This is the beginning of a a very long piece at The Medium and the Message, a blog by Adam Curtis at the BBC. It is made longer by 10 videos. It touches on ideology and other deeply held political perceptions. It focuses on breaking old molds and achieving new outcomes. It is well worth your time:
The idea of "humanitarian intervention" which is behind the decision to attack in Libya is one of the central beliefs of our age.
It divides people. Some see it as a noble, disinterested use of Western power. Others see it as a smokescreen for a latter-day liberal imperialism.
I want to tell the story of how this idea originated and how it has grown up to possess the minds of a generation of liberal men and women in Europe and America.
It is the story of a generation who became disenchanted with traditional power politics. They thought they could leap over the old corrupt structures of power and connect directly with the innocent victims of war around the world.
It was a grand utopian project that began in the mid-60s in Africa and flourished and spread across the world. But in the 1990s it became corrupted by the very thing it was supposed to have transcended - western power politics.
And the idea seemed to have died in horror in a bombing of a hotel in Baghdad in 2003.
What we now see is the return of that dream in a ghostly, half-hearted form - where the confidence and hopes have been replaced by a nervous anxiety. ...
This modern phase of humanitarian intervention begins in 1968 with the Biafran war. It is a fascinating moment because it is where the framework - the contemporary filter through which we now perceive all humanitarian tragedies - was first constructed. ...
Out of Biafra was going to come a new idea of how to save the world. And the man who would create it was a young French doctor called Bernard Kouchner.
Kouchner had worked for the Red Cross in Biafra, but he had become disgusted by the Red Cross' refusal to publicise the genocide created by the Nigerian government.
Just as the Red Cross hadn't revealed the horrors they saw in World War Two in the Nazi concentration camps because they insisted on being "neutral"
Kouchner resigned and went back to Paris where he founded a new humanitarian organisation called Medecins Sans Frontieres. Being neutral, Kouchner said, really meant being complicit in the horror. And MSF would never be complicit. It was on the side of the innocent victims.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning reported another large rise in unemployment. The official unemployment rate now sits at 8.5%, up from 8.1% last month and higher than at any time since November 1983. Job losses for March totaled 663,000. Since December 2007, when the recession began, 5.1 million jobs have been lost, with 3.3 million of those occurring in the last five months. ...
Bad as the numbers are, the misery is worse than they show. The official unemployment rate (called U3 by the BLS) doesn’t count people who are so discouraged they have given up looking for work nor those who have taken a part-time job only because they can’t find full-time employment. The figure that includes these Americans (U6) hit 15.6% today, up from 14.8% last month.