The Andrew Extravaganza

Sarah Silverman does a joke in which Sarah’s niece is telling her about what she learned in school, but she has confused a minor detail...I’ll paraphrase:

Niece: Hitler killed 60 million Jews.
Sarah: No…he killed 6 million.
Niece: What’s the difference?
Sarah: Well…60 million would be unforgivable.

I’ll go out on a limb—the Holocaust was bad. But let’s say Hitler kept his Jew loathing confined to the post WWI borders of Germany; he has the ultimate goal of a unified Europe, but wants to do some house cleaning first. I think it’s safe to assume that France would have surrendered preemptively, but for the sake of this scenario we shall ignore the images of jackbooted Nazis goose-stepping down the Avenue des Champs-Elysées and pretend the cowards of Vichy France were never born.

So Hitler proceeds to have his Holocaust, but only inside his German borders. Would the world have tried to stop him? I’d guess they would eventually. But since Europe (we can include the isolationist U.S.A. too) sat watching with their thumbs up their asses while Hitler built a war machine in the 1930’s, maybe they don’t intervene until it’s too late.

Clearly there would have been a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of the German Jews.

So fast forward to present day; pick your African post-colonial hell hole. Sudan is presently having a spirited genocide in Darfur, so let’s use them.

Cold fact: If every Sudanese person died today, it wouldn’t affect me much. Not to diminish its impact, but even the loss of life during the World Trade Center tower collapses on 9/11/2001 didn’t affect my daily routine beyond the day of the attack.

Beyond the moral obligation, which shouldn’t be minimized—Jews are certainly a comedic group, but you can’t convince me they’re more valuable as a people than Africans—what reason does the world community have to intervene? And by intervene, I mean go to a little more effort than having the U.N. impose hollow deadlines and send representatives to helplessly watch the ethnic cleansing take place.

Say what you will about the Iraq war, but at least we get oil and a chance at regional stabilization through democracy. Maybe that hornet’s nest was best left alone, but since the end of WWII, the U.S. has frequently meddled in the affairs of nations with much less upside. The conflict in Darfur is between Muslims of Arab decent and Muslims of African decent; perhaps Sudan is a potential breeding ground of global terrorism. That statement is an example of my ignorance on the matter: I don’t even know if their version of the Islamic faith embraces the killing of infidels; although since Sudan itself is pretty fucked up I suspect they have bigger fish to fry than the death of America (but you better watch your ass Belgium, France and Britain).

One thing I know: the average American doesn’t give a shit about the plight of the Sudanese. It would be a tough sell to convince the people that even one American life lost would be worth the trouble.

Conservatives like to spout the belief that the mainstream media is run by bleeding heart liberals (ranging from your run of the mill big government welfare state proponents to outright America haters). Why don’t the papers and news programs turn the African genocide into an issue as big as The Runway Bride or Jacko’s Juvenile Orgy trial? I’ll speculate: a) genocide stories don’t sell (but do tell us all about Brad and Angelina); b) They can’t advocate a military intervention in Sudan without looking like a bunch of hypocrites on the Iraq war—at least without taking the U.N. led peace-keeping force copout route.

I’m still trying to figure out how much I care about Sudan; I’ll toss out a number: 1 American casualty per 25,000 Sudanese saved in the short term. That seems reasonable now, but if and when a soldier does die for that cause you can be sure the media will exploit his/her death for ratings/circulation. It would be nice to see a European nation step up and take the lead, though I suspect in their heart of hearts they want us on that wall (Team America: World Police…but who else will in cases like this or Kosovo or Somalia? Better to watch the Yanks take one for the team.) Before I get all Lee Greenwood I had better wait and see how this one plays out…although there’s probably already too much waiting and seeing going on.

I apologize for any rambling that took place in this one: it was mostly stream of consciousness. I’m reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and it got me thinking about how France’s colonial war in Indo-China turned into a massive scar on an entire generation of Americans. Certainly it can be argued that Vietnam helped lead to the demise of the Soviet communist system, but that’s another topic. I guess it just illustrates that a small conflict begun with good intentions can quickly turn into something that fucks things up for a lot of people all over the world. Shout out to the Powell Doctrine.

TV blows. I watched 10 minutes of "news" on the tube before I got p-o'ed and surfed over to bbc.co.uk instead.

Concerning the Sudan thing though, (showing my ignorance there. I just called it a "thing") I think I'm in a similar boat. The main difference is that I don't care enough to even blog about it. How sad is that? But say we were to be suddenly taken up by the cause. Say we woke up tomorrow and though, "today I have to do something about those poor folks over in Sudan!". What can we do? Donate to aid organisations so their trucks of supplies can be looted by whichever militia is in control of the road at the time they pass through?