i want to talk about respect. / how even the desperate deserve it.
If you study international relations, or humanitarian law (which is the law of war and of armed conflict, which may or many not overlap with human rights law, to the surprise of many an idealistic undergraduate), or the history of conflict, or indeed just history, eventually you may get to the chapters on genocide.1
Perhaps, depending on where you are and who your professors are and who structured the course and when, you will have studied Cambodia or Rwanda or Bosnia or Darfur or Myanmar or yet another, for the list is long, and there’s always a new one. You are very unlikely to have encountered the 1951 We Charge Genocide petition, nonetheless.
Perhaps you will have read Kofi Annan’s 2004 address to the commission on human rights: “No one can claim ignorance. All who were playing any part in world affairs at that time should ask, “what more could I have done? How would I react next time –- and what am I doing now to make it less likely there will be a next time?”
You will find, in the literature and the scholarship and the historical texts, an emphasis role of dehumanizing language and rhetoric, on the identification and demonisation of The Other. In Rwanda, cockroaches; during the Holocaust, Untermenschen.
You may find in the contemporary popular press the repetition of the slogans of the day, or the dismissal of allegations as “shameful lies”.
Yes, it can happen here, for any value of here.
Attribution
i want to talk about gratitude.
i want to talk about compassion.
i want to talk about respect.
how even the desperate deserve it.
how haitians sometimes greet each other
with the two words “honor”
and “respect.”
how we all should follow suit.
— from quaking conversation by Lenelle Moïse