Long and digressing post on the injustice of the universe
I think it was a comic that originally made me take an interest in human rights. As a child I was a huge fan of the American native comic character Sølvpilen, originally invented by the Belgian comic writer Frank Sels for the Scandinavian and German market. One of those magazines was re-launched in a special edition a couple of years ago, and I read it eagerly. Today I can see that the comic offers mostly nostalgic value and not much else – even as a child I questioned the authenticity of the heroine’s dress, and the Kiowa people had WASPy features and achieved a native look only by adding some tan and jet black hair. Even so, at 9 I was fascinated, and the fascination led to interest which led to a search for information which led to a more general concern for the fate of the American natives, and that’s when I got angry.
(Incidentally, Silver Arrow was also the first, but certainly not the last, fictional character I fell in love with. The list also includes
- Gilbert Blythe
- Will Scarlett
- Spartakus from Les Mondes Engloutis
- Legolas (Aragorn being too old, and too taken)
- Atreju
- All characters Keanu Reeves ever played
- Strongbow
- Wilfred of Ivanhoe
- Lee Adama, even though he’s extremely high-maintenance
- Nightcrawler (comic version, not movie version)
- and, needless to say, Fitzwilliam Darcy)
The anger grew as I read about South-African apartheid, the occupation of Tibet, the American civil rights movement, die Endlösung der Judenfrage, the forced assimilation of the Sami peoples, Pinochet’s torture chambers, the Berlin wall. I think what frustrated me the most, was the utter stupidity of it all. How deficient in common sense do you have to be in order to think you have the right to randomly mistreat people for no good reason? Why didn’t the dictators around the world see how stupid their violence and censorship made them look? Why didn’t they explode like trolls as soon as their unjustifiable actions were exposed to the world? Why couldn’t someone at least take charge and revoke their human licence? I just couldn’t understand it.
Unfortunately, the rage never found any immediate source of relief. Even the angriest can appreciate the futility of travelling to Chile in order to shake general Pinochet by his collar, and I’ve never been a physically brave person. So I stayed at home and joined Amnesty International, and took satisfaction in working with methods completely opposite of the tyrants we worked against. In the meantime, I grew up and learned that there’s always more than one side to a story, that nothing is as simple as it seems, and that if you want to help make things better for people, you can always rely on someone to come and tell you that this is not the best way to do it. Giving money to the poor is bad because they will never learn how to help themselves. Carelessly handing out human rights to everyone is bad because it could destabilise fragile states that might be somewhat brutal, but at least they’re not completely chaotic, right? And besides, bringing down tyrants is mostly likely to help men, whereas women, who suffer more from domestic oppression and less from state oppression, will probably not be better off, and where’s the justice in that?
I guess that’s why the recent monks’ protests in Burma got so much attention. They had all the necessary characteristics: The demonstrators were peaceful and unarmed where the regime is brutal and armed, the protests arose quite suddenly after many years of silence, and the whole situation is refreshingly simple. There’s no doubt about who’s right and who’s wrong, and nobody can plausibly argue for “quiet diplomacy” and growth-first-democracy-next, because it’s so obvious it won’t help. It’s South Africa and Eastern Germany all over again, I’m as angry as I haven’t been since I was a teenager, and I feel just as helpless as I did then. Even so, the Internet that has appeared in the meantime offers some supplements to the slow business of writing letters. And if the activities organised by the Facebook group “Support the Monks’ Protests in Burma” can actually achieve more than nothing, then I’ll even have one more point to add on my still quite short list of good reasons to be registered on Facebook.
But I so wish the attention of the world would make the generals explode like trolls.