Mary's Notes, April 24, 2007

RIP David Halberstam. Chris knew him pretty well and remembered him this morning as one of the most significant journalists of the 20th century; someone who was trained by The New York Times and John Siegenthaler and who then became an institution unto himself; a reporter who may have brought more young people into journalism than Woodward and Bernstein.

Chris is writing to Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University professor who wrote a provocative piece in the London Review of Books last month about Darfur. It’s a piece that both silvio.rabioso and davidgura have pitched us recently, and it suggests a more complicated reading of the situation there than Nick Kristof and other American journalists are painting. Mamdani writes:

Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.

Mahmoud Mamdani, The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency, London Review of Books, March 8, 2007.

Tonight, Globalization’s Double-Edged Sword. Tomorrow, maybe Mamdani, maybe HIV transmission, maybe something else. We’ll keep you updated.