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Counterpunch January 25, 2012
Kristof and the Rescue Industry
The Soft Side of Imperialism
by LAURA AGUSTÍN
Reasons abound to be turned off by the New York Times columnist,
Nicholas Kristof. He is too pleased with himself and demonstrates no
capacity for self-reflection. He is too earnest. He claims to be in the
vanguard of journalism because he tweets. He is said to be Doing
Something about human suffering while the rest of us don’t care; he is
smarmy. He doesn’t write particularly well. But most important, he is an
apologist for a soft form of imperialism.
He poses for photos with the wretched of the earth and Hollywood
celebrities in the same breath, and they are a perfect fit. Here he is
squatting and grinning at black children, or trying to balance a basket
on his head, and there he is with his arm over Mia Farrow’s shoulder in
the desert. Here he is beaming down at obedient-looking Cambodian girls,
or smiling broadly beside a dour, unclothed black man with a spear,
whilst there he is with Ashton and Demi, Brad and Angelina, George
Clooney. He professes humility, but his approach to journalistic
advocacy makes himself a celebrity. He is the news story: Kristof is
visiting, Kristof is doing something.
In interviews, he refers to the need to protect his humanitarian image,
and he got one Pulitzer Prize because he “gave voice to the voiceless”.
Can there be a more presumptuous claim? Educated at both Harvard and
Oxford, he nevertheless appears ignorant of critiques of Empire and
grassroots women’s movements alike. Instead, Kristof purports to speak
for girls and women and then shows us how grateful they are. His
Wikipedia entry reads like hagiography.
Keen to imply that he’s down with youth and hep to the jive, he lamely
told one interviewer that “All of us in the news business are wondering
what the future is going to be.” He is now venturing into the world of
online games, the ones with a so-called moral conscience, like Darfur is
Dying, in which players are invited to “Help stop the crisis in Darfur”
by identifying with refugee characters and seeing how difficult their
lives are. This experience, it is presumed, will teach players about
suffering, but it could just as well make refugees seem like small brown
toys for people to play with and then close that tab when they get
bored. Moral conscience is a flexible term anyway: One click away from
Darfur is Dying is a game aimed at helping the Pentagon improve their
weapons.
Kristof says his game will be a Facebook app like FarmVille: “You’ll
have a village, and in order to nurture this village, you’ll have to
look after the women and girls in the village.” The paternalism couldn’t
be clearer, and to show it’s all not just a game (because there’s actual
money involved), schools and refugee camps get funds if you play well. A
nice philanthropic touch.
Welcome to the Rescue Industry, where characters like Kristof get a free
pass to act out fun imperialist interventions masked as humanitarianism.
No longer claiming openly to carry the White Man’s Burden, rescuers
nonetheless embrace the spectacle of themselves rushing in to save
miserable victims, whether from famine, flood or the wrong kind of sex.
Hollywood westerns lived off the image of white Europeans as civilizing
force for decades, depicting the slaughter of redskins in the name of
freedom. Their own freedom, that is, in the foundational American myth
that settlers were courageous, ingenious, hard-working white men who
risked everything and fought a revolution in the name of religious and
political liberty.
Odd then, that so many Americans are blind when it comes to what they
call humanitarianism, blissfully conscience-free about interfering in
other countries’ affairs in order to impose their own way of life and
moral standards. The Rescue Industry that has grown up in the past
decade around US policy on human trafficking shows how imperialism can
work in softer, more palatable ways than military intervention. Relying
on a belief in social evolution, development and modernization as
objective truths, contemporary rescuers, like John Stuart Mill 150 years
ago, consider themselves free, self-governing individuals born in the
most civilized lands and therefore entitled to rule people in more
backward ones. (Mill required benevolence, but imperialists always claim
to have the interests of the conquered at heart.) Here begins
colonialism, the day-to-day imposition of value systems from outside,
the permanent maintenance of the upper hand. Here is where the Rescue
Industry finds its niche; here is where Kristof ingenuously refers to
“changing culture”, smugly certain that his own is superior.
In the formation of the 21st-century anti-trafficking movement, a
morally convenient exception is made, as it was made for military
actions in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The exception says This Time It’s
Different. This time we have to go in. We have to step up and take the
lead, show what real democracy is. In the name of freedom, of course. In
the case of trafficking the exception says: We have achieved Equality.
We abolished slavery, we had a civil-rights movement and a women’s
liberation movement too and now everything is fine here.
With justification firmly in place, the US Rescue Industry imposes
itself on the rest of the world through policies against prostitution,
on the one hand, and against trafficking, on the other. In their book
Half the Sky, Kristof and co-author Sheryl WuDunn liken the emancipation
of women to the abolition of slavery, but his own actions –brothel
raids, a game teaching players to protect village women – reflect only
paternalism.
It may be easier to get away with this approach now than it was when
W.T. Stead of London’s Pall Mall Gazette bought a young girl in 1885 to
prove the existence of child prostitution. This event set off a panic
that evil traders were systematically snatching young girls and carrying
them to the continent – a fear that was disproved, although Stead was
prosecuted and imprisoned for abduction.
In contrast, in 2004 when Kristof bought two young Cambodians out of a
brothel, he took his cameraman to catch one girl’s weepy homecoming. A
year later, revisiting the brothel and finding her back, Kristof again
filmed a heartwarming reunion, this time between him and the girl.
Presuming that being bought out by him was the best chance she could
ever get, Kristof now reverted to a journalistic tone, citing
hiv-infection rates and this girl’s probable death within a decade. She
was not hiv-positive, but he felt fine about stigmatizing her anyway.
Then last November, Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid in the company
of ex-slave Somaly Mam. In “One Brothel Raid at a Time” he describes the
excitement:
Riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with
AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in
northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence;
it feels like something out of the Wild West. (New York Times)
There’s the cavalry moment again. A few days later Kristof boasted that
six more brothels had closed as a result of the tweeted raid. Focused on
out-of-work pimps, he failed to ask the most fundamental question: Where
did the women inside those brothels go? The closures made them instantly
vulnerable to trafficking, the very scenario Kristof would save them from.
Some Rescuers evoke the Christian mission directly, like Gary Haugen of
the International Justice Mission, which accompanies police in raids on
brothels. Or like Luis CdeBaca, the US Ambassador-at-Large for
Trafficking, who unselfconsciously aligns himself with William
Wilberforce, the evangelical Christian rescuers claim ended slavery – as
though slaves and freed and escaped slaves had nothing to do with it.
CdeBaca talks about the contemporary mission to save slaves as a
responsibility uniquely belonging to Britain and the US.
Kristof positions himself as liberal Everyman, middle-class husband and
father, rational journalist, transparent advocate for the underdog. But
he likes what he calls the law-enforcement model to end slavery, showing
no curiosity about police behavior toward victims during frightening
raids. Ignoring reports of the negative effects these operations have on
women, and the 19th-century model of moral regeneration forced on them
after being rescued, he concentrates on a single well-funded program for
his photo-opps, the one showing obedient-looking girls.
Kristof also fails to criticize US blackmail tactics. Issuing an annual
report card to the world, the US Office on Trafficking presumes to
judge, on evidence produced during investigations whose methodology has
never been explained, each country according to its efforts to combat
human trafficking. Reprisals follow – loss of aid – for countries not
toeing the line. Kristof is an apologist for this manipulative policy.
To criticize the Rescue Industry is not to say that slavery,
undocumented migration, human smuggling, trafficking and labor
exploitation do not exist or involve egregious injustices. Yet Kristof
supporters object to any critique with At least he is Doing Something.
What are you doing to stop child rape? and so on. This sort of attempt
to deflect all criticism is a hallmark of colonialism, which invokes
class and race as reasons for clubbing together against savagery and
terrorism. The Rescue Industry, like the war on terrorism, relies on an
image of the barbaric Other.
It is important not to take at face value claims to be Helping, Saving
or Rescuing just because people say that is what they are doing and feel
emotional about it. Like many unreflective father figures, Kristof sees
himself as fully benevolent. Claiming to give voice to the voiceless, he
does not actually let them speak.
Instead, as we say nowadays, it’s all about Kristof: his experience,
terror, angst, confusion, desire. Did anyone rescued in his recent
brothel raid want to be saved like that, with the consequences that came
afterwards, whatever they were? That is what we do not know and will not
find out from Kristof.
Discussing Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe said Conrad used Africa
as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity,
into which the wandering European enters at his peril… The real question
is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long
attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. (Things Fall
Apart)
The latest sahib in colonialism’s dismal parade, Kristof is the Rescue
Industry at its well-intentioned worst.
LAURA AGUSTÍN is author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets
and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books). A researcher and analyst of human
trafficking, undocumented migration and sex-industry research for the
past 20 years, she blogs as the Naked Anthropologist.
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