Thursday, September 1, 2011

Notice anything interesting about this picture?

The NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen attended the International Conference on Libya in Paris on 1 September 2011. [picture and text from www.nato.int]

5 comments:

  1. There's only one person wearing red?

    The people are too small for me to identify their race or gender, even zoomed in as far as I can, but I'm guessing the answer lies in there.

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  2. Ah, sorry. I'll see if I can get it blown up. There are four women in the picture as far as I can tell.

    Really though it struck me that at a moment when the kyriarchy have demonstrably done a bad job of running things a picture of the people gathered together to "fix" the problem is pretty much a snapshot of the kyriarchy who caused the problem.

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  3. (I think the problem with browser zoom is that the image doesn't get clearer as it gets larger, it just gets bigger and fuzzier) I did go to the link you provided and read the article on nato's site, though.

    I can see that there is a sea of blue suits, so predominantly male. And I can see some people dressed in traditional middle eastern garb, but not many. I guessed that the red shirt was a woman, and after some scrutiny decided the person in the front with a white shirt is also probably female, but I couldn't really be sure.

    I really like the idea of NATO and the principles behind it, but I don't agree with how things are always handled in practice. I've been to some of the villages in northern Serbia that were bombed in the 90's, based on false intelligence (the whole problem with NATO's involvement in that was that it did everything from afar). It's a lot easier to blow a place up when you can't see the elderly women who take the bus to the market once a week to sell their eggs.

    When I think of that particular village, I think mostly of sitting around a table drinking juice, listening to Hungarian songs from the 40's on the radio. I'm not saying Serbia was innocent in all of that mess -- nobody was, and there were atrocities being commited that needed to be stopped. I spent some time reading in Bosnian what survivors of those camps were saying, reading their poetry, bearing witness. It was horrible. But most of the civilians who were bombed were not complicit in, or even aware of what was happening in other parts of the country.

    Why am I rambling about Serbia when you posted about Libya? Well, I know more about Serbia, and it's closer to home -- just 20km from here and all that, even though I wasn't here yet back then, and I haven't followed the developments in Libya closely enough, though I've read some here and there. If I did some research I might be able to compare and contrast more intelligently, but instead I'm just rambling, because it got me thinking. NATO seems like such a good idea. I really like the concept of it. Hopefully one day it'll be better.

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  4. I didn't get the sense you were rambling about Serbia...in fact you are actually speaking directly to one of my (vaguely) implied points. The people making the decisions are not the people who are being impacted by those decisions.

    I like the idea of NATO. I just don't like the idea of NATO (or any other power) having so little input from the people who would be most effected by those decisions.

    You are in Hungary now, right? My dad was serving in the NATO forces in Europe during the Hungarian uprising.

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  5. What would be ideal for NATO would be to be in contact with people on the ground, listening to their problems, supporting them, helping them troubleshoot, giving financial and military aid as required.

    Completely unrelatedly, my mind has wandered off to "that whole twitter thing with Iran" and "the facebook? i think? thing with Egypt I think it was" how western users of social media were talking all excitedly about how the revolution was happening on twitter and everyone was retweeting all these posts in English like crazy, flooding the channels with so much noise that even if people had been trying to the social media in that way, they would have had a hard time finding a signal. (There were actually very few people in Iran who were registered with twitter. And in Egypt, most people weren't learning about it on Facebook, they were walking out their front doors, finding a protest, a joining in.)

    I saw a really small example of this with Belgrade pride -- I was staying with some of the organisers of it, and a British woman was staying there too and she was all excited about how it had "all been organised on Facebook! I totally wouldn't have been able to co-ordinate my coming to pride without Facebook!" And, sure, there was a Facebook page, but there was a lot of other things too -- and it was really organised in person by the organisers. Most people heard about it at gay clubs, from friends, on the official website, or on the gay forum, or because it was a major news story on tv for about a week before the parade, and everyone on the radio was talking about it.

    Yeah, I'm in Hungary now. My mother and grandparents were refugees in the uprising. I know a fair bit about what happened at the time -- how it started here in my town in the very auditorium I had my Syntax lecture in and then spread to Budapest, that it was mostly college students and young people who were not anti-communist but wanted to reform it because of problems that they saw, and of course I know of how Austria opened its borders for the refugees and how the Russians put it down with tanks, and of course the personal narrative of my family's leaving. I don't know much about NATO's involvement here in 1956, though. Now I'm curious. :)

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