The political landscape in which the humanitarian movement took current form has changed radically. If humanitarian certainties have been upended, it is not in Sri Lanka, or even Syria or ...Afghanistan, but in the NGO response to the migration crisis in Greece and in the Mediterranean. However overstated, the claim of neutrality has always played an important role in establishing the legitimacy humanitarian action has enjoyed in Europe. But it is no longer possible, if it ever was, for relief workers to separate their ethical commitment to helping people in need from their political convictions, including about what the EU should stand for.
Abstract
Is remembrance an absolute moral duty or is it better thought of in more ethically constricted pragmatic and empirical terms? This essay argues that both individuals and societies should ...strive for remembrance where possible, but accept that there are times and places where more forgetting is the only safe choice to make. One may hope that at some point in the future the need to remember will sweep away a prudential decision to forget, but while we are within our moral rights to hope that, in a given case, forgetting itself will outlive its usefulness, conflating our wishes with teleological certainties is an exercise in hubris, not morality. But on no account should memory be thought of as a categorical imperative.
Is remembrance an absolute moral duty or is it better thought of in more ethically constricted pragmatic and empirical terms? This essay argues that both individuals and societies should strive for ...remembrance where possible, but accept that there are times and places where more forgetting is the only safe choice to make. One may hope that at some point in the future the need to remember will sweep away a prudential decision to forget, but while we are within our moral rights to hope that, in a given case, forgetting itself will outlive its usefulness, conflating our wishes with teleological certainties is an exercise in hubris, not morality. But on no account should memory be thought of as a categorical imperative.
Many people in the West, including almost all politicians, constantly pay lip service to human solidarity. During the siege of Sarajevo, the British prime minister did not say, "sorry, it's a sad, ...cruel world out there and there is nothing much one can do for those Bosnians." No, he insisted that something was being done. The reality, of course, was that very little was being done. In this regard, Rieff takes a look at the case of Rwanda where the crisis of humanitarianism was most obvious.
If the hope for human progress and for a better world can be said to rest on anything, it rests on the great documents of international law that have been promulgated since the end of the Second ...World War. These include, first and foremost, the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But while these documents offer a global vision of what the world might become if humanity is lucky, they remain more hope than reality. In contrast, the corpus of international humanitarian law, that is, the rules governing armed conflict, have actually proved its utility again
The influence of sectarianism in politics is about as welcome a topic among policymakers as the drunken uncle or the drug addict son is at the family dinner table. Indeed, a strong case can be made ...that it is because policymakers in powerful countries, above all in the US and Western Europe, within the UN system, especially in the departments of political affairs and peacekeeping, and at the World Bank and the IMF, tend to craft their strategies and make their decisions as if sectarianism were a minor concern rather than the central one that it has always been in most parts of the world, that, like a sort of Philosopher's Stone in reverse, it has turned so many supposed geostrategic sure things into either disappointments or outright failures. By playing one group off against another, the British in West Africa, the Belgians in Rwanda and Burundi, and the French in some of their Maghrebi and Sahelian colonies, picked favorites among the peoples over whom they ruled.
The persistence of genocide Rieff, David
Policy review (Washington, D.C.),
02/2011
165
Journal Article, Magazine Article
Peer reviewed
... Never Again" has become kind of shorthand for the remembrance of the Shoah. Bluntly put, an undeniable gulf exists between the frequency with which the phrase is used - above all on days of ...remembrance most commonly marking the Shoah, but now, increasingly, other great crimes against humanity - and the reality, which is that 6 5 years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, "never again" has proved to be nothing more than a promise on which no state has ever been willing to deliver.
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