but its heart is in the right place, so that’s acceptable. If that came off as condescending, it wasn’t meant as such.), this whole thing just gets at the larger point of how Europe has underdeveloped and exploited Africa for centuries now. While the Congolese need our help, so does the rest of the continent. Darfur needs help. People have to bring attention to the travesty of a state that is Zimbabwe. Chad is developing into a problem. The continent is on the upswing, for sure, but that doesn’t mean that things are where they should be, where countries have the ability to fully support themselves and their populations. There are clearly a lot of priorities, but it’s immaterial which one is more important. I hate that women are getting raped for metal as much as I hate that my beloved country (yes, I do love America deeply) being entangled in a war that is completely unjustified and being represented by politicians who do not represent my interests (and yes, I do vote). They are all equally important. I’m glad that this sort of position piece is written, expressing the viewpoint of this particular blog and its editors.
The reality is that everything is tainted. But instead of focusing on how to destroy everything, the focus should be on how to build a better society/world. (Not saying that you’re focusing on destroying, of course Chris)
The problem is that doing all of this from the bottom up, while helpful, in the long run just isn’t enough. These are issues that need to be dealt with from the top down, or in other words, there needs to be core changes to how we do business.
I would argue that the focus on infinite profits over infinite time is the real stumbling block to real change here, in that we as a society are very slow to do anything that might interfere with that percieved “right”.
All the media is worried about is Anna Nicole Smith! What about global warming or this, for example. I am very happy that this was posted. I think teenagers must be better informed about these kinds of tradgedies happening currently and in front of their noses. We have to get the message that there are real and present dangers and sadnesses in the world. It makes me sad when I hear that nothing is being done about these kinds of occurences.
Quite a revelation we are having today:
To sum up:
– We buy products
– Products are made of resources.
- there were hundreds of millions of us buying products
- the boosted price of resources attracted murderous rapist thugs to the location of the resources.
- Women near the resources paid, and are still paying, the price.
You all rush to flame Mavis, but up until now his is the ONLY post that actually discusses anything relating to the issue. He is stating that the fault lies with those committing the crime, not the unwitting consumer.
Try actually responding to people who disagree with you. You may actually learn something.
Very well written Chris, and speaking as a foreigner, it is really nice to see some internationalist perspectives here now and then
I particularly like how you don’t pose a solution either. Too often pieces written like this end up with some snappy suggestion at the end … ie guilt people out through the article, and then provide some kind of penitence at the end so that the reader can not feel shitty when they finish reading.
The Western world owes its privilege, wealth and standard of living on the backs of developing countries, and particularly the people therein …and specifically, Africa. Like Sheelz, I don’t believe in a consumer resistance to this because it’s piecemeal, and it really honestly isn’t challenging the uber-capitalist system that allows this stuff to go on … hell, encourages it.
There are no easy answers here … but a good fucking start would actually you know, be starting something.
Do you need me to explain some of the big words in the post, Grilltacular?
Thanks, Grilltacular. I think I probably agree with the poster and the commenters on the nature of the problem, I just really resent the tactics of the post.
“the fault lies with those committing the crime, not the unwitting consumer”
And we walk away unaffected, fingers placed tightly in our ears to block out the screams we wish to deny…
Grilltacular, you’ve got a great career ahead of you in either politics (Republican of course), or as a spokesman for the tobacco industry…
What are the tactics of the post that you resent so much? Either you feel guilty about participating in a consumer culture that fucks the less fortunate or you don’t, the post merely points out what is happening. And this whole “unwitting consumer” thing is pretty much complete bullshit, we all know that are buying practices are connected to horrible treatment of people all over the world; just because you choose not to ask many questions about it doesn’t make you “unwitting.”
It’s unlikely that the war in the Congo would have taken place if not for the region’s valuable minerals.
I don’t know if I’d go that far. It’s undoubtedly true that exploitable resources has made it many times worse, but I doubt that all would be sweetness and light if if those resources weren’t there. Humans seem to be able to find things to kill each other over pretty easily. National borders for example.
I do resist the implied guilt trip though. I should view the Internet as tainted because of the horrors of the tantalum mines? I mean, come on Chris. Go down this road and before you know it you’re back to Manifest Destiny and Christopher Columbus, the genocide of the Native Americans, where does it end? At what point can we say, “here is where it all started to go wrong?” Recorded history is largely about atrocities committed by one group or another. Watch the History Channel’s “Barbarian Week” that’s going on right now.
I agree with the premise wholeheartedly, if that premise is:
It goes further than that. We consume so much compared to what we produce that some person, animal, or environment must cover the difference through some form of suffering.
Where do we go from there?
What I don’t agree with is Amanda’s “6 degrees of suubjugation” method of guilt tripping society in general with her “Original Sin” analogy. It doesn’t stick.
P.S.
Chris: your lame attempts to position yourself as “smart” are betrayed by your constant ad hominem attacks on anyone you disagree with. Be the bigger man!
Except that it isn’t clear how unwitting those consumers really are. I first read about coltan back during the dot-com boom, I think from Salon. Plenty of dot-commers did. So you got one day of everyone kind of hanging their heads and going “Ooh, not good” before it was back to business as usual, get that code out, look at my striped shirt, rah rah rah.
The top-down solutions are going to be the most effective, vastly more effective than one consumer delaying a cell phone upgrade. I don’t think anyone here disputes that. But as Kyso pointed out in her review of Fast Food Nation, just because your action may be futile doesn’t mean it’s an action you shouldn’t take.
That goes double for the hardcore geeks who upgrade just to stay ahead of the curve. I see no difference between them and women who obsessively purchase flashier and pricier jewelry–the only difference is, in a sexist society we’ll dish some shit out to women for failing to ensure their diamonds are conflict-free, but we won’t utter a peep at the male nerds buying their tech equivalents.
Thanks for this, Chris. I’ve been looking forward to it since yesterday because I was sure you were going to head this direction with it.
Here’s another thought. I wouldn’t even know about the horrors of the tantalum mines if it wasn’t for the Internet.
Thanks for this excellent post, Chris. And thanks for the comic relief near the end: “Which provides a bit of an interesting perspective to the blog wars about whether you can be a real feminist if you blog about lipstick — on a network built on a foundation of rape war.” Of course, you probably had no way of knowing what kind of zany hi-jinks awaited you in the comments.
Dude, why are the Pandagon tubes mad at me? I’m always in moderation now.
sigh. Like a flashback to that godaweful term paper I wrote about Angola.
Only this time, ronald regan isn’t paying for half of the stupid, I am personally.
The point of this post, per StotheL
1. Inform unwitting consumers like me that Internet requires tantalum contributes to war includes rape.
2. Remind consumers who are aware (does that make them witting?) that their tech usage comes at a high price to poor women, men, and children of color. Just like their coffee and gemstones.
3. Start a conversation about the guilt implicit in that understanding.
So where did we get to guilt tripping and Christopher Columbus? I thought this post was well written and informative, and I somehow bypassed the imaginary finger-wagging that Mavis and Grill seem to have found.
StotheL
P.S. Grilltacular: you seem to be saying that Mavis, whose first sentence was “This post is soooo (sic) stupid.” is being the bigger person and intellectual. That seems kind of dumb.
Let me see if you’ve been added to the blacklist. I haven’t read anything of yours that’s objectionable, so I don’t mind fishing you back out, but be advised that one of the other bloggers will likely you throw you back in if there’s good reason for you to have been there in the first place.
Grilltacular’s about to tread where An Arrogant Tool of the Matriarchy has been if he doesn’t watch the fucking piehole.
Oh, and to clarify: pointing out actual guilt does not necessarily equal guilt tripping.
That’s not what I am saying at all Mike. What I am saying is walking away pointing fingers in all directions is misguided and childish.
Everyone involved in the consumer culture should be aware of the price of the items they consume, in terms of effects on people, the environment, etc. As a smart person wrote above, these costs are not always included in the “price” (money) that we pay for the item. None of us are omniscient to the point of including the long and short term costs into that figure. So where does that leave us?
To Amanda, that leaves us all in a place of guilt where women of color shouldered the burden for the growth of the internet. And this is constructive how?
I love how some readers of this blog assume anyone to the right of Amanda is a Republican. As I’ve said before, I constistently vote for Democrats, and that is why I am here and not over at Salon. I am more interested in the opinions of people like Amanda and readers of this blog because you are killing the party worse than the wingnuts ever could. Amanda’s comments about Catholicism and the Duke Lacrosse case have created Republican voters and killed Edwards’ candidacy faster than Rush Limbaugh could ever dream of, and if you don’t realize that you are a fool.
Political battles are *always* fought over the large centrist block of voters. You know, the same people you alienate with your misguided name-calling…
What could I have possibly done to get blacklisted? You have to understand–the penis enlargement pills I’m selling really do work!!!
I am so sick of hearing this bullshit. No one does consensus politics like the Canadians, but check out Preston Manning. Hell, check out Goldwater and Reagan. The “center” is always being redefined in modern politics.
Grilltacular–
You do know this post wasn’t written by Amanda, don’t you?
Nothing is unmitigated good. Certainly the internets aren’t–aside from the present debacle, there’s also the energy demands of the net to consider. Certainly, more than a few greenhouse gases are created by the demand for electricity driven in no small part by the net.
That doesn’t mean that the net is an unalloyed evil, either. All it means is that, like almost everything else we consume, there are truths about its creation that we don’t really want to know. (Quick, meat-eaters: how many of us have gone to visit an industrial slaughterhouse? Not me, that’s for damn sure. Quick, clothes-wearers: anything you own from Indonesia? Myanmar? Cambodia? Yeah, me too.)
What we need to do is take off the blinders and really see what’s going on. The internet may not be the proximate cause of the war in the Congo, but it’s certainly a contributing factor, and so if we are honest with ourselves, it’s incumbent on us to do what we can to mitigate the damage. At the very least, we owe it to those who we’re hurting, even indirectly, to acknowledge their pain.
Oh, never mind–Grilltacular’s just a troll. Moving on.
Sfil, fair question. My off-the-cuff response is that a. where does this kind of culpability end? and b. what’s the solution?
Oil causes wars, metal causes wars, and water causes wars. The fight over and use of resources can and does lead to violence, social stratification and subjugation, extreme poverty, and enviornmental degredation. It’s a major problem. (Some of these problems can be attributed to the injection of Western money and/or Western corporations. But there was fighting in the Congo long before Microsoft.) Every expansionary act has both positive and negative consequences - Manifest Destiny, the Industrial Revolution, Globalization. We must look at those consequences and decide which roads are worth taking and which are not. If you wish to live in a pre-Industrial Revolution world, be my guest. I do not. What we responsible citizens must do is rectify the negative consequences of our trespass.
There are only two types of solution. One is revolutionary: out with the economic structures that commodify and allow for poverty. People of world unite. Good luck with that. The other option is liberal: Find ways to use the wealth and power of the United States and other willing nations to increase food supply and equality, reduce violence, and stop environmental degredation. It’s not an easy road, but I think it’s the only way to go.
As to why I find the post obnoxious, it’s because it’s infantilizing and a waste of time to tell us all to feel guilty about buying computers. Who gives a shit about feeling guilty? Justice has nothing to do with feeling guilty for what you have. It is about recognize the plight of others is undeserved. Gotta run
AATOTM, try going by your other handle or maybe changing what you enter for the URL. If that doesn’t fix it, then I don’t know. I can’t turn up a match on your email or IP in the blacklist.
Weird.
Okay!
Chris isn’t using ad hominem, and you’re boring people by trying to have a dick-swinging contest with him.
Please discuss the post, not how smart is Chris Clarke. He’s vain enough as it is.
Some people really are incapable of reading for content.
The post, Mavis, was not about “making poor beleaguered Mavis feel guilty about buying computers.” It was about cutting the rug out from under the constant fucking petty guilt tripping to be found on the net.
Truman said something about telling people the truth and them thinking it was hell. Dunno why I just thought of that.
In other news, I suspect that it would make Grilltacular very smug and happy indeed were he to be banned by us choir preachers. And I am nothing if not generous.
I will go ahead and defer to Mavis. He puts the issue in context better than Chris ever did, and he also gives constructive analysis of where do we go from here.
Eveeryone else, continue to tilt at windmills.
Gritt, Amanda didn’t write this post and I can’t find a comment by her on this thread. Learn to read. While you’re at it, look up the term “concern troll”.
This is hardly a way to get a poster to take a commentator seriously. I think that Mavis had a point but it was already contaminated by the first sentence. Chris is right to call Mavis for bad intent and Grilltacular, you are not earning any credits by ignoring it.
Guilt by association is what has finally gotten people past the pretty deBeers ads on diamonds and if it works on any level to get people to think before upgrading their PC, getting a new cell phone because the new one is prettier or just taking the time to recycle their old tech toys properly than so be it. On some levels we are all guilty because we don’t want to pay the real price of things and we prefer to put it off on a future generation. Cheap crap is costing us in innumerable ways that we may never see, but as with all aspects of industrialization, the technological revolution comes with a price tag. I would rather know what I am guilty of so that I can try to do what I can than remain ignorant.
Grilltacular: Speaking of names… Amanda didn’t write this post. And also, “killing the party…” Excuse me, weren’t you complaining about mis-guided guilt trips?
Great post, Chris. Thank you for the information.
Sorry, folks, a bunch of y’all beat me to it.
Thank you.
I tried self-deprecation once.
I wasn’t very good at it, though.
I will note for the future that it’s a sign of intellectual elitism to prefer that responses actually address what the post actually said. Good to know.
In 2001 while trying to find a unique political topic for a poem and googling random words, I stumbled across the phenomenon of ape eating cell phones.
Bonobos, gorillas, and other wild animals including elephants are being poached for food by coltan miners and militias. This poaching often involves desperate miners force to work in near slave by Congolese warlords.
The effect on species was so pronounced the UN issued a special report on the connection. At the time, reports said phone companies attempts to avoid tainted metal were hampered by third party suppliers who mix good and bad sources.
It’s sad the connection between coltan and endangered apes has gotten more play than coltan and rape.
Then there’s the other end of the spectruum: How Lagos, Nigeria and other African cities have become grotesque dumping grounds for old electronics. Urban poor, especially women, risk their lives salvaging valuable toxic metals for a few pennies. These urban areas of environmental inequity also have problems with the sex trade, AIDs, abuse, etc. Not a direct connection but still.
Then there’s the bad labor practices of computer factories including sexual harassment. This is largely a foreign problem, but there were sweatshops in Silicon Valley until 2000 at least.
The facade of the information industry is how it runs on intangible - and thus clean - data. The reality is a poison garden of electronic delights where net users frolic with devices which rooted in squalor, pain and exploitation. It’s a nightmare combining Bosch and Stephenson, Gibson, Coupland and Corey Doctrow.
I wish some cybersaavy writer or filmmaker would piece together the fragments of this story into a single powerful work, a la Fast Food Nation.
At this point writers are only nipping at the edges, concentrating on soft exploitation like C. Doctrow’s fiction which mentions virtual sweatshops in online games.
I am stepping away from the keyboard…put down the flamethrower.
I am here to learn, not to fight. How about you?
I’m here to fight. Learning brings up all kinds of scary feelings for me, like “guilt.” But then I just remind myself that I “consistently vote for democrats,” and I realize that I am entirely blame-free from anything bad that happens anywhere in the world!
Really? Wow … I mean, from your belittling, arrogant, condescending, rude and dismissing attitude through your ENTIRE history of posting here, we must have TOTALLY got the wrong impression …
Our bad.
I’m only here for the snack chips.
Alas the net ate my post with all the links, but if one does the research one can find that the supposedly clean information industry is in reality a poison garden of electronic delights were a lucky few frolic with devices which originate and end up in exploitation and pain. I first read about this coltan when the UN released a report connecting cell phone use with the poaching of bonobo apes and other endangered species by starving miners, often forced to work by Congo militias.
Ape eating cell phones are just the start. There’s the horrible labor practices in computer factories which included sweatshops in silicon valley until at least 2000. Then there’s electronic waste which is turning Lagos, Nigeria and other intensely poor African cities in to grotesque dumping grounds where the poor get paid pennies to salvage valuable toxic metals for reuse. Not to mention the weirder soft exploitation of foreign workers getting paid pennies per hour to farm gold in online games.
Of course there’s sexual abuse and harassement every step of the way.
What we really need is the cyber equivalent of Fast Food Nation to wrap up all the strands of this into one fascinating package, possibly fact based fiction.
I’m suprised Stephanson / Gibson / Coupland / Cory Doctrow hasn’t taken this on. Perhaps there needs to be a new, perhaps female, voice describing the toxic blacktop of the information superhighway.
Sorry, I rewrote my post twice because I thought me first was lost.
If you’re here to learn, lurk longer. Stop posting.
Uh, I obviously meant to address that to Grilltacular.
Thanks for writing about this. It’s yet another horiffic example of how mineral wealth is a curse to those that inhabit the land above it. I haven’t seen much comprehensive writing on the horrid events that have been occuring in that region of Africa.
Anyway, regardless of whether this causes a guilt impulse in anybody or not, it’s generally better to be informed. Every time I turn on a light switch I’m reminded that I’m irrevocably burning away another little bit of my native Allegheny Plateau, and even though it makes me sad, I’m glad I’m aware of the connection.
You bastard! Funyuns are made from tortured baby Montenegrans!
Shame!
Shame!!!11!1!
OT: softdog - I ran into that too the last few days … apparently the spam catcher is doing funky things for some reason.
Fuck you Chris.
Here you had a fantastic piece of work about something that matters, and you had to go and fluff it with a bunch of bs about who gets to take the high horse on the high road.
It wasn’t me who wrote that in the last fucking graph of my post:
I still say you accused us of what I now see is basically genocide, and then acted coy about it. Fuck you if I would like to see proof for that kind of talk.
And fuck you for being right about it.
Damn Chris … look at all those exclamation points you are wasting there! Don’t you feel guilty?! Your should feel soooooo guilty! You need to conserve your exclamation points!
heh this kind of reminds me of a semi joke some of my freinds have about “oh what thing can we not use today because of trying to be politically pure [i even have freinds that dont eat honey because of “bee exploitation”]
you just cant do it though. if you want to stop doing X because it makes you feel like your doing something good, more power to you, but i cant stand the holier than thou ones that get on everyone else.
[…] The Most Important War You’ve Never Heard About For a conflict that killed around 3.5 million civilians, give or take, the Second Congo War is remarkably unknown to the world. Chris Clarke has a good post about the coltan angle of the conflict, which is basically Johann Hari’s report with less fluff; it’s riddled with standard issue guilt-based arguments, but there are enough gems in the post that any sane person should be able to focus on its important parts. […]
[…] For a conflict that killed around 3.5 million civilians, give or take, the Second Congo War is remarkably unknown to the world. Chris Clarke has a good post about the coltan angle of the conflict, which is basically Johann Hari’s report with less fluff; it’s riddled with standard issue guilt-based arguments, but there are enough gems in the post that any sane person should be able to focus on its important parts. […]
I’m not eating Funyuns, though. I’m eating Responsibilityuns. For some reason they don’t sell as well…
Thank you, Chris. I was not aware of that which you quite rightly document. It’s always good to act with knowledge.
I love the Internet. It’s beautiful to watch how a post that’s about the SILLINESS of consumer purism and guilt-tripping is now being accused of that self-same flaw.
I’m trying to have NoFunyuns, but when I open the bag all I see inside are bible verses on little slips of paper…
Okay, off-topic, but I’ve switched back to my usual internets handle. I apologize to the administrizzles for any inconvenience caused by my screen-name chicanery.
[Ed.: You son of a bitch. I had to click the mouse a second time.]
Note to all:
Being described as
now equals being
Please make a note of it.
Also, Leia at 6:05 pm?
I love you.
Fuck all Chris, what the fuck are you writing about?
What exactly is your point?
Why did you spend all this time writing this if it is only tangentially related to whatever the fuck it is you are talking about?
Is this important or isn’t it?
Are you/ am I complicit in this or not? Are these women and others being persecuted because of demand for consumer electronics or not?
My head is about to explode because I really can’t figure out what the fuck it is you are doing if the answer to those questions is no. Was this just some kind of prop show so you could show off how you could out-Godwin anyone else’s won’t-somebody-think-of-the-X? Are we really still on some SadlyNo bullshit?
I’m pretty sure you drew a fairly straight line from consumer demand for electronics to what you yourself described as the suffering of these women at the hands of murderous rapist thugs. In my understanding, our (world) demand is the cause and their death and suffering is the effect. 1,200 people a day, over 600,000 people dead sure sounds something like genocide. Isn’t that the fucking point of your post? Why did you write this if it wasn’t?
You’re the most brilliant person on the planet. I give up.
My name is not Chris, but given that I actually read what Chris wrote, I consider myself qualified to say the following:
Shorter Chris:
“We all have blood on our hands, and we should remember that; but given that we all have blood on our hands, it’s exceedingly wanky and even hurtful to spend time accusing other people of having blood on theirs as though the finger we are wagging isn’t bright red.”
strix, let me see if I can ramp this down a bit.
First: What Auguste said.
Also. There is a straight line from electronics purchases to the Rape War. Does that mean you did an evil thing when you bought your iPod? Well perhaps, but not because of that necessarily. Events are complex. It would have been possible to buy just as many Treos without a single woman being assaulted. Each assault was an act of volition by the rapists, who bear the responsibility for their own actions.
When I talk about degrees of complicity, I mean something more nuanced than a simple “guilty/not guilty” metric. One really can bear a trivial amount of responsibility for a heinous genocidal war. I think a person should be able to mention the connection between consumer purchases and geopolitics and land somewhere between denial and hauling people into the Hague for buying two dollars worth of tantalum. If I was going to write a post accusing Pandagon commenters of genocide, I think I’d start somewhere where the degree of complicity is a bit starker. Like living on land stolen from the victims of genocide, for instance.
And yes, you could say that I brought up the Congo War to, as you put it:
That’s an uncharitable way of putting it, to be sure, but in essence correct. The fact is that I’ve been considering writing on the Congo for some time. The recent blogspats are what pushed it forward in my long list.
But I’m also a person who generally tends to write about more than one subject at once. This post is about the civility spats: that’s the general context in which it’s written, as you saw in part I. But it’s also about the Congo War. Maybe I didn’t make the connection as seamless as I’d have liked, but the fact is that there is no issue that isn’t connected to another issue. Many of the commenters here seem to have understood the point I was making, and a different but overlapping set of many seem to have valued the information on the Congo I put up here. That’s good enough for me.
So…NOW THAT WE ALL KNOW ABOUT THIS, what are we going to do?
And just for the record, the blame lies with the rapists and thugs–not the people logging on without knowing any of this was / is happening.
Furthermore, Africans -at some point- need to actually take responsibility for their own destiny. WHITE people and other non-Africans can give hand outs and advice; however, the actions necessary to secure a decent, safe, economically viable place / places to live in Africa lies squarely in African hands.
I know someone’s going to blast me for saying it-but it needed to be said.
Oh, hush up Jeff — you’re taking away my secret giggles…..Each drop in the water creates ripples, which mixes with other drops in the water, and hopefully in the long run it does some good.
There’s a reason why certain issues seem to stick together. It’s because they’re related..maybe not obviously, maybe very subtly, sometimes stuck together like glue. But something affects something else, and that continues on, and so on.
Thanks for writing this. IMHO, Americans need to prioritize better in terms of what we get outraged about. There are injustices everywhere, to be sure, but some are simply bigger than others. Hundreds of thousands of dead Africans is a Big Deal. Someone calling Barack Obama “articulate” (to pick just one example) is Not a Big Deal.
I only disagreed with one thing: your overemphasis of tantalum. IMHO, this would be no more and no less of a tragedy if tantalum weren’t involved. Tantalum is not the root cause of the conflict. An amplifier, perhaps, but not the root.
Also, for whoever wrote this:
this whole thing just gets at the larger point of how Europe has underdeveloped and exploited Africa for centuries now
Absolutely right. But progress is being made…now the Chinese are underdeveloping and exploiting Africa!
Uhura,
Yes, thank you so much for saying that. I was getting sooo sick of all the people in this thread claiming that rapists should not be blamed for their horrible actions, and that nobody in Africa should attempt to make conditions in their own country better…. Wait a second, I just actually read this thread, and no one actually ever said anything like that. But then again, people like me are killing the democratic party, so you should probably just ignore me.
Shorter Chris:
“We all have blood on our hands, and we should remember that; but given that we all have blood on our hands, it’s exceedingly wanky and even hurtful to spend time accusing other people of having blood on theirs as though the finger we are wagging isn’t bright red.�
And isn’t that a truly terrible point? We should ignore the 101 Fighting Keyboarders? We should just forget - or at least cut some slack - that some people advocate foolish policies that cause death and destruction because we are all impure? Come on!
Oh, and sorry about putting too many “o’s” on “soooo stupid.” Totally my bad.
Ironically, the slogan of the site Uhura gives as a home page is
A soccer site, eh?
Um, excuse me, do you know what soccer balls are made of?
damit. Missed Chris’ latest post.
Also:
I think that a primary motivation for the whole “how can you talk about X when Y is sooo much worse and is also happening” is that often times Y is something that is really easy to ignore. For instance, when actions of sexism, racism, etc. are pointed out, these are things that people may actually be able to see in themselves, and therefore would really rather not think about. Thanks in part to our nifty media, the incredibly horrible situation that is going on in DRC, or sweatshops in Asia, or other similar problems are extremely easy to ignore, because they are not a part of my every day life. However, discussion of issues like objectifying people based on their appearance, racism, sexism, etc. make me examine the actions I take on a daily basis, and I think many people don’t want to examine their own actions, lest they realize that they are active participants in societal racism, sexism, etc. I don’t think it’s any coincidence then, that the first response to someone actually writing about the situation in the DRC is met with “why are you writing about this, I am not guilty, blame anyone else but me,” attitude; it doesn’t matter what you actually write about, if you point out the truths of what are going on in this world, some people just don’t want to hear about it.
Wait, Mavis. I’m confused. Are you pissed off because you think I guilt-tripped people, or because you think I don’t guilt-trip people enough?
Chris,
I think I can solve your problem with a mere Top Ten list:
1. Buy a Prius
2. Sell your computers and use an internet cafe for blogging
3. Send the cash from your computers to a Ruwandan rape tratment center
4. Send $25 to Bono (be sure to get a receipt)
5. Ask John Edwards to sell his 28,000 sq. foot house and donate the proceeds to the poor in the African country of your choice
6. Ask Madonna for the name of her adoption contacts and save 3 children from the fate you describe
7. Make credit cards illegal, to reduce demand for the products that are impoverishing Africa
8. Send 25,000 “take back the night” placards to Ruwanda
9. Ask Keith Olbermann to get mad for your cause
10. Vote for Hillary. She consumes tons of the stuff you say causes African suffering and maybe she’ll buy less if shes busy in the White House.
In the absence of the above, buy some of those chains the Shi’ites use to beat themselves on Karbala day.
In the absence of any of the above, well…you may not be serious.
FSF, you left out the part about how I should post from a hemp computer, and you didn’t suggest that maybe the militias have been falsely accused. Are you sure you’re an actual wingnut? Seems like you’re not that experienced yet.
FSF,
Will you have my baby?
I actually rather like many of the folks who are being dismissed as trolls - they encourage me to examine my biases (note that this does not apply to the genuine one-shot sniper trolls).
Anyway, for Mavis and Grilltacular, here’s my understanding of CC’s point:
(1) We are morally responsible for the consequences of our actions
(2) Sometimes our actions provide an additional incentive for people to do evil
(3) When people respond to those incentives (which would not be there but for our actions), we bear some responsibility for the harm caused
(4) Our responsibility is not eliminated by the fact that our personal contribution to bad incentives takes place in a context where hundreds of millions of people are making similar contributions.
Karmakin
Mar 7th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Each drop in the water creates ripples, which mixes with other drops in the water, and hopefully in the long run it does some good.
There’s a reason why certain issues seem to stick together. It’s because they’re related..maybe not obviously, maybe very subtly, sometimes stuck together like glue. But something affects something else, and that continues on, and so on.
——————————————————
Karmakin…yeah….a butterfly farts in the Yukatan Pennisula and a giant snowstorm shuts the Federal Government down for 24 hours.
Auguste-there is a defference betwixt “helping people achieve their goals” and “enabling them to continue their crap.”
People who really want help want halp in order to eventually function independently. They don’t steal food (given as charitable donations) from their own people and rape women to the point of fistula.
www.melaleuca.com
So because some men have raped women, those women “need to actually take responsibility for their own destiny”? Got it.
No one has made any suggestions about what we can do to help.
WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED?
Auguste-You know full well that an obvious straw man is a bad strwman.
Try again.
You mean aside from the one in the post itself?
And the one Antigone added?
And yes-survivors of rape and abuse in Africa (and elsewhere) have taken steps to manage their own destiny.
There is a village in Africa comprised of women who decided to leave abusive husbands and stike out on their own.
It’s called the Umoja Village.
Strawman? You write a “those people” comment about a continent of millions of people, and when I point out that your bootstraps fetish actually marginalizes the very people who are being oppressed, you call that a strawman?
It seems almost certain that your comment deserves only this reply:
“Do you need me to explain some of the big words in the post,” or maybe, “Some people really are incapable of reading for content.”
But, unlike some, I’ll grant that my prose isn’t always unfailingly clear.
My point is that by suggesting we are all guilty of various crimes and misdemeanors, you undercut the real guilt of parties that have actually done something wrong knowingly and intentionally. And additionally, you alienate those millions of people, myself included, who refuse to feel guilty about shit weren’t informed of and is only marginally connected to our actions. And, yes, that’s the way most people will interpret this.
You argue that we are connected to the violence in the Congo and it’s an interesting case, but you hardly prove it. You don’t examine the levels of violence prior to our interest in these metals. And the mere existance of valuable natural resources and the interest of corporations doesn’t necessarily mean that war and rape are sure to follow. It could (and should) be good news for indiginous populations. But something went wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s the consumer’s fault (though she might be able to do something to rectify things). A convincing article would make a much stronger connection between the problems in Congo and the bad behavior of corporations that I’m supporting with my tubes habit. It’s a blog post and you’re unpaid and I’m not giving you a hard time about not having the time or resources for ground-breaking journalism, but it’s a step you really need to make to complete your case. That’s my 17 cents.
The post does not suggest what we an do about the mining etc. I guess the easy way would be to donate to Doctors Without Borders. Write your check and soothe your conscience-LOL.
Auguste, here is what I said:
————————————
People who really want help want help in order to eventually function independently. They don’t steal food (given as charitable donations) from their own people and rape women to the point of fistula.
————————————-
My comment actually condemns the rapists yet you are stating I blamed the people who were raped. It’s a classic strawman.
thanks togolosh. but I do need to shut up.
Etc.
I recognize that you intend to be constructive here, Mavis.
But that’s not what I’m suggesting. As I’ve said. Repeatedly.
I guess I fall into the cynical point of view–we can argue that anything we use on the planet manages to exploit someone, somehow, unless we grow it ourselves. Somehow I don’t think that we’re going to willingly go away from modern technology any time soon, with all the ramifications of “exploitation” that that might include.
I’m not exactly sure what people think is the “morally correct” thing to do–stop the Congo war? We’re trying that. Stop buying computers and devices? Well, that might lower the demand for tantalum, but if the demand drops, price drops, and one can argue that there will be MORE violence because a greater amount of raw material will have to be obtained and sold to maintain the same amount of money coming into the area.
Can one starve a war to death by removing sufficient economic incentive from the fight? This only would seem to work if the war is fought purely on an access-to-materials term. I think a lot of the wars in Africa also have tribal, nationalistic, and religious aspects as well, so there’s a question as to how much effect shutting down the demand for tantalum will have on the wars.
What one could do is get the word out about this enough (using the Internet, ironically), that companies get driven to find “good-sourced” tantalum (possible), or there’s enough incentive to develop a substitute (also possible), or something happens which gets rid of the need for the devices entirely (not very realistic, IMO)
What you said was:
which is victim-blaming at its finest: Is ethical investment a handout? Debt forgiveness a handout? Is anyone saying that Africans won’t eventually self-determine?
When faced with a story like that Chris wrote about, it’s pretty damn arrogant to say “I wish those people would get their shit together.” And if you don’t think what you wrote is classic dog-whistle symbolism for just that sentiment, then you probably haven’t been paying much attention.
Just to clarify, again: I understand perfectly that white people and westerners do not hold the key to self-determination. I also understand perfectly how economic realities translate to real-world action by any economically oppressed (or even recently economically oppressed) people; there’s advocating for self-determination and then there’s parroting right-wing talking points.
Whether you meant to or not, I found you to be doing the latter, and I called you on it.
tzs, there is something concrete that could be done. it’s not the kind of thing likely to make Uhura happy, because it involves holding corporations to account. It would also be difficult to implement, given that the Bush administration is one of the groups stonewalling.
But as I said upthread, the UN has squelched a list of corporations that trade in Congo tantalum. From what I can tell, quite a number of firms are interested in clean tantalum, and if the UN were to make the results of their investigations public, manufacturers with a conscience could avoid the DRC stuff, which would bring that old “free market” into play.
Hey, don’t forget me!
Oh yeah, and colonialism.
Uhura said:
“Furthermore, Africans -at some point- need to actually take responsibility for their own destiny. WHITE people and other non-Africans can give hand outs and advice; however, the actions necessary to secure a decent, safe, economically viable place / places to live in Africa lies squarely in African hands.
I know someone’s going to blast me for saying it-but it needed to be said.”
Yeah, I’ll go ahead and blast you for that. You might have a point if white people had only been giving handouts and advice to the people of the Congo for the past few hundred years. Of course though, that isn’t the case. In the real world, after years of pillaging the Congo through the slave trade and colonialism, white people bought coltan from the “thugs” you mention, and looked the other way while they raped the millions of women in question. If we’re talking about degrees of guilt, I think the merchants putting money in the hands of rapists in the name of cheap coltan are pretty high up on the list of criminals.
Also, plenty of citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are working to build a decent, safe, economically viable place to live. However, we make that very difficult when the only money we spend in their country goes to rapists, rapists who use that money to buy guns and political power.
And what do we do now? We figure out how to hold businesses we patronize accountable for their actions. Or, at least, stop them from more criminally irresponsible business activity.
Boy, alot happened since I refreshed last.
I have no idea why this comment was rejected previously.
Chris thinks he’s getting at the core of the problem by blaming Western consumers, but he’s not. The fact that the Congo has rich resources of a valuable mineral should be a good thing. Why isn’t it? After all, as Chris points out, many of the reserves of tantalum are located in Australia and Canada, and I certainly haven’t heard about either of those nations being torn apart by civil war as a result.
The real question is why Africa can’t seem to create decent governments. This isn’t a rhetorical question; it is a very serious issue that needs to be carefully studied, as it is the underlying cause of many of Africa’s problems. A decent government would be one that would be accountable to the people of the Congo and would exercise sufficient control to end the epidemic of rape and civil war. Why doesn’t such a government exist there, or in most other nations on that continent? South Africa has a reasonably good government, though it certainly has its flaws. Botswana, from what I’ve heard, has done a pretty good job of ensuring that the profits of its diamond bounty are fairly shared. Why do all the other governments of Africa, without exception, suck so bad? No doubt colonialism is part of the answer, but it can’t be the entire answer. I wish there was something the West could do to help, but Bush’s Iraq war has made it impossible for the U.S. to intervene without ulterior motives being suspected. Furthermore, whatever system is developed, it has to be self-sustaining and not depend on the benevolence of outsiders.
This is a difficult question and you do it an insult by claiming that the Internet “took place, in large part, on the backs of a specific group of poor women of color�. The fact is that Africa was a nasty place full of strife and civil war long before the 1990s.
Auguste, you didn’t call me on jack shit.
You accused me of blaming the rape survivors when clearly-that is not what I did.
Then you take the OTHER portion of my statement about self determination -which you agreed with later on by the way-and translated it into something else. You are still creating strawmen and strewing them about & this makes it impossible to have an open and honest discussion about race, sex, money, and power.
What is it that White liberals fear the most? Blacks who actually do not REQUIRE their help. Please trust and believe that I have witnessed this firsthand and experienced it in raw form.
I have YET TO HAVE an HONEST discussion about race with any WHITE PERSON that I know personally or on any online forum.
Ready for a “those people” statement? Here it comes: YOU / WHITE PEOPLE are delusional, arrogant, and disgusting. You see what you want to see, and experience social wrongs only to the extent that is comfortable and convenient for you because you get to be White in a White world, and if & when shit gets too hot or too personal-off you go to the safety of your proverbial home and lock the proverbial door.. “I think I’ll befriend a negro / hispanic today and try to get down to the bottom of things…”…”Don’t SAY that the Africans need to get their shit together.” What ever mofo.
This is why NO ONE can enter a discussion with White liberals and say: The folks you’re are trying to help WILL NOT be helped if the main ingredient is your alleged benevolence. The key ingredient in any assister-assisteee relationship is the desire of the assistee to get out of their current situation. Certain folks up in here cannot (or don’t want to) wrap their minds around that becasue it takes the importance of almighty YT out of the equation.
Snerk.
Exactly:
1) Chris thinks he’s getting at the core of the problem by blaming Western consumers, but he’s not.
2) The real question is why Africa can’t seem to create decent governments.
3)Furthermore, whatever system is developed, it has to be self-sustaining and not depend on the benevolence of outsiders.
Thanks Firebug.
Of course you don’t.
All of a sudden I am very tired.
Chris thinks he’s getting at the core of the problem by blaming Western consumers, but he’s not.
Ilyka, stop hogging the whole sofa.
Auguste, I’ll read your response tomorrow if I feel like it. I am guessing that the hearty helping of Black Anger that you just experienced will probably leave you bewildred and confused.
Uhura said: “2) The real question is why Africa can’t seem to create decent governments.”
No, the real question is why people who can’t name most of the countries of Africa (a continent) think they can pontificate about “Africa’s” problems.
Firebug, do you have a knowledge of Africa’s history? Your comment on failed governments seems to indicate a big no. Have you looked at Ghana? Kenya? Somaliland? Mali? To ask a relevant question, it helps to proceed from a base of knowledge. Simple assumptions about an entire continent only lead to ignorant comments.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you both know more about African history than I think you do. If so, maybe you could look at specifics, and contingent circumstances rather than generalizing about an incredibly diverse and complicated place.
Except that, well, that never works. It’s not the first time somebody in this part of the blogosphere is doing that; Lauren already did that with her “Every time you take a shower, you’re guilty” post. It didn’t work then; and it’s not working now.
That said, most of this thread looks surreal to the point of wankery. You’ve written about the single deadliest, most brutal conflict since World War Two, and you’ve written cogently. Now, I’d expect that the thread about it would be a historical debate over the relative importance of coltan to the conflict, or comparisons to similar wars. My own reading of the situation is that the war would’ve been just as deadly even if there was a coltan deposit four times as big as the Congo’s in Nevada. Obviously, yours is different.
Instead, commenters focus on some minor blogospheric kerfuffle involving a handful of players who nobody outside the blogosphere has even heard about. At least you use American spelling. If you didn’t, people would be derailing all of your threads, wondering whether it’s correct to refer to what’s between the left and the right as the centre.
Dammit.
My browser just crashed and ate a five-paragraph comment I was about to Submit.
Uhura, this’ll be a bit truncated because I don’t feel like writing that much twice.
I never said you were blaming the rape survivors. I said that, in your correct assertion that self-determination is vital, you were also implying - using the aforementioned coded language - that the rape survivors were included in the “they need to want it” formulation.
Plus, in an online forum I have no idea who you are. The only thing I can do is read your rhetoric, and your initial rhetoric would not have sounded out of place at a meeting of the CCC.
I believe you’ve experienced it. I also call it a straw man - you’re assuming we’re all white liberals, and you’re painting all white liberals with the same brush. I’ve been down this road before, you know, and while I will admit to lazy thinking, I will NOT admit to some sort of paternalistic White Man’s Burden, not in the way you’re describing anyway*.