60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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22 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness America as pertinent to how Europeans colonised Africa. Yet, the way Europeans treated Native Americans is a mirror image of their treatment of Africans: Native Americans became homeless in their own land; some Africans, kidnapped and taken into slavery, were torn away from their land, while others faced the same fate as the Native Americans. With the Bantustans under apartheid in South Africa, an attempt was made to turn that part of the continent into reservations. However, given the current power relations between Africa and Europe, Africa and the US, and Africa and the rest of the world, would it be far-fetched to consider individual nation states as being closer to Native American reservations than to sovereign states? The question keeps popping up: have we ever moved away from colonial times? The system has not fundamentally changed; it has been reinforcing itself, helped along the way, more often than not, by its former victims. From such a perspective, it should not be surprising that the level of violence, as well as its intensity, keeps growing. At the same time the capacity of the media to present mass violence as its opposite has grown to an incalculable level, thanks in great part to the equivalent capacity to provide entertainment on a level unimaginable in the past, even by the Nazi experts during World War II. 13 Global warming, global pauperisation, global de-humanisation 14 In the 1960s, when ghettoes in large US cities like Chicago and Los Angeles were burning, one of the reactions was that the big foundations, Ford and Rockefeller, started providing funding for the creation of African Studies, African-American Studies, Ethnic Studies, International Area Studies, and so forth. While the repressive machinery of the State ensured that order was maintained, universities were encouraged to open their doors to people who had previously been excluded from the higher levels of academic achievement. Al- 13 The Roman empire recipe of providing ‘panem et circenses’ (bread and circuses) can be seen at work today, globally, with world events like the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, and the World Soccer Championship. The combined economic and fi nancial power of the entertainment and advertising industry is so interlocked with other industries (defence, pharmaceuticals, tourism) that at times it is diffi cult to imagine their demise. At the same time, the latter aspect makes the comparison between the demise of the Roman empire and the demise of the American empire more complex than it is presented in Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis (2007). 14 Harry Braverman’s ([1998] 1974) work on the degradation of work should be revisited because, at least intuitively, it makes one wonder whether that process could be analysed as part of a much larger and deeper process of degrading humans as human beings.
the history of mass violence since colonial times 23 most half a century later – and three decades since former defence secretary Robert McNamara went to the World Bank and vowed to eradicate poverty – Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, have been given seed money (us$ 15 million each, by Senator Feinstein and her husband) to start a programme called Poverty Studies. Given the precedence, it is not diffi cult to guess the probable outcome of this kind of initiative: academics will ‘discover’ poverty, in much the same way that Columbus discovered the New World. The causes of poverty will be defl ected in such a way that those who are structurally responsible for its spread and growth will be spared. Those who suff er its most debilitating consequences will be held responsible for their own situation, while the funders (and founders?) of Poverty Studies will congratulate themselves and benefi t morally, if not fi nancially, from the whole endeavour. At the same time, Africa has become a major concern (at least on the surface), with various millionaire celebrities in the UK, not to mention the UN Millennium Project, NEPAD (the New Partnership for Africa’s Development) and other schemes. The Nobel Prize for Peace has been given to the Bangladesh founder of the Gramen Bank. Who is fooling whom, and for what purpose? Pacifi cation under colonial rule always used diff erent tactics – those of force (collective and severe punishment) and/or seduction (prizes and rewards) – for the same strategic purpose: to ensure submission. One could add to this list to show that things really are changing for Africa, but not for the better as the propaganda would have it. 15 Yet, given the scale of destruction, one could not even argue that the assistance is a drop in the bucket. It is more like giving the impression that something is being done, when in fact the bottom of the bucket has rusted away. These acts of pretended charity are aimed more at self-congratulation than at really addressing the problem. Sooner or later, thanks to changes in the way information is channelled and controlled, more and more people will come to see the relationship between mass violence against Nature and mass violence against people, between the impoverishment of the biosphere and the impoverishment of human beings. With books like 1491 (Mann 2005) and From Cradle to Cradle (McDonough and Braungart 2002) it is be- 15 The transition of South Africa is often pointed out as a positive sign. But how positive is a transition which maintains the structures that produce and reproduce violence, poverty and death for the majority while generating massive wealth for a tiny minority, and for others the hope that they too will ‘make it’?
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Page 5 and 6: Acknowledgements The larger part of
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In short, both the understanding of
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Behind most mass violence lurk econ
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ehind most mass violence lurk econo
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Is there a south perspective on gen
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is there a south perspective on gen
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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