Speak Loudly AND Carry a Big Stick

Over at The Washington Post Anne Applebaum wishes American leaders would shut their yaps about human rights and simply act on addressing those issues instead. I have no problem with speaking up if action follows. What is intolerable is staking a self-righteous claim to commitment to human rights and then not backing it up, as in, say, Darfur.

On The Road: Self Indulgence Alert

I am hitting the road for the next ten days or so. This weekend I'll be attending the 123rd annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York, where I hope to see this for the first time. Then I will be heading to Washington, DC, to participate in the 2009 Jack and Anita Hess Seminar for Faculty (pdf) at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. (My own perspective and connection is the issue of genocide in Africa, an issue about which I have written a little and taught a bit more.) As always, I'll post as I can.

The Darfur Crisis (Self Indulgence Edition)

The Foreign Policy Association has published a lengthy piece that I have been working on for quite a while, "Never Again," Again: The Darfur Crisis. It is also available in .pdf, with footnotes, here.

The Opening paragraph:

The pattern is relentless, bleak, frustrating, and odiously predictable. The leadership of Sudan and its murderous minions engage in brazen and cynical acts of murder and foment chaos, either directly or by proxy. The rest of the world responds tepidly if it responds at all. Sudan oversteps, the world criticizes, hinting of ramifications to come. Sudan backs off just long enough for the goldfish-length attention span of the western powers to turn their attentions elsewhere. And then the self-preserving thugs in Khartoum return almost immediately to their cruel and rapacious ways.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog.]

Self Indulg . . . Ah, You Know The Drill: ASMEA in DC

I am in my old stomping grounds of Washington, DC for the first meeting of a promising new organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. On Saturday I will be presenting a paper on a project on Darfur on which I have been working for quite some time.

Typical of a lot of my work, this project is not quite scholarly enough for academics and may well prove too scholarly for the general public. By no means am I an expert of Darfur or Sudan, but as someone who writes about Africa I have been asked to contribute to this inaugural conference and was asked some time ago to write a piece on this nightmare scenario. In May I will present a more advanced (I hope) version of this project at a Sudan Studies meeting in Tallahassee and when all is said and done maybe I'll have something worth saying in a couple of venues about the human rights catastrophe that we have helped to countenance through benign neglect and practiced malfeasance.

The China Conundrum

So, what to do about China and the Olympics?

It is facile and ahistorical to assert that the Olympics, or sports in general, should be kept separate from politics. The Olympics are an orgy of nationalistic fervor and political platforms and always have been.

Hell, the Cold War gave the Olympics a huge amount of their cache. I always found it ironic that conservatives blasted Jimmy Carter for choosing not to send the American teams to the 1980 games in Moscow given that Carter was making the decision not to give the Russians the platform that the Olympics offered. It may not have been a great decision politically, and it may not have had the desired effect, but the ardent self-avowed anti-Communists ought to have embraced the decision. But most ardent anti-Communism was always more of a cudgel with which to batter the domestic opposition than it was anything else anyway.

But that brings us back to China, which has a record of human rights violations second-to-none on the globe and which actively countenances genocide in Darfur. SL Price called out the International Olympic Committee in a recent issue of Sports Illustrated, and rightfully so. But what is the responsibility of the United States? Are we not fueling China's despotism, albeit despotism with a gleaming capitalist facade, by sending our teams to compete and our media to cover those competitions? The die was cast as soon as the IOC granted Beijing the Games. Surely it is not too much to ask that in the future we don't grant the games to totalitarian countries. Is it?