NOBODIES

Suggested Reading from Steve Viederman, Needmor Fund

“Never again,” they said in 1945 after the Holocaust. And yet in the intervening years genocide and ethnic cleansing continue. In the Balkans the UN, the US and other western nations responded, though often too late. In Africa the response has been non-existent or weak. For example, little notice has been taken in the press or the UN on what the Arab Sudanese leadership is inflicting at this very moment on black African Sudanese—700,000 murdered, raped or pillaged. (See for example Nicholas Kristof, “Ethnic Cleansing, Again,” NY Times, March 23, 2004).

This situation brings to mind the April 1994 massacre of 800,000 or more Tutsi in Rwanda by the Hutu government. “The dead of Rwanda,” reports Philip Gourevitch, “accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The US did not respond because it was not in “its national interest” as reported recently by Richard A. Clarke. Canadian general Romeo Dalliare, who was in 1994 head of a meager UN force in Rwanda, observes in his new book Shake Hands with the Devil (Random House, Canada) that Bosnians counted more. Rwanda genocide was met by international silence, “self-interested racism.” “Not all humans are human in the international context,” he observes. "There would have been more reaction if someone had tried to exterminate Rwanda’s 300 mountain gorillas.”

Gourevitch’s highly acclaimed We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Die with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) reminds of us of what happened and by inference what could and is happening again. A reporter for the New Yorker Gourevitch has a keen sense for history, time, place and people. He is at his most compelling when he tells the story of the genocide through the eyes of the people directly affected, and the people who carried out the heinous crimes. The beauty of his writing belies the ugliness of the content. This is a must read, if the oft-quoted phrase ‘never again’ is to become truth.

Readers of these ramblings know that I have high regard for Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, a pair of great investigative journalists. I have previously called attention to two of their earlier books: Trust Us We are Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future and Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War against Iraq.

Mad Cow USA, when first published by Rampton and Stauber in 1997 had the subtitle “Could the Nightmare Happen Here?” What was prescient in 1997 is now in the headlines, and the availability of an updated edition (Common Courage Press, 2004, paperback) is a useful reminder of how the officials in the US Agriculture Department and elsewhere responsible for overseeing our food safety seem to have been and continue to be looking in the wrong places.

Also by Rampton and Stauber, Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State (Jeremy Tarchers/Penguin, 2004), due out in June, is a well documented, well written and forcefully argued picture of the spread of conservatism and its dangers to democracy in the US.

In among the many issues they address the authors raise an important question for progressive philanthropy: should so-called progressive foundations emulate conservative foundations’ efforts to establish powerful, well-funded, usually Washington-based think tanks to impact policy agendas? The National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy has been involved in this discussion since Sally Covington’s 1997 NCRP report, cited in Banana Republicans, continuing through to the recent Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Public Policy (2004). The need for a truly progressive policy agenda is clear. However, bringing that about in the context of a commitment to democracy adds a degree of difficulty that does not seem to concern conservatives. How can a concerted effort to shape policy be reconciled with democratic and participatory decisionmaking? Who comes to the table, and how is that decided? How are people’s voices heard? How are decisions made? To whom would a progressive policy institute be accountable, and how? Rampton and Stauber conclude “That the world wants democracy, but—at least for the present—it no longer sees the United States as a democratic leader. . . Democratic renewal in the best of American tradition will have to emerge from the initiatives of numerous individual citizens acting separately and yet inspired by a common goal.”

I recall a four-panel Saturday Evening Post cover from years ago. In the first panel the boss is berating the husband. The second shows the husband berating his wife. In the third the wife is berating their child. In the fourth, the child is berating the sad-eyed cocker spaniel that sits there looking quizzically at the young boy.

Robert W. Fuller, physicist, former President of Oberlin, and now self-described international citizen addresses issues of ‘rankism’ in Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank (New Society Publishers, 2003). He argues that we must deal with the often unperceived gap between the relatively powerful and successful and the relatively weak and vulnerable. To deal with racism, sexism and the other isms, we must explore issues of rankism. In calling for ‘nobodies liberation,’ he observes, “discrimination based upon power disparities is no more justified than that based upon differences in race and gender.” “The notion of rankism is the bridge,” he concludes, “that links two revolutions of the twentieth century—civil rights and human rights.” Fuller’s book is worth reading at this time in our history when the response to demands for justice is being undermined by the somebodies.

Lora Jo Foo’s illuminating study Asian American Women: Issues, Concerns and Responsive Human and Civil Rights Advocacy (The Ford Foundation, 2002) demonstrates how the promise of democracy has failed many Asian American women. It also describes their efforts to right the wrongs. The report will be of interest to anyone concerned with organizing.

Jeffrey Hollender’s What Matters Most: How a Small Group of Pioneers is Teaching Social Responsibility to Big Business, and Why Big Business is Listening (Basic Books, 2004) and Deb Alley (with others) Global Profit and Global Justice: Using Your Money to Change the World (New Society Publishers, 2004), both look at the ‘social responsibility’ of the most powerful institutions in the world today, seeing changes for the better. Both are well written and full of examples of companies trying to do the right thing within what I see as the limits of the present economic system. The need for a systemic approach to bring the corporations (the leading ‘somebody’ in the world today) is still to be done. These authors did not set out to provide such a systemic analysis, but my hope is that I’ll get to review one in the near future.

When I ‘speed’ read Don Quixote in college I did not appreciate its humor or its political undertones. When I read the glowing reviews of the new translation by Edith Grossman (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2003) I decided to be more serious this time around. I was enthralled with delightfully funny book and happy that I had returned to all 940 pages. Early in Cervantes recitation I could not help but think of many of leaders today. “The truth is,” Cervantes observes, “that when [Don Quixote’s] mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had . . . to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse … to seek adventure . . . righting all manner of wrongs.”(Page 21) He tilted at windmills and sought things that were not there.

Stephen Viederman is currently a trustee of the Needmor Fund and former president of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation. He is the co-director of the Initiative for Fiduciary Responsibility.