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3. A Duty to Intervene: On the Cinematic Constitution of Subjects for Empire in Hotel Rwanda and Caché
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3 A Duty to Intervene On the Cinematic Constitution of Subjects for Empire in Hotel Rwanda and Caché In his classic work The Wretched of the Earth, anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon argued that the international recognition of repression and brutality in the colonies was largely determined by the presence or absence of imperialist competition in a given area at a particular time. Where these geopolitical turf wars were minimal or absent, mass slaughters remained on “the other side” of the international division of visibility: In 1945 the 45,000 dead at Sétif [Algeria] could go unnoticed; in 1947 the 90,000 dead in Madagascar were written off in a few lines in the papers; in 1952 the 200,000 victims of the repression in Kenya were met with relative indifference.1 The massacre at Sétif took place just before the beginning of the Nuremberg trials as the West sought to address barbarity in its midst while continuing to ignore long histories of racist colonial violence outside the West. In stark contrast, when and where Cold War competition was acute, Fanon argued that even the most minor act of repression in the colonies registered at the level of the international: Two men are beaten up in Salisbury and an entire bloc goes into action, focuses on these two men and uses this beating to raise the issue of Rhodesia — linking it to the rest of Africa and every colonized subject. (35) It was neither the magnitude nor the form of brutality that determined the recognition of colonial violence by the West, but rather 43 44 A Duty to Intervene the visibility was regulated through a brute calculus of racism and imperialist geopolitics. Fanon’s critical response to the imperialist world was not to point out the hypocrisies and contradictions in order to appeal to the “goodwill of European governments” (61–62). Rather, the impasse necessitated the adoption of a political program in the only language that the West recognized: force. Thus he affirmed anticolonial warfare and gave reasons why it was necessary: In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists. This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence. (2–3) In this strategic formulation, Fanon rejects the solution offered by the “colonialist bourgeoisie,” which at “the critical, deciding moment . . . introduce a new notion, in actual fact a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence” (23). Since Fanon’s death in 1961, the attainment of independence by many nations of Africa, and the end of the Cold War, a new institutional force has emerged to challenge the relative monopoly of powerful nation-states over the international borders of in/visibility: nongovernmental human rights organizations (NGOs). Beginning with the establishment of Amnesty International in 1960, the publicizing of “human rights abuses” has been taken on by an everwidening cast of international NGOs including the Organization for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Terre des Hommes, and Médecins sans Frontières, to name but a few. Given the lack of institutional mechanisms to enforce a legal obligation for states to respond, human rights organizations have adopted a host of visibility strategies designed to appeal to the conscience of the West. The strategic circuit favored by human rights NGOs moves from (1) making conditions of violence visible to (2) provoking shame to (3) necessitating a response. In this political program, it is the ethos of shame that constitutes the critical means of challenging the narrow calculus of imperialist interest that otherwise regulates the in/visibility of conditions of violence outside the West. Such a strategic project serves as the modus operandi for the human rights practice of the major international NGOs. As Peter Takirambudde, [3.237.91.98] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:50 GMT) A Duty to Intervene 45 regional director for Human Rights Watch, Sub-Saharan Africa, recently outlined: We seek to target those institutions that have the most influence over the recipient countries in terms of foreign aid. Part of the strategy is obviously that we seek to shame those who commit the primary abuses. But we also seek to shame those who support them, those who cooperate with them, and those...