answer some question about human right and write 2 short essay

Part 1(50%): In your own words, interpret and explain the following quotations. What is the context of the quote? What points are the authors trying to make? Answer should be given in a short paragraph (5-7 sentences)—answers should not exceed that amount, but should be as complete as possible within those limits. A) What difference would it make for human rights discourse to take the photo opportunity seriously? Not the photo ops on behalf of human rights, but the ones coming from the other side, the other sides. What would it mean to come to terms with the fact that there are things which happen in front of cameras that are not simply true or false, not simply representations and references, but rather opportunities, events, performances, things that are done and done for the camera, which come into being in a space beyond truth and falsity that is created in view of mediation and transmission? ~Thomas Keenan B) This paper examines one fundamental mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes of mass-murder neglect. This mechanism involves the capacity to experience affect, the positive and negative feelings that combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions. Many researchers have begun to study the “dance of affect and reason” as it applies to decision making. I shall draw from this research to show how the statistics of mass murder or genocide, no matter how large the numbers, fail to convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The numbers fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action. ~Paul Slovic Part 2 (50%): Answer the following questions from the following list. The questions are to be answered in a short paragraph (5-7 sentences)—answers should not exceed that amount, but should be as complete as possible within those limits. A) Thomas Keenan raises important questions regarding role of media in conveying meaning about the events of human rights abuses. How persuasive do you find his account of “mobilizing shame”? Does media really goes beyond mediation of concrete events into sphere of performance and manipulation? B) Taking into account that most encounters with human rights abuses (or other human suffering) and western audience is facilitated through public media, what do you think about Paul Slovic’s strategy in mobilizing awareness of western audiences who are in position to provide direct relief to other humans in need? Do you think the way we portray events play a role in our empathetic response? If yes, why? Should humanitarian crisis be addressed as in such a strategic way where a narrative is created to support plea of UN and NGOs to help the deprived? When/if are we allowed to misconstrue the facts in order to motivate public response to provide the aid? “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide Paul Slovic1 Decision Research and University of Oregon Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 2, no. 2, April 2007, pp. 1-17. Abstract Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are “one of many” in a much greater problem. Why does this occur? The answer to this question will help us answer a related question that is the topic of this paper: Why, over the past century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide? Every episode of mass murder is unique and raises unique obstacles to intervention. But the repetitiveness of such atrocities, ignored by powerful people and nations, and by the general public, calls for explanations that may reflect some fundamental deficiency in our humanity – a deficiency that, once identified, might possibly be overcome. One fundamental mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes of mass-murder neglect involves the capacity to experience affect, the positive and negative feelings that combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions. I shall draw from psychological research to show how the statistics of mass murder or genocide, no matter how large the numbers, fail to convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The reported numbers of deaths represent dry statistics, “human beings with the tears dried off,” that fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action. Recognizing that we cannot rely only upon our moral feelings to motivate proper action against genocide, we must look to moral argument and international law. The 1948 Genocide Convention was supposed to meet this need, but it has not been effective. It is time to examine this failure in light of the psychological deficiencies described here and design legal and institutional mechanisms that will enforce proper response to genocide and other forms of mass murder. Keywords: genocide; psychic numbing; dual process theories, affect, compassion. To avoid further disasters, we need political restraint on a world scale. But politics is not the whole story. We have experienced the results of technology in the service of the destructive side of human psychology. Something needs to be done about this fatal combination. The means for expressing cruelty and carrying out mass killing have been fully developed. It is too late to stop the technology. It is to the psychology that we should now turn. Jonathan Glover, Humanity, 2001, p. 144 1 Introduction My title is taken from a statement by Mother Teresa: “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” These two observations capture a powerful and deeply unsettling insight into human nature. Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue “the one” whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of “the one” who is “one of many” in a much greater problem. Why does this occur? The answer to this question will help us answer a related question: Why do good people ignore mass murder and genocide? An internet columnist (Reynolds, 2005, p. 1) frames this question and the topic of my paper: For sixty plus years, since the liberation of the Nazi death camps, we’ve said “never again.” Since then we’ve had mass exterminations of human beings, whether by deliberate malice or sheer, bloody-minded ideological stupidity, in China, Cambodia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kosovo, and Rwanda. Each time we tut tut, but … we do nothing. “Never again” has become “again and again.” And now there’s Darfur, a region of Sudan, where the Janjaweed gangs, with the support of the corrupt national government, are carrying out yet another genocide. In a few years there’ll be an HBO movie on Darfur. We’ll vow “never again,” once again, but the world being as it is, there will be another genocide under way even as we engage in the ritual of mild self-flagellation for Darfur. Again and again. Why do we ignore mass murder and genocide? There is no simple answer. It is not because we are insensitive to the suffering of our fellow human beings – witness the extraordinary efforts we expend to rescue someone in distress. It is not because we only care about identifiable victims, of similar skin color, who live near us: witness the outpouring of aid to victims of the December 2004 tsunami in South Asia. We cannot simply blame our political leaders. Although President Bush has been quite unresponsive to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur, it was Clinton who ignored Rwanda, and Roosevelt who did little to stop the Holocaust. Behind every president who ignored mass murder were millions of citizens whose indifference allowed them to get away with it. It’s not fear of losing American lives in battle that necessarily deters us from acting. We have not even taken quite safe steps that could save many lives, such as bombing the radio stations in Rwanda that were coordinating the slaughter by machete of 800,000 people in 100 days, or supporting the forces of the African Union in Darfur, or just raising our powerful American voices in a threatening shout – Stop that killing! – as opposed to turning away in silence. Every episode of mass murder is unique and raises unique social, economic, military, and political obstacles to intervention. But the repetitiveness of such atrocities, ignored by powerful people and nations, and by the general public, calls for explanations that may reflect some fundamental deficiency in our humanity – a deficiency that, once identified, might possibly be overcome. This paper examines one fundamental mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes of mass-murder neglect. This mechanism involves the capacity to experience affect, the positive and negative feelings that combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions. Many researchers have begun to study the “dance of affect and reason” as it applies to decision making. I shall draw from this research to show how the statistics of mass murder or genocide, no matter how large the numbers, fail to convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The numbers fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action. Genocide in Darfur is real, but we do not “feel” that reality. I shall conclude with suggestions about how we might make genocide “feel real” and motivate appropriate interventions. I shall also argue that we cannot only depend on our feelings about these atrocities but, in addition, we must create and commit ourselves to institutional and political responses based upon reasoned analysis of our moral obligations to stop the mass annihilation of innocent people. Although I have attempted to fashion a compelling explanation for genocide neglect that has implications for action, the story is not complete. The psychological account, while based on theory and recent empirical studies, clearly needs further testing and development, particularly to examine more directly the relationship between imagery, affect, and sensitivity to numbers. The action implications remain to be elaborated by legal scholars and others. 2 The lessons of genocide Dubinsky (2005, p. 112) reports a news story from The Gazette ( Montreal; 29 April 1994, at p. A8): On April 28, 1994: the Associated Press (AP) bureau in Nairobi received a frantic call from a man in Kigali who described horrific scenes of concerted slaughter that had been unfolding in the Rwandan capital “every day, everywhere” for three weeks. “I saw people hacked to death, even babies, month-old babies…. Anybody who tried to flee was killed in the streets, and people who were hiding were found and massacred.” Dubinsky (2005, p. 113) further notes that: The caller’s story was dispatched on the AP newswire for the planet to read, and complemented an OXFAM statement from the same day declaring that the slaughter – the toll of which had already reached 200,000 – ‘amounts to genocide.’ The following day, UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali acknowledged the massacres and requested that the Security Council deploy a significant force, a week after the council had reduced the number of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda from 2,500 to 270. Yet the killings continued for another two and a half months. By mid-July, when the government was finally routed by exiled Tutsi rebels, the slaughter had been quelled, and 800,000 were dead, reinforcements from the United Nations were only just arriving. In his review of the book Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide (Melvern, 2004), Dubinsky (2005, p. 113) draws an ominous lesson from what happened in Rwanda: Despite its morally unambiguous heinousness, despite overwhelming evidence of its occurrence (for example, two days into the Rwandan carnage, the US Defense Intelligence Agency possessed satellite photos showing sprawling massacre sites), and despite the relative ease with which it could have been abated (the UN commander in Rwanda felt a modest 5,500 reinforcements, had they arrived promptly, could have saved tens of thousands of lives) – despite all this, the world ignored genocide. Unfortunately, Rwanda is not an isolated incident of indifference to mass murder and genocide. In a deeply disturbing book titled A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, journalist Samantha Power documents in meticulous detail many of the numerous genocides that occurred during the past century, beginning with the slaughter of two million Armenians by the Turks in 1915 (Power, 2003, see Table 1). In every instance, American response was inadequate. She concludes, “No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on” (Power, 2003; p. xxi). Table 1. A century of genocide. Armenia (1915) Ukraine (1932-1933) Nazi Germany/Holocaust (World War II) Bangladesh (1971) Cambodia (1975-1979) Countries in the former Yugoslavia (1990s) Rwanda (1994) Zimbabwe (2000) Congo (Today) Darfur (Today) ? (Tomorrow) A second lesson to emerge from the study of genocide is that media news coverage is similarly inadequate. The past century has witnessed a remarkable transformation in the ability of the news media to learn about, and report on, world events. The vivid, dramatic coverage of the December 2004 Tsunami in South Asia and the similarly intimate and exhaustive reporting of the destruction of lives and property by Hurricane Katrina in September 2005 demonstrate how thorough and how powerful news coverage of humanitarian disasters can be. But the intense coverage of recent natural disasters stands in sharp contrast to the lack of reporting on the ongoing genocides in Darfur and other regions in Africa, in which hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered and millions forced to flee their burning villages and relocate in refugee camps. According to the Tyndall Report, which monitors American television coverage, ABC news allotted a total of 18 minutes on the Darfur genocide in its nightly newscasts in 2004, NBC had only five minutes, and CBS only three minutes. Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson received vastly greater coverage, as did Natalee Holloway, the American girl missing in Aruba. With the exception of the relentless reporting by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, the print media have done little better in covering Darfur. Despite lack of attention by the news media, U.S. government officials have known of the mass murders and genocides that took place during the past century. Power (2003, p. 505) attempts to explain the failure to act on that knowledge as follows: … the atrocities that were known remained abstract and remote…. Because the savagery of genocide so defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it…. Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the “twilight between knowing and not knowing.” [italics added] I shall argue below that the disengagement exemplified by failing to “wrap our minds” around genocide and retreating to the “twilight between knowing and not knowing” is at the heart of our failure to act against genocide. Samantha Power’s insightful explanation is supported by the research literature in cognitive and social psychology, as described in the sections to follow. 3 Lessons from psychological research In 1994, Roméo Dallaire, the commander of the tiny U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, was forced to watch helplessly as the slaughter he had foreseen and warned about began to unfold. Writing of this massive humanitarian disaster a decade later he encouraged scholars “to study this human tragedy and to contribute to our growing understanding of the genocide. If we do not understand what happened, how will we ever ensure it does not happen again?” Dallaire (2005, p.548). Researchers in psychology, economics, and a multidisciplinary field called behavioral decision theory have developed theories and findings that, in part, begin to explain the pervasive neglect of genocide. 3.1 Affect, attention, information, and meaning My search to identify a fundamental deficiency in human psychology that causes us to ignore mass murder and genocide has led to a theoretical framework that describes the importance of emoti