In just 1 Day, 200 Protesters were Killed in Guinea
On Monday, September 29th, Guinean soldiers opened fire in a stadium filled with 50,000 people and murdered an estimated 200 in the capital city of Conakry. More than a thousand people were injured. Eyewitness reports allege that soldiers also sexually assaulted female demonstrators and beat them in their genitals. Several people who tried to escape from the building were finished off by soldiers with bayonets. The protesters were demonstrating against Captain Moussa Dadis Camara’s military-led government. In a show of disapproval, former colonial power France announced that it would be suspending military aid to the country. This may lead some to wonder why France was militarily aiding a military junta in the first place.
How many people were already aware of this recent clampdown on political dissent?
How many people care?
Prior to June 2009, Iran mainly graced mainstream media (MSM) news headlines when stories surfaced about its nuclear program, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comments on the Holocaust, or its constant interference with Western power schemes in the Middle East. Reporting was focused on international relations (or the lack thereof), with the occasional story about a jailed activist, student protest or state ordered execution popping up in between. Representations of Iran were usually vilified and homogenous, with the Iranian people rarely being presented as a separate entity from the Islamic Republic. Poking fun at the one-sided representations of Iranians by Western MSM was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Jason Jones in Iran: Access of Evil, where Jones (a comedian in real life), travels to Iran to expose its alleged evilness, but can’t seem to get Iranians to act villainous no matter how hard he tries. Ironically, the show’s commentary was a little late; Western MSM had already begun to modify its representations of Iranians due to the outbreak of the protests. Indeed, for the first two months after the election, headlines about Iran were almost entirely focused on those whom MSM has deemed the “people of Iran.” Gone (at least temporarily) are the images of Iranians burning American flags in the streets. Now they are chanting slogans in favor of democracy. The crowds are no longer depicted as unified, male-dominated, angry, anti-Western mobs. Instead, at the centre of many of images that are now being twittered, facebooked and youtubed around the globe about Iran are young men and women, their faces sometimes bruised, their head scarves defiantly pushed far away from their foreheads.
Do these people deserve your support and solidarity? Absolutely. But what makes them so much more special than those who have also been fighting for democracy in Guinea for years?
This is one of just a few clips that are currently floating around about this tragic event on youtube.
I think a big part of the problem is a great many people care so much they can’t even go here anymore, Jasmin. I don’t like admitting what an asshole I am about Africa, but it is very hard to drag my attention over to any more problems in Africa. It has been too horrible for too long, and, yes, that is largely the fault of first world countries, and, yes, I want that to stop, but, whoa, I can’t take it anymore. Blood wants to squirt from my eyeballs every damn time I make myself read something about it.
A quick scan down this page will give a pretty good idea about how I got here.
I’m saying that, at least in the United States, beside our general tendency not to worry too much about troubles elsewhere in the world, unless the fascist media is drumming up another war, as it is with Iran, when it’s just apocalyptically horrible news for all the decades of one’s life, it just hurts too much. People feel utterly impotent… and sustained over decades, humans shut down to it.
I had to learn to take the Israel thing and put it in the freezer for a while to keep from screaming YOU MURDERATING FUCK to every single person trying to make half an excuse for their heinous behavior, and though it’s hard to imagine anything worse, all the horrors of Africa are at least as bad. I don’t remember a time in my life when there weren’t appeals on tv to save the starving babies, and the “conflicts”, and the genocides…. It just gets worse and worse and worse.
The thing about Iran is that they DO have a vague form of Democracy that would almost certainly have grown less vague, more moderate and liberal, had there not been such intense “regime change” pressure from the West, so much filthy, evil, underhanded covert crap, and psychotically INTENSE threats of nuclear holocaust spewing out the mouths of all our politicians — including the sainted President Lying Sack of Spin Obama — like vomit all over the world stage.
So. In sum: Iran is something people don’t feel so cellularly hopeless about. The fascist media doesn’t downplay or completely ignore it. They bombard us with it so we will like it when we nuke those “evil dictators”. This is fresh meat to your average American Joe. So they can care about it, one way or the other, in public.
Besides, “democracy” is code for “fascism” now. Just as the Chinese are not communist anymore, the United States is not democratic anymore… and so much less do we mean it when we are screaming about the need for it elsewhere… let alone in Africa. Africa! Pfeh. Every single “democracy” we ever heard about, from before we were even born has come to worse abjection for the people. Plutocrats make CERTAIN of that. Always. Without exception.
People really do have to start aiming at the heart of all of these awful problems. It isn’t our racism. It isn’t our laziness. It isn’t our overfed apathy. It isn’t our brute ignorance. It’s a whole globe of suffering with one heart. The plutocrats who run everything. EVERYTHING. Everywhere. For all time.
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October 1, 2009 at 8:20 am
The war drums are deafening….
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October 1, 2009 at 9:29 am