The Company You Keep

I have to say that this story at ESPN is pretty stunning. Here we have Samantha Power, advocate of human rights, US Ambassador to the United Nations socializing with Henry Kissinger (they were taking in a Yankees game together!) recently. I suppose whether one finds a war criminal repugnant or not depends on whether he is our war criminal?

"Dignity" as a Defensive Claim

"Outside of Kant, human rights in particular were unconnected to any theory of dignity until Catholics yoked them together at midcentury. Today, human dignity is a principle chiefly for those who admire judges and want them to have the power to check the state in the name of basic humanitarian values. Its currency is a sign that our morality has been redefined around the worst that can transpire in history rather than some better order that could be achieved through political contest and struggle." ~ Samuel Moyn

Take Back the Streets: Repression and the Criminalization of Protest Around the World

Democracy requires the capacity of publics to engage in political protest. That in turn requires some official recognition of the civil and political rights of protesters. A new report compiled by International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations (INCLO) - Take Back the Streets: Repression and the Criminalization of Protest Around the World - suggests just how precarious such recognition has become across the globe. The report is "a collaborative effort on the part of nine domestic civil liberties and human rights organizations: the American Civil Liberties Union, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, the Kenyan Human Rights Commission, the Legal Resources Centre, and Liberty." You can find a copy (pdf) here.

Digest - Politics, Art & Politics, Political Inquiry

Charter 77 emerged as an opposition movement in communist Czechoslovakia; it recently announced that Georgian human rights activist Ales Byalyatski has been awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize for 2013.

City officials in Newport, Wales have begun demolishing a mural (detail above) commemorating an uprising of Chartists in 1839. (Chartism being perhaps the first modern mass political movement - pressing 'the People's Charter' consisting of radical demands for expanded franchise and political representation.) There has been significant opposition to the demolition. Here is a report from the BBC and here is another from The Independent.

A review here at The Guardian of a London exhibition of work by German artist George Grosz, a socialist, whose work captures the despair and mayhem of post-WWI Berlin.

George Grosz ~ Down with Liebknecht (1918). 

In 1984 the British government established a special committee - COBRA (or Cabinet Office briefing room A) - that meets to address quickly political emergencies perceived or actual. The Guardian reports here on a newer, parallel COBRA, consisting of artists aiming "to engage critically and creatively with the increased use of aesthetics and performance by the UK government to promote, explain and justify its labelling of an event as 'an emergency'." The parallel entity meets whenever the official COBRA does in order to formulate a creative response to the the putative emergency.

Finally, I recommend this brief blog post at The New York Times by philosopher Alva Noë on the entanglement of facts and values in science generally. That means, by implication, in political science in particular. And, of course, that flies in the face of virtually the entire discipline which still embraces a rigid fact-value dichotomy. Ooops.

Can the Hard Case on your iPhone Support Human Rights and Free Expression?

So, onto my FB news feed pops a link from a group called Friends of Ai Wewei who are peddling 'skins and cases' for various sizes, shapes and makers of cell phone. Proceeds putatively go to support campaigns for free expression and human rights. I am pretty sure that neither the Chinese manufacturer of my cell phone nor it's American purveyor don't care what I wrap the thing in once I've paid for it. And irony is not necessarily effective in art or politics, so wrapping my iPhone in this case is unlikely to change anything much. Are there better places to send my money in support of admirable causes? I can't tell from the web pages.

And the PEN/Pinter Prize for 2013 ...

... goes to Tom Stoppard. You can find the mandate for the prize - named for Harold Pinter - here. It seems Stoppard is a deserving winner. For some reasons why see this effusive report at The Guardian.

Amnesty International Graphics

I have noted here repeatedly campaigns that Amnesty International has run using provocative, creative imagery. Today on my news feed, this compendium of posters - including the ones I've lifted here - from various AI campaigns.

Daniel Hernández-Salazar (Once Again)

I have posted here numerous times on Daniel Hernández-Salazar, a Guatemalan photographer whose work I admire very much. Today the Lens blog at The New York Times ran this post on his photographs of the recent trial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Hernández-Salazar was instrumental in documenting both the crimes of the regime and the subsequent popular politics of recovery and remembrance. It bears noting that the decades of repression in Guatemala were underwritten by the U.S. ...  And it is a major accomplishment that Ríos Montt was convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison for his deeds.

Ríos Montt Trial to Begin

Maya villagers gathered in a courtroom in Guatemala City in January (2012) for the evidentiary hearing in Mr. Ríos Montt’s case. Photograph © Victor J. Blue for The New York Times.

Last month I noticed this OpEd at The New York Times, noting the prospects that former Guatemalan dictator (read U.S. surrogate, alum of the School of the Americas, etc.) General Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity. Over the course of three decades an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed by various military regimes; a vastly disproportionate number of the victims were indigenous peoples. The crimes have been documented by multiple inquiries [1]. Now The Times reports the trial is set to commence this week. What is that saying about the 'arch of the moral universe?' The ex-dictator actually seems to be caught in the vagaries of practical political bargaining between the current Guatemalan government and the Obama administration. But that is close enough. It is lesson enough that the powerful cannot arrange for protection in perpetuity.

Bangladesh ~ Photography, Politics

Puppets of alleged war criminals dangle from nooses in Shahbagh Square in Dhaka.Photograph © Shahidul Alam Drik/Majority World.

Since early last month Dhaka, Bangladesh has been beset by massive, peaceful, public protests. You can find coverage of the events and the sordid political history that has generated the ongoing protests at The Guardian [1] [2] [3] [4] and, succinctly, in this Op-Ed by Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam from yesterday's New York Times.* I have posted on Alam and his work here several times in the past.

I lifted the image above from this series, also published at The Times* and did so for two reasons. The first is to suggest how Alam manages to depict a singularly troubling feature of the protests by indirection. The Shahbagh crowds are calling for the execution of individuals found guilty by a war crimes tribunal in Dhaka. That is problematic for advocates of justice and human rights who denounce the persistent use of official violence in Bangladesh. But, secondly, Alam's image also underscores the precipitating role photography has played in the protests. And in so doing, we can grasp, why the crowds calling for justice also clamor for death.

Here is the offending photograph, followed by some explanation taken from the first of The Guardian reports I link to above:

Abdul Quader Mollah offers a victory salute after being convicted of war crimes in Dhaka.  Photograph © STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images.

"It all began with a victory sign. When Abdul Quader Mollah, assistant secretary-general of Bangladesh's Jamaat-e-Islami party, emerged from the supreme court on the afternoon of Tuesday 4 February, he turned to the press waiting outside, smiled, and made a victory sign. An odd reaction for a man just sentenced to life in prison.

Mollah smiled because for him, a man convicted of beheading a poet, raping an 11-year-old girl and shooting 344 people during the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence – charges that have earned him the nickname the Butcher of Mirpur – the life sentence came as a surprise. Earlier this month, a fellow accused, Abul Kalam Azad, who is reputed to have fled to Pakistan, was sentenced to death in absentia.

When Mollah emerged from the courthouse, a group of online activists and bloggers assembled to protest against the verdict, demanding that Mollah, like Azad, be given the death sentence. They set up camp in Shahbag, an intersection at the heart of Dhaka, near the university campus, and staged a small sit-in. They collected a few donations and ordered khichuri (a mixture of rice and lentils) to keep them going through the night. Word spread on Facebook and Twitter. The next day, a few news channels began covering their protest. By the end of the week, they had managed to put together the biggest mass demonstration the country has seen in 20 years.

[. . .]

In addition to the perceived inadequacy of the sentence is an abiding anxiety about the way it will be carried out. It is ingrained in the public imagination that justice always takes second place to political expediency. Mollah knows that if his party or its allies were to come to power again, he would almost certainly be freed. That is why the protesters at Shahbag are calling for his death: it is the only way they can be sure the episode will come to an end."

So, the apparent perversity of insisting on death as a token of justice perhaps is understandable. The issue - as Alam also make plain in his essay -  is one of deserved punishment and lack of official credibility. It also raises issues of prudence, since supporters of Jamaat-e-Islami have begun to demonstrate their own displeasure at the proceedings and verdicts. The daunting political problem then, seems to be to create a way to sustain the hope that the Shahbagh protesters hold out, without reverting to violence and execution.**
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* You can find the text of the Op-Ed integrated with the images here at Alam's blog.

** Update: In this regard you might also read this more extended analysis of events in Bangladesh by Nadine Murshid at The Economic & Political Weekly,

Photographs of Silenced Critics

In The New York Times you can find this Op-Ed and this one on the political travails that have descended on Chinese novelist Mo Yan who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The essays warn against a too easy moralism - especially when exercised from a distance - in judging Mo Yan. And it must be said that upon winning the prize Mo Yan spoke out clearly on behalf of imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo.

On the eve of the Prize announcement last week, Reporters Without Borders released this video clip of Liu Xia, wife of Liu Xiaobo, who herself has been under house arrest for the past two years. Liu Xia is a writer and photographer. Her detention and nearly total isolation is a case of extrajudicial harassment, likely aimed, according to this report from the BBC, at inducing her husband to agree to accepting exile. As you will discover, the clip - from which the silhouette above was excised - is silent, except for the chirping crickets.

Pussy Riot Appeal and a Parallel

This past summer I posted several times on the unsavory spectacle of the Russian courts convicting three members of the group Pussy Riot on charges of "hooliganism" and promoting "religious hatred." According to Amnesty International (who here offer the chance to drop a polite remonstrance to Russian officials) the women's appeal is scheduled for this coming Monday.

In an odd parallel, The New York Times reports that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man thought responsible for the video "Innocence of Muslims" that has inflamed religious passions in recent weeks has been jailed in Los Angeles. He has been detained after a hearing in which he was "charged with eight probation violations." Although Nakoula's video (if it is his) is pathetic, the response of rioters and those who have incited them is as contemptible. And the court here is clearly relying on legal technicalities to punish Nakoula for his alleged expression of studied ignorance and bigotry.

Pussy Riot, Liberalism, Hypocrisy

"How many fans of Pussy Riot’s zany “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s erudite and moving closing statement were equally thrilled by her participation, naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008? That performance, by the radical art group Voina (Russian for “war”), was meant to illustrate how Russians were abused by their government. Voina had previously set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge.

Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere, not just in authoritarian Russia. But Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democracy, anti-Putin feminism without the incendiary anarchism, extreme sexual provocations, deliberate obscenity and hard-left politics." - Vadim Nikitim

Voina staged a live public orgy at the State Museum of Biology in the hall “Metabolism, energy, nutrition, digestion”. While five couples were copulating, the Voina chief media artist Alexei Plutser-Sarno, wearing a tuxedo and a top-hat, was holding a black pre-electoral banner reading “Fuck for the Bear” (29 February 2008).

I have to say that I found this scolding Op-Ed by Vadim Nikitin truly, ridiculously offensive. Why? Not because there are not many sanctimonious liberals who simply want to chastise far-away regimes for transgressions of the sort they wrongly believe never, ever occur here in the US. There are, of course, many liberals of just that sort. What is offensive about Nakim's argument (and Glenn Greeenwald's endorsement of it at The Guardian) is that there are many Americans who (1) speak regularly and loudly about transgressions by public - and private - powers in the US, (2) are quite aware that the women of Pussy Riot have been involved in provocative - some might say 'tasteless' or 'offensive' - performances in the past, and (3) nevertheless not only find it outrageous that the Russians are still running show-trials to rival those of the Stalin years but feel obliged to say so.

 A couple of things are important. First, Nikitim is right that protests of the sort Pussy Riot has staged might well get one arrested in many places other than Russia. But would they also get one a show trial and multi-year sentence - serious prison time? Second, the orthodox church is busy supporting the oligarchic Russian regime, and it is naive to assume otherwise. Just as when ACT-UP New York staged protests during the church services of Cardinal O'Connor, the Russian activists are identifying church complicity with oppressive policies. Imagine gay kiss-ins during holy mass! Third, Greenwald is off the mark when he invokes Chomsky's moralism. Sure the US is especially egregious in perpetrating violence world-wide. That in no way implies that we should sit on our hands when other regimes follow suit. And, of course, when liberals support 'freedom of expression' in cases like this, it becomes easy to turn the outrage around next time they demur in the face of domestic outrages.
 ________________
P.S.: A follow up. It would also be a mistake to assume that all Russians support the show trial prosecution. Consider this observation from The Nation: "Support has come from inside Russia and abroad. More than 40,000 Russians have signed an online petition protesting the band members’ arrest and detention. A hundred Russian civic and cultural figures have petitioned the country’s Supreme Court. Russia’s human rights ombudsperson has urged their release."

Gustavo Germano ~ Ausencias (Absences)

One of my really smart former students Constanza Iribarne brought to my attention this work by Argentinian photographer Gustavo Germano. The graphic for Germano's project, I think, captures brilliantly the approach he adopts. Not only does it announce the subject - "30,000 Detained-Disappeared and killed by the military dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983" - it suggests, with the only partly missing 'i' the way los desaparecidos continue to haunt families and politics in Argentina. Germano captures absence by rephotographing families, including his own, prior to and following the disappearance of one or more loved one.

 1969: Gustavo Germano, Guillermo Germano, Diego Germano, Eduardo Germano

 2006: Gustavo Germano, Guillermo Germano, Diego Germano. 

Both images © Gustavo Germano.* To the best of my knowledge his work has been exhibited across Latin America and Europe but not in the U.S.. His eldest brother, Eduardo was 'disappeared' by the Argentinian regime in 1976. 
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* See this slideshow for other images (text in German) from this series. 

Daniel Hernández-Salazar (Again)

Daniel Hernández-Salazar is among my very favorite photographers. I respect him immensely and have posted on his work here on several occasions before. His photography - and the ongoing struggle for political memory in his native Guatemala with which it is entangled - are featured in this recent post on the Lens blog at The New York Times. Daniel Hernández-Salazar stands as a striking counterexample to those who blindly insist that art and politics don't mix.

Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent

Here is a link to the newly established Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent including notice of the three inaugural winners of the prize - Ai Weiwei, Manal al-Sharif, and Aung San Suu Kyi. 

Of course, there is nothing wrong with giving prizes to courageous people and the three winners clearly are impressive. That said, I wonder if the foundations might've stuck out their necks just the slightest bit and bestowed the award on people who do not already occupy a prominent place in the western media. They might, in other words not just rewarded courage but exhibited it too. 

Moreover, while I agree that dissent often requires tremendous creativity - more so than most of what passes for "entrepreneurship" - how about those engaging in pedestrian resistance to oppressive regimes? Read Disturbing the Peace. In it Havel describes the Plastic People of the Universe - the group of musical misfits and hangers on whose persecution offered the reason for Charter 77. These were not glamorous "dissidents" or "artists" who received big commissions or traveled to this or that Biennale around the world. They were a bunch of "kids" who were being harassed and badgered by the Czechoslovak police because they wanted to play rock and roll. That was dangerous business. But they were not in the headlines. In other words, in addition to being a bit courageous the award committee and its funders might also work some at being creative themselves. 

The Prize committee might look for incipient dissent, the political opposition that might not be recognized as especially creative as it stands but that is no less crucial for that.

Gay Rights, States Rights and the President's Persistent Lack of Leadership

So, President Obama has decided to catch up with civilized opinion on gay marriage - finally. What follows below are a set of images that came across the news feed on my FB account this afternoon. We need a third map showing the percentage of FOX News viewers by county in North Carolina. I know what my priors lead me to suspect on that. The take away is that Obama is not simply late on this issue, he barely has caught up - you'll note that he continues to privilege states rights over gay rights. And given that the nice folks in NC voted to constitutionalize discrimination yesterday, well . . . where does that leave the President?

AI ~ Science for Human Rights: Human Rights Monitoring for the 21st Century.

Beirut City, Lebanon, After (l) and Before (r)
Bombing by Israeli Forces (2006).

I suspect Colin Powell's duplicity and dissembling about WMD in Iraq will have made many skeptical about the uses of aerial (actually satellite) photography to document phenomena on the ground. But one should not identify a technology with any particular one its uses. I've noted some of the uses of aerial imagery here before. Skeptics might follow this link for a demonstration of how Amnesty International is using aerial photography as an aid to visualizing the consequences of violent conflict. Amnesty is not alone in this enterprise; you can find interesting discussions of the broader intersection of human rights work and aerial imaging technology here and here too. (Thanks for the idea Will Moore!)

Democracy in Peril (2): United States

"While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit." ~ Jonathan Turley (WAPO, 13 January 2012)

Andrei Sannikov ~ Political Prisoner in Belarus

I have in the past noted persistent political repression in Belarus and those who've spoken out against it. This morning I came across this plea written for Andrei Sannikov by his sister. Sannikov has been sentenced to prison for five years in response to his lawful and peaceful political activities. It is nearly certain that he has been tortured while in captivity. You can find an open letter - signed by, among others, Ai Weiwei & Václav Havel - decrying political repression in Belarus here.