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The hype-o-meter hits the red zone

By Michael J. Smith on Wednesday March 28, 2007 10:43 PM

I should read the Huffington Post more often. There's nothing more delightful than movie folk getting all world-historical. Here's Mia Farrow (remember her)?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mia-and-ronan-farrow/the-genocide-olympics_b_44476.html

"One World, One Dream" is China's slogan for its 2008 Olympics. But there is one nightmare that China shouldn't be allowed to sweep under the rug. That nightmare is Darfur....

[E]qually disappointing is the decision of artists like director Steven Spielberg -- who quietly visited China this month as he prepares to help stage the Olympic ceremonies -- to sanitize Beijing's image. Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?

... Corporate sponsors like Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, General Electric and McDonalds, and key collaborators like Mr. Spielberg, should be put on notice.... Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?

Whoa! "Collaborator?" "Leni Riefenstahl?" I guess the Fur are the new Jews -- because Khartoum is the new Baghdad? Or is that Tehran?

So many targets, so little time.

Comments (4)

sk:

A little dash of reality for those susceptible to moral hucksterism.

op:

sk
great link indeed

Mahmood Mamdani article superb

"China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan"

this strikes home "personal" wise

i was
an unpaid
hack for pol pot
"back in the day"
and
since i was
i can say with some authority
darfur 03-07 is no kampuchea 75-79

as to the prc bash here

its even less.....far far less parallel

op:

MM:

"The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. "

"The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’."


"the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them"

How exasperating. She's the daughter of a director, she's done 40 or so films, and Mia still doesn't understand directors.

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