October 17, 2003

Today, Wired offers an interesting article about the increased use of technology by the oppressed of the world. Taliban executions of women and the mutilations of men are recorded by brave women concealing cameras under their burqas. Phillippino natives use cameras as shields against sugar company workers trying to forcibly relocate them. Camcorder evidence convicted some of those responsible for the slaughter of 7,000 male Muslims Srebrenica.

But woven throughout Wired's technological account is an attempt to link the struggles of some of our own American "activists" with those of the truly oppressed. From the Video Activist Network's web site:

The San Francisco Video Activists' Network presents the story you won't see on Fox News: an unflinching look at the Bay Area's radical resistance to an illegal and horrific war.

"We Interrupt This Empire..." is a collaborative work by many of the Bay Area's independent video activists which documents the direct actions that shut down the financial district of San Francisco in the weeks following the United States' invasion of Iraq. With the audio backdrop including the live broadcasts of SF Indymedia's Enemy Combatant Radio and the SFPD's tactical communications that were picked up by police scanners, the documentary takes a look at the diverse show of resistance from the streets of San Francisco as well as providing a critique of the coporate [sic] media coverage of the war and exploring such issues as the Military Industrial Complex, attacks on civil liberties, and the United States' current imperialist drive.

Do these people really care about anything but their own sense of moral worth, or their own public righteousness?

Did they actually watch the footage of the anonymous figure in the flowing blue burqa, kneeling in a soccer field somewhere in Afghanistan? Did they notice the bullet puff into the dirt in front of her after it passed through her skull?

The "United States' current imperialist drive" put a stop to that.

Craig Baldwin, Bay-area producer of "unusual and experimental film," called "We Interrupt This Empire"

...a clear picture of what's left of an American conscience in the midst of this national horror-show--this is the best damn doc I've seen on the local face of what might have been the largest anti-war movement in world history.

Again, I am forced to ask a question: what constitutes "an American conscience" to people such as Mr. Baldwin?

I find a profound disconnect between such professions of conscience and the atrocities we know have taken place in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Does this disconnect exist because there has been no footage of Iraqis going feet-first into the plastic shredder? Is it because there haven't been enough photographs of the mass graves in the desert, or of the men without tongues and ears?

Clearly not. The severed hands and bloodied dust of Afghanistan are well-represented by images both moving and still, and there is no acknowledgement by these "activists" that American action there was warranted for any reason. So, it must be something else. Perhaps it is some high moral standard--that if we act in the world, it must be selfless. Perhaps the "activist" ideology holds that where our national interests and the human interests of others intersect, we must avoid taking any action that would benefit us as well as those in need, and can thereby achieve some sort of societal moral purity.

I have realized, however, that even that twisted ethic doesn't quite explain the disconnect between professions of conscience and real-world atrocity that I perceive. I came to that realization while listening to Martin "Duct Tape" Sheen talk about himself on television recently.

I saw Sheen on Bravo's Inside The Actor's Studio. He is a well-known "activist," with somewhere around 40 protest-related arrests on his record. Being in an auditorium full of Incipient Thespians, this facet of his life was of course brought up for discussion. While describing his spirituality--a self-styled "Catholicism" that apparently involves "becoming heaven" when you die--he said something that I found to be one of the most self-involved, blinkered examples of the "activist" mentality I've ever come across.

I'll have to paraphrase it, because Bravo offers no transcripts. When discussing his protest activism, he said that although he was aware that he, himself, could effect no change in the world, he couldn't "not do it [i.e. protest] and still be [him]self."

Actually effecting real change is no goal of his, because he thinks it's impossible.

Now, one interpretation of this is that he views himself as "one voice among many." But he made no mention of that, and never alluded to the necessity of the involvement of others. It was all about him. All the protesting, all the public declarations of righteous indignation, all the labeling of America as the "land of the lunatics"...all of it is rooted in his self-definition. In his sense of who he is. In his conception of his spirituality. It is an expression of his rights. Of his desire to "improve America."

When describing a film that portrays a bound man's throat being brutally slashed apart by Islamofascists, the author of the Wired article writes that it

...is one of many such clips that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan published online to document atrocities committed by Islamic fundamentalists long before extremists flew airplanes into buildings Sept. 11, 2001.

But where does actually stopping these atrocities fall within the set of some Bay area "activists'" priorities?

Apparently far below depicting the "diverse show of resistance from the streets of San Francisco," or achieving self-congratulatory coverage of "the largest anti-war movement in world history." A movement, it should be noted, that not only failed to stop the war, but failed to do anything at all to ease the suffering of the people with which the movement was ostensibly concerned.

For twelve years, Peter Gabriel's Witness organization has been providing the means to capture evidence of atrocities ranging from the systematic rape of children in Africa to the oppression of indigenous people by oil companies in the Amazonian basin. Mental Disability Rights International used imaging technology to close psychiatric clinics in Mexico that were rife with abuse. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan showed the world what the Taliban mullahs were really all about.

And what do groups like Video Activist Network do?

Record themselves being righteous in public.

They don't belong in the same article as organizations like Witness, the MDRI, and RAWA.

Shame on Wired, for conflating the naïve, privileged ethics of spoiled Americans with the ethics of those in the world who are truly suffering. And shame on those Americans who, because of their irrational hatred of a single man and their neurotic opposition to the very concept of an American national interest, would let thousands suffer and die in perpetuity so that they can better serve their own moral satisfaction.