A sober treatise, burning with righteous indignation. Rieff makes a solid if impious case for humanitarian reform, one that...
The Third World is a heap of severed limbs, the aid the First World offers but the smallest of Band-Aids: so argues journalist Rieff in this lucid polemic.
“Any adult who does not understand that the world is an unjust place, even in its treatment of catastrophe, is a fool or a dreamer.” Thus Rieff (Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, 1995) establishes the tone of his emphatically unstarry-eyed look at relief efforts in places such as Rwanda and Kosovo. Rieff’s argument follows provocative lines: humanitarian relief organizations working in such places are in crisis, as even its most committed proponents recognize, in part because they have been co-opted by the major powers, which in turn have made human rights central to foreign policy. In the theater of aid-as-realpolitik, relief too often plays into the wrong hands, propping up corrupt governments and creating a pattern of infantilizing dependency; as one aid worker observes, “aid too often does nothing to alter—and very often reinforces—the fundamental circumstances that produced the needs it temporarily meets.” Rieff urges, among other things, that we shed fairy-tale views of a world of tyrants and oppressed; as he observes, many of the Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda in 1994 had merrily slaughtered their Tutsi compatriots before packing their bags, which does not lessen their need—only their supposed status as innocent victims. Just so, he argues, the UN’s insistence that all sides were villains in the Balkans, “while false in the instance”—the Serbs, in his view, having been the clear aggressors—“was right about any number of conflicts in the world, from Tajikistan to Burundi.” All of which is not to say that the West should stop trying to ease the world’s suffering. But, Rieff urges, humanitarian NGOs can do their stated jobs only if they act independently, not as arms of the new world order, and the major powers would do better to remove tyrants at gunpoint than deliver powdered milk to faraway places.
A sober treatise, burning with righteous indignation. Rieff makes a solid if impious case for humanitarian reform, one that ought to generate much discussion.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-80977-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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