Posted on 06/13/2004 6:48:00 PM PDT by dufekin
As photographs of the atrocities began to circulate, there was no denying the horror they revealed. Members of an occupying force, which had come waving the banner of progress and commerce, were shown brutalizing helpless captives.
All this happened a century ago, when an international human rights movement exposed the enslavement, maiming and killing of Africans in the Congo, then ruled by King Leopold II of Belgium. These events, newly resonant following the snapshots from Abu Ghraib, inspired the latest work by Ping Chong, a director and choreographer known for probing cultural tensions.
"The timing is uncanny," said Mr. Chong, 57, who began working on the piece, called "Blind Ness: The Irresistible Light of Encounter," three years ago. "This is the first exposé of atrocities by the portable Kodak camera, which had just come into use. It's also a tale of media manipulation by Leopold and his adversaries."
The production, with a cast of 17 actors and dancers, had its premiere in April at Kent State University in Ohio. On Friday it will open a two-week Manhattan run at La MaMa Annex in the East Village.
Mr. Chong, whose parents worked in Chinese opera, grew up in New York, where he studied film and graphic design. He then spent eight years working with Meredith Monk, the experimental composer and choreographer. "My work is always about movement," he said. "I'm driven by a kinesthetic impulse."
"Blind Ness" defies easy categorization. The script draws from texts like "King Leopold's Ghost," by the journalist Adam Hochschild, and Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." The staging includes puppetry, shadow play and grisly archival photographs found in Brussels.
There are just two dance sequences: one based on military maneuvers, the other on diplomatic give-and-take. But Mr. Chong also uses movement, gesture and lighting to evoke cinematic effects like long shots and close-ups. "The physical language Ping brings to this piece adds clarity and sharpness," said Michael Rohd, 36, a co-writer of the script, who plays both Edmund Dene Morel, a daring whistleblower, and Marlow, Conrad's narrator.
For Mr. Chong, choreography is the key to bringing this forgotten epic back to life. "I never sit on an image for very long," he said. "I like to keep things moving."
But even more disturbing is the Times's attempt to draw a moral equivalency between the prisoner abuse in Iraq and the genocide that prevailed in what today is the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which, incidentally, is about as much of a democracy than North Korea, Algeria, East Germany, Communist Ethiopia, and any of the varioua other self-styled democratic republics of the world).
Precious few survived the carnage brought by Leopold to the Congo, and many of these surrered forced starvation, brutal enslavement, dismemberment and cannibalism of various body parts, and other cruelties. This stands in stark contrast to Iraq under American occupation, where almost all except the terrorists will live in freedom.
I seem to have missed in Iraq the forced-labor camps, the cannibalism, the genocide, the incitement of the most brutal forms of tribal warfare, the ordinary Iraqi people fleeing the Americans and abandoning their communities, the Iraqi people without hands, legs, arms, or genitals, the penning of women with starving, ravenous dogs, and the other incidents of cruelty that were commmonplace in the Belgian Congo.
c'mon man...
..."I seem to have missed in Iraq the forced-labor camps, the cannibalism, the genocide, the incitement of the most brutal forms of tribal warfare, the ordinary Iraqi people fleeing the Americans and abandoning their communities, the Iraqi people without hands, legs, arms, or genitals, the penning of women with starving, ravenous dogs, and the other incidents of cruelty"...
Isn't the daily morning-noon-night references enough for you?
"Blind Ness" that nonsense says it all.
"Blind Ness" defies easy categorizationTranslation: It made no sense.
What? You say there's no comparison? You say I'm insulting the memory of 6 million dead by daring to compare a minor arrest to their tragedy?
Oh. Nevermind. (But I were European, I bet I could get away with it.)
Words mean things; just not to Liberals, however.
The thing that's most beyond ugly is that New York liberals will go watch this crap and come to the same conclusion as the Slimes: George W. Bush is King Leopold's ghost.
Moral relativism from those who thought communism was morally superior to capitalism.
That couldn't be further from the truth. Bush has tried, with unknown degrees of involvement, to bring peace and stability to the Congo. Indeed, it is in our national security interest.
Reports abound that al-Qaida "bought uranium" there. (Apparently, it's not a part of Africa--only the American embassy in Niger is.) The country is infected with epidemics of malaria, trypanosomiasis, onchocerciasis, leishmaniasis, dengue fever, typhus, bubonic plague, tungiasis, helminthic infections, dysenteries, typhoid fever, hepatitis, giardiasis, cholera, dracunculiasis, echinococcosis (but not paragonimiasis or poliovirus), schistosomiasis, trachoma, arenavirus hemorrhagic fevers, lassa fever, ebola, marburg hemorrhagic fevers, meningococcal disease, and other wretched diseases, be used to harvest germs for biological warfare? Or perhaps (I hope I'm not giving terrorists any ideas), weaponizing snakes?
The lawless and genocidal region could provide a haven to terrorists where they could operate, given superior firepower, with impunity beyond the effective control of any national power.
sounds about right.
Killing 15 million black people is equal to placing Hanes her way on the head of a general from a regieme who killled about 10 million Iraqis...
It's called moral equivalence.
Would you mind submitting your reply directly to The New York Times letters section? Really, they should print it.
Hmm. theoretically my job precludes me from writing to newspapers. But am tempted. Unless you want to do it instead? Should also point out how self-indulgent liberal attitudes to Africa are. They are all about making the liberal feel better, and so actually help keep Africa down by making Africans feel they never have to be responsible for their own actions. The West is, apparently, always under an obligation to bale them out because of perceived injustices committed anywhere between four decades and four centuries ago...
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