Further Thoughts

On Wednesday, Philip Gourevitch (author of We wish to inform you… see previous post) gave a reading and a Q & A on Pitt’s campus. He discussed the typical writing and researching—and then he got into politics. He’s incredibly opinionated and amazingly knowledgeable. I wish he announced the nightly international news (then it might actually be international!). Since I had already been thinking about Darfur and intervention, etc, as I listened to him talk, I applied some of it to what I know about Darfur.

Intervention is a funny thing—it appears simple and never, ever is. To go in for purely humanitarian reasons is a rare thing. It would be a nice thing, but it rarely happens because intervention cannot be separated from politics. Whenever two or more countries are involved, there is always a political aspect. (Whenever just one country is involved, there are always politics!)

Gourevitch made this connection clear. There are always politics. AND, if one or more countries are not going in with the best interest of the people affected in the country, they simply shouldn’t go. It’s not fair to the people affected to use them for political reasons.

At the same time that I’ve been reading and listening to Gourevitch, I’ve been studying the Twelve Year War in El Salvador. (1980-1992) In the late years of the Cold War, U.S. involvement in El Salvador was disturbingly political and allowed for major violations of human rights. (See The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner for more info.)

In addition to learning about the histories of Rwanda and El Salvador, I’ve been learning and teaching Modern Latin American history as a teaching assistant. The professor of the course requires the students to write “State of the Nation” essays at major time points in Latin American history. These essays are to analyze the political, economic, and social patterns of the country, and a good essay (I tell them) describes the overall relationships between these three patterns.

The political, economic, and social aspects of a country cannot be separated. In El Salvador, the political turmoil opened the door for major social atrocities. In Rwanda, the three are so intertwined I would need three pages for the thesis statement alone (so see Gourevitch’s book, because he’s already described it). And in Darfur…

This is what I know: these matters are so complex that they cannot be taken lightly. The more I learn, the more I learn that I will never learn it all. There will always be more.

I have no answers. But a step toward seeking to understand the complexity seems to be a step in the right direction.

I think, by the way, that this is one of the reasons why I love writing: I’m learning history and politics (and even some economics!)—all in an MFA program for writing. Go figure. Writers have such opportunities to be interdisciplinary that it’s overwhelming. Thanks go to Gourevitch and various professors for opening these doors for me…