Behind Her Anger by Susan Griffin
March 13, 2008
Samantha Power
(Harvard faculty photo) |
I was saddened to learn about the unfortunate mistake Obama advisor Samantha Power made in her interview last week with a Scottish journalist. Power said herself later that Hillary Clinton is by no means a monster. The epithet was unfair and unwise and of course she had to resign. But, both as an American citizen and a feminist, I am sorry to lose a crucial voice in the continuing debate over foreign policy that has been stimulated by the democratic primaries.
For the last 15 years, Samantha Power has alerted us to genocide and attacks against civilians in warfare. From the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, which she founded in 1998, and where she still teaches, to an impressive list of speeches, articles and books, she has steadily reminded us of atrocities around the world. In an impressive volume, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003, she charts the dimensions of genocide, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, along side a history of the of the failures American policy. In 2005, she called our attention to another tragic lapse in our nation’s compassion, publishing a stunning article in the New Yorker about genocide in Darfur.
While I deplore what she said about Senator Clinton I well understand the anger that must have fueled this ill-advised remark. Having spent many years of my own life doing research, at times harrowing, and thinking and writing about the deaths of civilians in warfare, I can sense the outrage she must have felt on seeing the ad Clinton’s campaign ran late in the day before the Texas and Ohio primary elections—a slick series of images inciting viewers to fear for the lives of their children.
At first glance, one might think that the ad simply reflects the senator’s desire to keep all our children safe. But this is not really the question before us, is it? We all want children to be safe. The real question is how can we best serve this goal. And paradoxically by inciting fear, this kind of approach threatens to start a chain reaction of irrational emotions, decisions and eventually policies that if not turned around will actually endanger the children of the world.
What most disturbs me about this ad is the underlying assumption that the principle way the President can protects us is as commander in chief of America’s armed forces. Though the use of force can never be ruled out, we have already used a lot of it and, far from protecting us— according to countless experts on terrorism, among them many four-star generals—the sacrifice of so many brave young soldiers has put our younger children in greater danger not less. Indeed, our current war in Iraq began with an invocation of fear. It is three am, are your children safe and Saddam has WMD’s was the message we got from Bush. Since that war began, there have been roughly 100,000 civilian deaths and almost 4000 soldier killed. And what has been achieved? Life for Iraqis, especially Iraqi women and children, has deteriorated. With the possible exclusion of a few female members of parliament, women have far fewer rights under the current government than they did under the old regime. Many have lost children or seen them injured, maimed, disabled for life. All that sustains children, access to water, food, medical care, an education has been diminished if not destroyed.
Is this not a feminist cause? The version of feminism we fought for was never confined to a woman’s right to be president. We were aiming toward a major shift in values. The suffragists hoped that when women got the vote, we would end war. Clearly this has not happened. And yet, through Code Pink and countless other organizations—going back to Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Women Strike for Peace, among others—women who have understood the larger scope of feminism have worked to end war, speaking out and protesting, in alliance with men, to end the violence. One of the hard won achievements in this current effort has been to transform the terms of the debate. The American people have begun to realize that they were coerced to accept this disastrous war through the manipulation of their fears. This realization has brought many independent voters to support both Democratic candidates.
The key word here is manipulation. This is not an argument against genuine feeling. In the seventies when feminist theory was being shaped, we spoke a great deal about the validity of emotion. Indeed, in a lecture she gave in 2004, in Stockholm, about genocide, Samantha Power put it this way, “There is a difference between knowledge of facts and deep, visceral knowledge—the kind that hits you like a punch in the tummy, the kind that makes you cry, the kind that makes you—if only for an instant—imagine your daughter being forced into round the clock service in a Serb rape camp, or your little boy being reduced to pleading to a machete wielding Rwandan extremist, ‘Please don’t kill me. I’ll never be Tutsi again.’”
Empathy leads to clarity and change. By contrast, as history has shown us again and again, when unconscious feelings are manipulated by the powerful, they lead to denial and the passive acceptance of authority. In this way, the failure to respond to genocide and a compliance with violence are bound together by irrational and numbing fears. What we need to encourage now is another kind of emotion, that which can resonant throughout the world. We all care about our children, we all fear for them and for their sake; we all have hopes for the future. We can work together not for Mutually Assured Destruction but for mutually assured safety, for a reciprocity of care and compassion. With all she has contributed to domestic programs, and women’s rights around the world, Hillary Clinton is certainly no monster. But if we do not continue to change the course of the debate and hence our policies away from unthinking belligerence and toward more understanding, cooperation and diplomacy, the consequences, especially for women and children, will indeed continue to be monstrous.
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