Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!

I just learned of the film from listening to this interesting interview with its director Dean Spade. Here’s the trailer, but you can watch the whole thing – it’s a little under an hour – on Vimeo for free, or at the film site, or right here:

Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! from Pinkwashing Exposed on Vimeo.

I think Spade did a great job with it. As he describes:

This film is useful, I hope, because it tells a story of what some local activists did to speak truth back to propaganda, and how we made our city confront uncomfortable truths. It doesn’t spare the details of the backlash - and it was ugly - because being prepared for backlash is part of doing work against well-organized opposition. But I think it demonstrates that despite the backlash, our work built a great deal of awareness and relationships and strengthened our resistance network.

For more about pinkwashing (origins), see here.

And because I still love it:



And a live version I just learned of:



“Because there is nothing hot about cruising in an apartheid state.”

South Carolina

Data on women in parliaments worldwide

Reading this piece, “Latin America: From U.S. Corporate Hegemony to Regional Autonomy,”* by Preeti Kaur, I came across a useful link to the data on the percentage of parliamentary seats held by women in countries around the world.

What surprised me was that so many of the top countries – those with the highest proportion of women in parliament - were poor. It’s interesting to look beyond the regional breakdowns. In the top ten are Bolivia, Cuba, and Ecuador, and also Rwanda, Senegal, and South Africa. Regionally, the Nordic countries are an outlier at the top, but even with them included Europe still comes in below the Americas; with the Nordic countries excluded, Europe is pretty much on par with Sub-Saharan Africa (a difference of only one percentage point). And the percentages for the US and Canada are below the Americas average. In the full list, the US comes in at 72nd, below Pakistan and Bangladesh (Venezuela, home to teleSUR which published Kaur’s article, has nothing to be proud of here, falling even below the US at 82nd).

Overall, it’s fairly depressing, but there does seem to be real progress - which I can appreciate even as an anarchist - in many countries around the world.

* An important, and infuriating, part of the article described the speech by Ban Ki-moon at the Summit of the Americas this past weekend:

Rather bizarrely, the UN Secretary General then went on to spend a third of his intervention at the Summit of the Americas to discuss the importance of business involvement in the post 2015 development agenda, and in the agenda to address climate change. While the Secretary General recognised that the Americas have been at the vanguard of discussions on key issues regarding climate change, he also said that the ‘new global development agenda and the battle against climate change will need resources, technology and capacity’, and as such ‘private sources and partnerships’ would be crucial in the fight against climate change.

‘With business support for implementing the sustainable development goals, we can transform our world. Business is part of the solution to several major global challenges’, said the UN Secretary General. Such an analysis fails to articulate the ways in which businesses are obliged to pursue profit, even at the expense of harmful impacts to the environment, and people. There is an increasing recognition that capitalism has caused climate change, described incontrovertibly in Naomi Klein’s recent book ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’.

The Secretary General’s intervention failed to explain how businesses might turn their minds to address the key issues of our day. Indeed, only three years previously, in Brazil at the Rio+20 sustainable development conference, Canada, and the U.S. united against reaffirming the responsibility of businesses to respect human rights, and protect our planet.

…Big business is the problem, not the solution. While technical innovation is necessary to combat climate change, much of this innovation is tailored to pursuing energy which increases profit opportunities for business, not which effectively reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Constructive engagement, then and now

Tonight’s All In with Chris Hayes (I’ll post the video when it’s available)

Updated - here's the video:



featured a report on the grotesquely deferential trip made by Barack and Michelle Obama and a twenty-hypocrite contingent from the US to honor the dead Saudi Arabian king. Hayes showed video of Michelle Obama, in reportedly a planned gesture, stepping back to allow her husband to walk in front of her and greet the new king [!] and his delegation first. It also shows them in a sort of receiving line where, in another planned move, Michelle Obama waited for each Saudi Arabian man to make a move to shake her hand first rather than reaching out her hand (too aggressively!) and expecting all of them to shake it as they had her husband’s. Several of the men passed by without shaking her hand.

Imagine, just imagine, if the US government had requested that some of its representatives defer to similar attitudes about black people, expecting them to walk behind white people and to accept that white people might not wish to shake their hands. All of this,* including the transparent rationalizations for obsequiousness toward this oppressive regime - a slap in the face to the women, LGBT people,…, and democratic activists in the country – reminds me of Reagan’s policy of so-called “constructive engagement” toward apartheid South Africa.

An informational 2011 interview with US foreign policy historian David Schmitz concludes with this exchange:

Would you argue that Reagan’s foreign policy extended the life of the regime in South Africa?

Yes. It gave it life. It gave it hope that the United States would continue to stick with it. It gave it continued flow of aid as well as ideological support. It delayed the changes that were going to come. Then you had the big crackdowns in ’86 and ’87. So there was harm in the lengthening. There was harm in the violence that continued.

I think a lot of well-meaning people in the United States bought the Sullivan principles and constructive engagement, because it seems reasonable. Reagan would say, “If we’re willing to talk to the Russians, why aren’t we willing to talk to the South African government?” We’re going to encourage them to moderate and reform — it sounds reasonable. But there was no real pressure. It was all talk. And it was exposed as that.

This is especially relevant given that Obama has argued that it was his opposition to this very policy that drew him into politics. Speaking to students at the University of Cape Town in 2013, Noah Rothman reported,

Obama told the South African students that, when he was a teenager, he was moved to abandon cynicism and engage in the political process in order to oppose his university’s and the American government’s support for the Apartheid South African government.

I wonder how it feels to return to that youthful cynicism.

* Hayes also reported on the Department of Defense plan to establish an essay contest in honor of Abdullah at the National Defense University. Yes, you read that right.

Resentment, ressentiment, and justice after mass crimes: Brudholm and Fassin

I’ve had the Somatosphere in my feeds for a little while since they were covering the Risperdal trial. I wasn’t sure if it fit with my interests more broadly, and almost dropped it. I was pleased that I hadn’t the other day when they linked to Didier Fassin speaking at Harvard Medical School about moral anthropology and the difference between resentment and ressentiment. Here’s the “video” (really just audio with a picture of Fassin):



There’s been a lot of discussion in recent months about anger, forgiveness, and punishment, and just after seeing the video I’d excitedly begun writing up a short post about it: “Drawing on the work on Jean Améry and others and on his own fieldwork in South Africa and France, Fassin sketches out a challenge the general fetishization of forgiveness, amnesty, and reconciliation which holds sway at present and, in my view, fails to appreciate perpetrators of state or corporate violence as moral agents or the broader sociological context….”

The work of Améry sounded so important to me that before I even posted I did an Amazon search, and one of the first related books listed was Thomas Brudholm’s 2008 Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive, which I’ve now read.



Brudholm writes:

This book offers a counterpoint to the near-hegemonic status afforded to the logic of forgiveness in the literatures on transitional justice and reconciliation…. It is meant to complement the scores of writings in which outrage, resentment, and refusals to forgive or reconcile are hastily rejected as the negative to be overcome: the irrational, immoral, and unhealthy or understandable but unfortunate attitudes of victims who are not-at least not yet- "ready" or "capable" of forgiving and healing.

…I argue that, in some circumstances, the preservation of outrage or resentment and the refusal to forgive and reconcile can be the reflex expression of a moral protest and ambition that might be as permissible and admirable as the posture of forgiveness. When this possibility is neglected and when advocates or scholars arguing the case for forgiveness and healing lose sight of the contestability of the values they promote, they also lose sight of the possible moral legitimacy of some victims' preservation of resentment. This neglect is not fair-and in fact it can be deeply offensive. (pp. 3-4)

It’s significant, readable, and fair. The odd thing is how similar Fassin’s presentation is to Brudholm’s work. It recapitulates some aspects – down to the focus on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission - but doesn’t go much beyond Brudholm’s far more comprehensive treatment. (Fassin does talk about ressentiment in relation to the response to AIDS drugs by the Mbeke government, which could be, and really would have to be, fleshed out to contribute something original to the discussion from the perspective of medical anthropology.) It’s quite strange.

So I’d been planning to recommend the Fassin talk, but after reading the Brudholm book I’m of course suggesting that instead. It’s divided into two parts – the first about the South African TRC, and in particular the views of Desmond Tutu and other leaders concerning victims who are unwilling to forgive and reconcile, and the second a detailed examination of Améry’s essays. The two halves don’t blend seamlessly, but they certainly make sense together and are independently strong. I was somewhat surprised at the lack of attention to South America, but one aspect I found intriguing was the evident religious aspects of the “logic of forgiveness.” I was hoping that Brudholm would elaborate on this when I happily discovered that his previous book was The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives



(…and then unhappily discovered that it’s the most expensive Kindle book I’ve ever seen).

Somewhere in my pantry

or my mother's cellar lies this...

tape. :/ From many years ago, when it was being sold to raise funds.



Admirable, and catchy.

Justice campaigns in Bhopal and South Africa; commentary to follow

Two campaigns, at once local and transnational, that I think deserve more attention:

The first is the B’eau Pal Water campaign. This was organized by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, the Bhopal Medical Appeal, and the Yes Men, whose new film I talked about a little while ago, followed by some more videos featuring the pair. As you can see from the videos, the stunt that received the most attention was an appearance on the BBC posing as a representative of Dow (which now owns Union Carbide) stating that the company had decided at long last to clean up the Bhopal site. Of course, this was not Dow’s intention, and people there continue to be poisoned.

The B’Eau Pal Water campaign is the most recent effort to raise awareness about Bhopal and the organizations involved in working for social justice there. They scared off the Dow people:



For those interested, here’s a short glance into the process involved in designing the “product”:



I think it illustrates well how people with a variety of skills can contribute to movements (including radical movements) for democracy, justice, and human rights.

The second is a campaign in the form of a tour. Abahlali baseMjondolo, the “Shack Dwellers Movement” in South Africa, has representatives in New York this week talking about the movement and their film in production, Dear Mandela:



Here’s their schedule in New York (note that there are events tomorrow and Thursday).