Mikey G Ottawa, Feed The Hungry, 2007
Certains droits réservés.

Burma’s political history is rife with turmoil and struggle. In the 1980s it saw political uprisings and student movements in favour of democracy. Violent military action under General Maung quelled these uprisings; the house arrest of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi (which continues to this day) also heralded the end of political radicalism. Even after 1990 elections that revealed an overwhelming majority vote for a democratic political party, the junta did not allow the democratic regime to rule ¹. Internationally, it has been acknowledged that the military junta is oppressive, unjust, holds political prisoners, trades opium, uses forced labour, stifles the free press, and shows a general disinterest in the welfare of its own people ². The international community’s attempt to affect political change in Burma through the imposition of economic sanctions has come to naught because, as Judge writes: “the worse the government, the less effective are the sanctions, precisely because despotic regimes ignore the suffering of the people.³” As we can see from the junta’s reign, Cyclone Nargis was not Burma’s first introduction to widespread suffering and injustice, and the plight of those affected by the cyclone under the junta has now complicated how exactly the international community should assist the Burmese.

Aid & inadequacy

On May 2nd, Cyclone Nargis swept Burma back into the international spotlight and revealed again the true state of political affairs in the region. The initial unwillingness of the government to accept foreign aid reinforced the popularly-held opinion that the well-being of its people is a secondary concern. Cyclone Nargis left 135,000 people dead or missing and another 2.4 million survivors in need of immediate assistance ⁴. Attempts to remedy the situation failed. First, and most obviously, the junta has refused external aid, believing they could sustain the food and water needs of their people ⁵. Second, the government has added insult to injury by being hostile to them. The Junta continues to brutalize its own populations, with their desire for absolute control stymieing ad hoc efforts of Burmese to help fellow citizens⁶. As past demonstrations by the Burmese have been met with military violence, it is unsurprising that villagers are acquiescent even in their most desperate time of need.
What little aid the government is supplying has only provided for a quarter of those most affected by the natural disaster ⁷. In addition to the insufficiency of the domestic aid, it is also misplaced. Sayadaw Otamma, a monk at the Kanna Pariyati Monastery told reporters for the New York Times:

The people from the foreign embassies go to see the people in the blue tents, who are the families of people in the Government […] The officials there tell them how to answer the questions: ‘We like it here. We have enough to eat.’ The Government does not bring the foreigners here because they know that if they spoke to us we would tell them the truth⁸.

Just recently, the junta rescinded its original position and has finally agreed to allow foreign aid into the country; the worry now is that it will not go to those most in need. The Burmese government has requested a donation of approximately $10 billion for reconstruction. This aid, once pledged to the victims of Cyclone Nargis, is set to be administered by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; Asean’s core group of governors, however, includes three members of the Burmese junta ⁹. The oversight of funds, therefore, does not necessarily lend itself to the transparency and accountability desired by the international donor community, lending to another troubling reality: can the junta generals be trusted to ensure a just flow of aid to their people? It seems unlikely. What the junta will do with $10 billion at their disposal is a worrying question.

Some members of the international community remain hopeful. After meeting with junta chief Senior General Than Shwe, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon told reporters: « We have seen that the Burma government is moving fast to implement their commitment. My sincere hope is that they will honor their commitment—that we have to see.¹⁰ » Ban Ki-Moon’s hopes are not reassuring. Ban asks a lot: trust the junta and believe they will follow through on their commitment. This puts the international community in a tight moral dilemma: either give money to a government that has so far not been responsible to its people and trust it to use that aid fairly and justly, or continue to watch those affected by the cyclone suffer. Can we show compassion to the Burmese while upholding our principles of fairness and justice?

Conflicted compassion

As Martha Nussbaum has argued in her article “Compassion and Terror”, compassion has the capacity to transcend differences in the interest of empathizing, helping or caring for another and is based on the perception of suffering in another. Nussbaum lists three main criteria that precede feeling compassion: 1) the perceived suffering is acute; 2) the suffering is undeserved; and 3) the suffering could conceivably happen to the one feeling compassion ¹¹. In other words, we think what happened is bad, we wish it wouldn’t have happened, and we hope it will not happen to us.

In the Cyclone Nargis, we can see that the unpredictability of the natural disaster is surely an undeserved tragedy for any person. Nature is unpredictable and capricious; it does not discriminate between nationalities. Because we know the suffering inflicted by natural disasters can happen to anyone, because we can imagine ourselves in the situation of the Burmese, we feel compassion. Maureen Whitebrook in her article “Compassion as a Political Virtue” also similarly points out that one of the benefits of compassion is that it is the foundation from which just actions follow ¹². That is, because we have the ability to feel compassion, we also have the capacity to be just.

However, problems arise when our compassionate reaction is fallible. Nussbaum points out the weaknesses of compassion: “it can get the judgment of seriousness wrong, ascribing too much importance to the wrong things or too little to things that have great weight.¹³” Is Burma a case study of ‘too little compassion’ in the right place? In other words, are we showing more compassion to extraordinary victims of a cyclone than to everyday victims of a despotic regime? Is it because we cannot imagine ourselves, members of a free liberal democracy, under an authoritarian military junta that we have not concretely aided the Burmese before now? Or, perhaps, this is a case of conflicted compassion. Do you give your brother’s forgotten lunch to the class bully to deliver safely to him?

Charles Rarick’s comments about economic sanctions on Burma reflect a similar moral dilemma. The international community wants to help the Burmese but are economic sanctions the best method of doing so? Rarick notes: “economic sanctions by the United States are […] working to destroy a country in order to save it.¹⁴” This kind of ‘tough-love’ approach to international politics Rarick finds reprehensible and useless, doing more harm than good. The people suffer even further and the government refuses to change its behaviour. If undeserved suffering evokes our compassionate response, then imposing economic sanctions is un-compassionate and markedly unjust. At this point, Burma doesn’t need any more help destroying itself—Cyclone Nargis has done a fine job already. At the risk of seeing hundreds of thousands more people die perhaps the international community has to take a calculated risk and trust that their aid will not be mismanaged. But the question remains: after the destruction of the cyclone is repaired, who will save the Burmese from the junta?

References

1. Charles A. Rarick, “Destroying A Country In Order To Save It: The Folly of Economic Sanctions against Burma.” Economic Affairs26(2), 2006: 60-63.
2. Rarick, op.cit.: 61.
3. M. Judge, “Are Sanctions Evil?” Wall Street Journal 19 July 2004: A11.
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/world/asia/27Burma.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin
5. “In Myanmar, Loss, Grief and, for Some, Resignation.” The New YorkTimes 27 May 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/world/asia/27scene.html?ref=todayspaper
6. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/world/asia/26Burma.html
7. “In Myanmar, Loss, Grief and, for Some, Resignation.” The New York Times 27 May 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/world/asia/27scene.html?ref=todayspaper
8. “The two faces of Burmese aid: a starving village and a state lie.” The New York Times 27 May 2009 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article4009946.ece
9. “Sizing Up Burma’s Junta”, Wall Street Journal, 27 May 2008 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121183607816720879.html
10. “UN: More boats, helicopters to Myanmar”, The Washington Post, 26 May 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/26/AR2008052600488.html
11. Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion: The basic social emotion.” Social Philosophy and Policy 13(1), 1996: 31.
12. Maureen Whitebrook, “Compassion as a Political Virtue.” Political Studies 50(3), 2002: 529–544.
13. Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion & Terror”, Daedalus 132(1), 2003: 10.
14. Rarick, op.cit.: 63.

Bill S., Comprehend, 2007
Certains droits réservés.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah recently pardoned a young woman sentenced to receive 200 lashes for being alone with a man. The woman in question, initially arrested in November 2006, received official pardon on 17 December 2007 largely due to the influence of public opinion. Janice Stein, director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, declared in an interview that this was good news because it also showed the strength of global public opinion. Stein remarked that the pardon in part resulted from public outcry from the international community via a flood of e-mail and online petitions demanding leniency for the accused ¹. The Justice Minister of Saudi Arabia declared that King Abdullah was acting in the “interests of the people”². In other words, public opinion influenced the King, and the electronic medium gave global citizens the power to communicate worldwide, providing the opportunity to advocate for domestic political change in other countries.

This demonstrates the persuasive power of writing: it conveys information in a manner that challenges how we normally think and act. The long-standing criticism of the medium of writing, best exemplified by the works of communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, seems – in one way or another – to all relate back to the idea that writing is an inauthentic form of human communication that limits human interaction. These critiques are meant to expose the potential dangers of writing as a medium, but they also inadvertently work to shed light on the potential power of the written word. Examining McLuhan’s criticism of writing and privileging of speech provides the opportunity for a re-interpretation of writing as a powerful medium that promotes conversation, interaction and political action.

Writing: A Stagnant Medium?

McLuhan, whose most influential work dates from the 1960s, believes the medium essential to how the message is communicated. Showing incredible foresight into the effects of technology and globalization on the way we communicate, McLuhan’s thoughts on writing and the phrase he coined, the ‘global village’, make him an interesting counterpoint to the power of writing, especially in the electronic form. In an introduction to Harold Innis’ Bias of Communication, he sees speaking as an interface, or chemical reaction, and the reading/writing process as stagnant³. McLuhan asserts that speech and dialogue create this interface where a dynamic interplay of ideas occurs between two or more people.

However, what he overlooks in this assessment is that reading also enables dialogue with the self, or what Plato calls “thinking”⁴. Reading therefore cannot be considered stagnant if it stimulates reflexive action and self-dialogue. Where this reflexive action becomes important to this discussion is in the resulting potential for dialogue with others. If thinking provides the possibility for dialogue with others, then what inspires thinking also introduces the possibility for interaction. Writing, as inspiring thought, thus has the power to present new ideas. This potential saves it from becoming that stagnant medium McLuhan believes it to be.

In Understanding Media, McLuhan also discusses the evolution of a distinctly political element to typography, which can further exacerbate writing’s tendency to be potentially isolating. He writes unflatteringly about print as changing the nature of society itself: “The tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men homogeneously trained to be individuals.” He later explains that typography gave man the “… power to act without reaction or involvement”⁵. McLuhan refers to two different groups in these passages: first, to the reader, and second, the writer. Simply put, reading print ideologically homogenizes its readers; writing allows for a passive form of political action in creating these ideologies.

Writing Redeemed

Though at first blush McLuhan’s discussion seems hardly complimentary of writing, what he believes to be its isolating characteristics can similarly be considered as its assets. The writing that ‘trains men to be individuals’ is dangerous. Indeed, if those men remain asocial and isolated in their experience of the written word. However, what McLuhan assumes to be the uniquely homogenizing effect of writing can in fact be seen as unifying. Writing, as the precursor to speech and dialogue with others, has the power to bring individuals together to discuss their individual interpretations of what is written. As Gadamer writes: “Thanks to the verbal nature of all interpretation, every interpretation includes the possibility of a relationship with others⁶”. What McLuhan sees as the downfall of writing—in that it individualizes–becomes powerful when seen as its potential to bring individuals together.

Seen in the light of modern technology, electronic writing provides a new venue for political action, not a compromised one. McLuhan’s critique assumes that only an interactive, dynamic medium allows for action. However, seeing writing as a precursor to this interaction, as well as a medium that allows for an internalization of its ideas, ultimately redeems writing. Electronic writings like e-mail, websites and blogs make information readily accessible to individuals and provide an opportunity for powerful political action. It is not a given that writing alone will provoke a response, but the increased accessibility of information via the written word provides readers with a crucial choice, and the resultant responsibility to decide between action and inaction. King Adbullah’s pardon shows the effect of this supposedly stagnant medium and confirms the potential for politically powerful writing.

Seeing the relationship of writing to thought, speech and action provides a way to recuperate the nature and potential of the written word. It was writing that influenced the King of Saudi Arabia to pardon a woman who otherwise would have suffered a terrible fate. This power begs us to ask the question: will readers allow the written word to make them think, talk and act, or will they become passive recipients of the ideas? What are the factors that influence the former over the latter? Understanding and unlocking the potential of writing requires awareness of the choice and potential that ultimately rests with the reader.

References

1. “Saudi king ‘pardons rape victim’”, BBC News Online, 17 December 2007, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7147632.stm> ; CBC Radio, The Sunday Edition, 30 December 2007, <http://www.cbc.ca/radioshows/THE_SUNDAY_EDITION/20071230.shtml>
2. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22293189/>
3. H. A. Innis, The bias of communication, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1964: Introduction, viii.
4. Plato, Sophist, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 1993: 264a.
5. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media: The extensions of man, Toronto, McGraw-Hill Publishing, 1965: 177-178.
6. H. G. Gadamer, Truth and method, New York, The Crossroad Publishing Corporation, 1989: 397.