Posted on 12/21/2002 4:14:25 PM PST by freeforall
The dark side of altruism NGOs may do more harm than good
Sean M. Maloney
Saturday Post
Saturday, December 07, 2002
A BED FOR THE NIGHT: HUMANITARIANISM IN CRISIS
By David Rieff Simon & Schuster 366 pp., $41
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While working in Kosovo in 2001, I saw a member of a prominent non-governmental relief organization handing out foodstuffs to refugees. The message on his T-shirt could have been the subtitle to this book: "If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?" In A Bed for the Night, David Rieff, a journalist with extensive Balkans and African experience, has finally thought the unthinkable and written the unwritable: humanitarianism is a dangerous ideology that generates more problems than it alleviates.
Practically each sentence in Rieff's book is a truism, particularly to those of us who have viewed with circumspection the activities of NGOs before, during and after hostilities throughout the 1990s. Rieff notes that "aid workers can do great harm, however inadvertently.... Are they serving as logisticians or medics for some warlord's war effort? Are they creating a culture of dependency? And are they being used politically?"
Rieff also takes pains to point out the myriad of cases where humanitarian NGOs reverse the process and use images of suffering to manipulate and use governments (and the resources of their sometimes well-intentioned citizens) for crass internal political purposes. The most egregious examples of manipulation involve the use of media images of children caught up in violent events and the tacit assumption that all civilians in conflict zones are like these innocent children: "They are victims; that should go without saying. But too often we need to think of them as innocent victims. And many of them are not.... We do those who are in pain and in need no favour by infantilizing them."
We must not forget, Rieff adds, that "international institutions --first and foremost, the UN itself -- and international treaty regimes that exist are not the expressions of community but of power. But just because these institutions exist does not mean any moral consensus exists." Indeed, the book examines humanitarianism's institutional and ideological origins and blows away many assumptions commonly held by Canada's cultural elite and the audience it services.
His revelations about the Red Cross organization's complicity in the Holocaust and the long-term moral effects of its policy on international humanitarianism up to and through the Biafra affair in the late 1960s and into the 1990s, are by themselves worth the price of the book. How, for example, could the Red Cross have railed against the use of chemical weapons in the First World War against soldiers, and then chose not to do so when similar gases were used to exterminate unarmed civilians? There is an answer to this question and it's not one that will sit well among those who assume that NGOs are all about doing good in the service of mankind.
In many ways, A Bed for the Night is an inadvertent but effective critique of the "soft power" and "human security" policies championed by Lloyd Axworthy and certain factions within the Department of Foreign Affairs over the last decade. The paternalistic smugness and moral superiority of the proponents of humanitarian intervention and their NGO supporters are very similar in tone to the same qualities in 19th-century European: Rieff takes pains to note the likeness in language and intent. Canada's bungled 1996 intervention in Zaire to assist Rwandan refugees is also put in a context that underlines the moral problems of humanitarianism: "In a way, what had happened is comparable to what might have taken place had 200,000 SS soldiers taken their families out of Nazi Europe as it fell to the Allies to somewhere they could hope to be sheltered from retribution."
And why should countries like Canada risk the lives of their soldiers to assist in similar projects? They should only do so if and when "humanitarianism is melded with national interest," since "only then is there likely to be any tolerance for casualties. It is for this reason that humanitarians' reliance on the power of images and on the utopian fantasy of a global village of moral concern is such a trap." And Canada has been caught in that trap by pretending that armed humanitarian operations are the same as peacekeeping and thus are somehow an extension of Canadian values.
Rieff is right that, flying in the face of human history, "the deep radicalism of humanitarian action is its belief that people are not made to suffer. To assume such a stance in a time of such widespread evil and pain is astonishing in and of itself." It is high time, with Canada's foreign and defence policy review looming on the horizon, that we seriously examine what Rieff has to say so that our limited resources are no longer squandered out of sheer emotionalism aggravated by the manipulations of those who do not have Canada's interests at heart.
Sean M. Maloney, PhD, teaches War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada.
© Copyright 2002 National Post
The EnvironMental NGO's are by far the most pernicious, with the greatest pernicious and malelovent agenda of all of them!!!
Humanitables.
Don't get me wrong, Atlas Shrugged was a wonderful story and a great contribution to the cause of liberty, but it just didn't deal with real trade-offs. The Virtue of Selfishness was in some ways a better book because it's expository form required that she lay out a structured philisophy: thus betraying the gaps in her proposal.
In writing Natural Process, I didn't want to make Rand's mistake, writing a story that masked errors in a proposed system because of an internally consistent logic. I thus chose to write the expository piece first. Perhaps if I can afford it some day I might give the more accessible venue of fictional example a shot.
Flowery, but not convincing Brian. Really, I've studied Rand's work at length and mean no disrespect, but she never showed how to make it work. Indeed, I have heard tell of one of the few tapes of one of her speeches where she assumed that government regulating pollution was a legitimate use of police power!
By contrast, Natural Process isolates the essential principles of free-market management of externalities, presents the necessary components of a market structure, shows how pollution control and treatment could work as a perfectly legitimate business, and then posits the necessary legal tools and first steps in making it happen.
I'm sorry to say it, but many Randians act as if she is the end-all of libertarian thought and waste an awful lot of energy arguing over trifles rather than further developing her initial concepts into workable applications. Followers of Hayek and von Mises are similar in that regard.
With a decent court system there would be no need to resort to preemptive government action (regulation). Anyone who is injured by the actions of another person, company, or neighbor could recover compensation for their actual losses. There isn't any need to appoint government as the guardian of the nebulous "public good". Often the argument against this is that wealthy entities will escape responsibility for their actions by virtue of their money. I'd argue that if such entities can't corrupt the power of government to protect their interests because the government is denied that regulatory power, then their wealth isn't really such an overwhelming advantage.
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