Читать книгу No More Heroes - Jordan Flaherty - Страница 6

In 2015 I visited Dinétah, the homeland of the Diné (Navajo) people, spread across parts of what is also known as New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. In the last forty years an estimated ten thousand to twenty thousand Diné have been forcibly relocated off of that land by the federal government, working in collaboration with coal mining corporations. This is, of course, on top of centuries of genocide and displacement.

I met with Diné youth and elders who are fighting to maintain their land, homes, and culture, while the U.S. government is still trying to push them out. “They try to take every little thing that they can,” explains Selest Manning of Indigenous Youth for Cultural Survival, one of the organizations in the Diné community. “Basically just to get rid of us. If we don’t have our necessary things to survive, we won’t.”

Manning is still in her early twenties but already committed to the struggle. For her, resistance can be as basic as learning their language or helping elders stay on their land. She and a few other young activists organized a gathering in late 2015 for elders to pass along cultural knowledge to the next generation. “It’s not even about us anymore,” Manning told me. “It’s about the next seven generations now, and that’s why we’re here.”

In Dinétah, I also spoke with Berkley Carnine, a cisgender white woman activist who works in solidarity with the Diné community. Carnine’s views on social change were shaped in 2008, at age twenty-six, by her experience with the Anne Braden Program of the Catalyst Project, an antiracist training organization in the Bay Area. The Anne Braden Program is a four-month-long organizer development program for radical white activists. As part of her training, Carnine was placed with Generation Five, an organization whose mission is to end childhood sexual abuse in five generations. In response to many nonprofits that see their work as continuing forever, Generation Five want to be successful enough that they no longer need to exist. “They have incredible analysis of trauma, how and why that gets perpetuated, and the modes of individual and collective healing that are necessary to shift that,” Carnine told me. “They also had a pretty core analysis of colonialism and the sexual violence that has been deeply rooted in colonialism.”

Connecting personal and systemic violence sparked new understanding in Carnine. “I was understanding things that have been harmful for me and seeing how and why I couldn’t feel okay in the world, because I was benefiting from the bodily harm and violence that was being done on such a broad and massive scale against people of color.” She started asking, “What is the trauma I carry from violence against me, but also what [are] trauma and patterns of abuse that I carry because of the violence that was done for me?”

After the training ended, she moved to Arizona and was inspired by the indigenous resistance happening in an area known as Black Mesa. Carnine joined Black Mesa Indigenous Support (BMIS), a group of mostly non-indigenous activists “working in solidarity with Native people upholding their responsibility in protecting land.” Since 2012 she has lived in nearby Flagstaff. She helps to train and coordinate the efforts of non-indigenous solidarity activists who wish to stand with the Diné resistance.

Carnine sees her work as part of an overall decolonization process, resisting the structures of settler colonialism our society is based in. She says that sometimes people from our settler culture interpret decolonization as meaning “making spaces more inclusive of Indigenous people,” which she says reproduces the assumption “that settlers are the rightful inheritors of the space to begin with.” Carnine says that true decolonization requires something more radical than being inclusive.

“Decolonizing the mind is about unlearning colonial mentalities and modes of relating based in western logic, exploitation, domination, entitlement, and individualism, based in disconnection from each other and the land,” Carnine says. “Also, this means doing the work of learning our various histories and understanding how our ancestors were first colonized to become colonizers.” This analysis of the importance of challenging your own privilege before you can stand with others is key for anyone doing international solidarity.

Colonialism has historically been enforced by military violence, but today’s conquests are often masked as charity. And international aid has become the first line of engagement. We engage with the world as saviors and leave devastation behind. In most cases we do not seek to listen and follow, like Carnine, but instead to lead and dominate.

In 1843 President Andrew Jackson famously called U.S. territorial expansion “extending the area of freedom,” an ideology also known as Manifest Destiny (as in a destiny of white people to dominate the rest of the world). A half-century later, Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling would make this racist call even more explicit with his poem “White Man’s Burden”:

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go send your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child

Since Jackson’s day, U.S. foreign policy has changed in tone but not mission. We still define ourselves as rulers of the world. We’re just more polite about it. U.S. international aid is contingent on accepting our country’s moral instruction and political guidance. Our cultural assumption is that our wealth and power imbue us with moral authority. Our government provides development aid and loans through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, but that aid comes with demands for neoliberal restructuring. We donate to rebuild after disasters, but U.S. disaster relief comes with instructions to buy U.S. products. We engage with the world as helpers but only on our own terms, in ways that benefit us.

Our government gives money to fight AIDS around the world, but it has traditionally been given with restrictions against preventative measures like needle exchange programs or efforts on behalf of sex workers. In 2003 the Bush administration passed the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which required organizations receiving funding to sign the Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath (APLO). All organizations receiving PEPFAR funding had to explicitly oppose prostitution in their policies. This meant they could not even give a condom to a sex worker, much less support sex worker–led movements.

“From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the U.S. is the White Savior Industrial Complex,” wrote Teju Cole in a series of tweets later reprinted in the Atlantic. Cole was criticizing a general trend but also specifically targeting neoliberal economist Jeffrey Sachs, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and a charity called Invisible Children, best known for their KONY 2012 video. Cole went on:

 The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.

 The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

 The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

 Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.

 I deeply respect American sentimentality; the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.1

Cole notes that the savior individual is often from the United States but focused on the world, particularly Africa. The savior sees dark skin and translates that to helplessness. And saviors see their own white skin as validation of the gifts they bring.

Author Binyavanga Wainaina, in a satirical essay titled “How to Write about Africa,” identified the patterns he has seen in non-Africans writing about Africa. His words are a stinging reminder of the ways in which colonial attitudes persist. Although his essay is directed at writers, it applies well to the many Westerners who have enriched their resumes and assuaged their consciences with charity work in communities that are not their own—from remote African villages to U.S. inner cities. Via social media these young white people spice up their vacations, posting photos of themselves with the darker-skinned children they have helped as evidence of their goodwill. “Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable,” writes Wainaina, “and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.”2

At elite schools, students are recruited for the Peace Corps, which sends them after graduation to countries they know little about, to do unpaid work that takes jobs away from locals or that helps maintain corrupt or authoritarian governments.3 Sometimes this work even entails feeding information back to U.S. intelligence services.4 Outside the elites, young people are recruited by the military, often with similar claims of helping others in faraway lands.

Many of the most offensive charitable campaigns involve white people “saving” Africa, but they never mention the history of colonial exploitation that led to poverty in Africa in the first place. The classic of the entertainment industry’s “savior pop” genre is the 1984 Bob Geldof song, sung by a forgettable assemblage of eighties pop stars, “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” which also includes the tellingly offensive line “Thank God it’s them instead of you.”

The song (and Live Aid, the subsequent project it birthed) raised over $100 million for famine relief. But when journalists dug deeper, they noted that the issues leading to the famine could not be solved through charity. Massive numbers of people in Ethiopia were dying. However, the primary cause was not a lack of food or bad weather leading to reduced crops. People were starving because of the political decisions of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.

As one reporter noted at the time, “Ethiopia, which has the largest standing army in Africa, is embroiled in four internal wars . . . government troops have systematically scorched the farmlands, destroying crops and killing oxen.” Ethiopia was yet another proxy war in the global Cold War, with Russian and U.S. interests both engaged. Any aid organization working within the country had to work within this dynamic, often actively supporting government resettlement programs. “People are dying in Ethiopia because of starvation. But throwing money and food at the problem without consideration of the politics that is keeping people and food apart is inexcusable,” concluded the report.5

The Save Darfur Coalition was founded in 2004 to raise awareness of human rights abuses in the Darfur region of western Sudan and recruited heavily on college campuses. The actions or crimes of the Sudanese government are almost beside the point. As Columbia University professor and author Mahmood Mamdani points out, the focus on Darfur was used to obscure crimes committed by the United States, Israel, and U.S.-supported dictators in the region, even though these were the crimes citizens were paying for from their tax dollars. Unlike Bush administration atrocities, liberals could condemn Sudan without endangering the overall project of empire. In a debate at Columbia University, Mamdani was harshly critical of this project. “The facts that this movement gives out are completely decontextualized,” he says. “Go to a Save Darfur website. What you will find on this website is a documentation of atrocities. No history, no politics, nothing [that] tells you why there is violence. All you see is evidence of killing, raping, ethnic cleansing. I call it a pornography of violence.”

“It is meant for the good of the one who views it, not for the good of the one who is being viewed,” said Mamdani. “The focus is on naming and shaming. On punishment, on criminal justice. The demand is not reform, the demand is punishment, as if they are lusting for blood. It is, I believe, seamlessly a part of the War on Terror.”6

These campaigns disseminate a simplistic worldview that disassociates the causes from realities on the ground. Save Darfur tells us to look at this video, sign this petition, and your duty to the world is done. To Mamdani it is the opposite of intellectual engagement. “The peace movement of the 60s turned the world into a classroom; its signature activity was the teach-in,” says Mamdani. “Save Darfur has turned the world into an advertising medium.”

It relates to its constituency not as an educator, but as an advertiser. It has not created or even tried to create an informed movement but a feel good constituency. Its focus, you can see, is increasingly shifting from college students to high school kids. These are Save Darfur’s version of child soldiers. Its leaders are less educators, they are more celebrities from high-profile activities: showbiz and sports. They openly disdain education and debate.7

Mamdani says that Save Darfur represents the difference between feel-good charity and true civic engagement. It is a way to “help” others, without addressing your own problems. “Why were my students and my son’s classmates . . . being mobilized around Darfur and not around Iraq?” asks Mamdani.

And I realized that Iraq calls on Americans to respond as citizens. A student who thinks of Iraq realizes either he feels or she feels guilty, or he or she feel impotent, that there are limits to American power. When it comes to Darfur, these same students . . . do not relate to Darfuris as citizens but as victims. . . . I realized that Darfur is a charity, Iraq is a tax. In Darfur these same students can feel what they know they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors. In Darfur, the assumption is as throughout the world . . . that if they don’t make it right we must go and make it right. The assumption is that the problem is internal, the solution is external. The U.S. has to learn to live in the world, not to occupy it.8

At the time, Darfur was often used as a rhetorical weapon against the growing pro-Palestine student movement. “Why are you focusing on Israel?” went the refrain. “Why not focus on the Muslims committing genocide against Africans?” And while real solutions to war and displacement are complicated and involve challenging systemic issues like the legacy of colonialism, Save Darfur offered a comforting, simplistic solution that did not involve challenging the privilege of U.S. citizens. Not coincidentally, the coalition was sponsored by pro-Israeli organizations (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and American Jewish World Service) at a time of increasing criticism of the Bush administration’s role in the Middle East and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The campaign provided a Muslim villain for easy condemnation—perfect for an audience that might be uncomfortable with the style of the Bush administration’s demonization of Islam but still accepting a basic distrust of Muslims.

In 2009 the Christian Science Monitor reported that “activist campaigns mischaracterized and sensationalized” casualty rates in Darfur. “What they tended to leave out was that the majority of the casualties occurred as a result of disease and malnutrition” rather than more directly from war. As a result of activist efforts like Save Darfur, hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. funding shifted from humanitarian aid (which would have been more useful for combating disease and malnutrition) to military “peacekeeping.” The newspaper concluded, “Had the Darfur activists not advocated for a reallocation of funds, more lives would probably have been saved.”9

Many from inside humanitarian institutions argue that even in the best cases their intervention is flawed. “The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances, and there’s no apolitical way of responding to them—no way to act without having a political effect,” writes journalist and author Philip Gourevitch. “Humanitarianism relieves the warring parties of many of the burdens (administrative and financial) of waging war, diminishing the demands of governing while fighting, cutting the cost of sustaining casualties, and supplying the food, medicine, and logistical support that keep armies going. At its worst—as the Red Cross demonstrated during the Second World War, when the organization offered its services at Nazi death camps, while maintaining absolute confidentiality about the atrocities it was privy to—impartiality in the face of atrocity can be indistinguishable from complicity.10

In 2003, the year before Save Darfur was founded, three young white Christian missionaries in their early twenties traveled from San Diego to Uganda in search of a documentary project. They were part of a Christian movement called the Emerging Church. Jason Russell, one of the founders, had first traveled to Africa in 2001, as a missionary in Kenya. After this trip his mission became to embody the gospel by “ending genocide.”

What the missionaries found inspired them to not only make a film but also start a charity that would distribute it, mostly to church groups. In 2006 they founded Invisible Children, a nonprofit aimed at raising awareness of war crimes in Uganda, through distributing their film of the same name.

After years of distributing Invisible Children, on March 5, 2012, they released a new video, KONY 2012. Across the United States thousands of people, many of them youth affiliated with church groups, tweeted the link to the video. Within five days the video had over one hundred million views. That hundred million would be a decent number for a new music video by Beyoncé or the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards, but for a half-hour slickly produced but ponderously paced and simplistic infomercial, it was a phenomenon, the most viral video ever at the time.

The goal was vague but simple: make Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony famous, and then some nation’s military (that of the United States or perhaps an African nation) would respond to the publicity and make his capture a priority, and his reign of terror would come to an end.

In terms of digital outreach, it was a phenomenal success. But as Joshua Keating wrote at the time in Foreign Policy, in words that apply to most activist projects launched by saviors, “What are the consequences of unleashing so many exuberant activists armed with so few facts?”11

Criticism of the video came hard and fast, much of it from Ugandans and other Africans. “This is another video where I see an outsider trying to be a hero rescuing African children,” wrote Ugandan blogger Rosebell Kagumire. “We have seen these stories a lot in Ethiopia, celebrities coming in Somalia, you know, it does not end the problem.” She went on:

How do you tell the story of Africans? It’s much more important what the story is, actually, because if you are showing me as voiceless, as hopeless . . . you shouldn’t be telling my story if you don’t believe that I also have the power to change what is going on. And this video seems to say that the power lies in America, and it does not lie with my government, it does not lie with local initiatives on the ground, that aspect is lacking. . . . It is furthering that narrative about Africans: totally unable to help themselves and needing outside help all the time.12

Ironically these saviors had declared war on a man who is the end product of previous generations of white saviors’ interventions in Africa. It was the white missionaries who brought the Christianity to Africa that Joseph Kony credited with inspiring him. He even named one of his children George Bush.

While Invisible Children never led to the capture of Kony, it added support to further U.S. military engagement in Africa—the kind of collateral damage saviors often bring. They organized thousands of young people to lobby Congress for more U.S. military engagement—seventeen hundred visited congressional offices in one day, and the next day a bill calling for more U.S. “involvement” in the region had over one hundred sponsors.13

Obama appointee Samantha Power’s first public address after she became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was to the Fourth Estate Leadership Summit, an event organized by Invisible Children. Writer Vijay Prashad described Power’s military interventionist foreign policy as “KONY-ism,” adding that “Power praised the group for its ‘new kind of activism’ whose ‘army of civilian activists’ had pushed the Obama administration to tougher action against Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and whose example had helped Kenyans and Russians and most of all Arabs, who ‘barely knew democracy as recently as three years ago,’ to use the Internet to hold governments accountable.”14

Under the strain of international attention, Invisible Children burned out in spectacular fashion. Ten days after KONY 2012 launched, cofounder Jason Russell had a public mental breakdown, ranting naked on the street corner outside his San Diego home, yelling at cars. “My mind couldn’t stop thinking about the future,” he said later. “I literally thought I was responsible for the future of humanity.”15

In 2014 the organization began the process of shutting down. “Even though we’re announcing this before the capture of Joseph Kony,” said CEO Ben Keesey, “the Invisible Children story is one of gigantic progress and huge impact in people’s lives.”16

Their defenders say that Invisible Children and Save Darfur led to more engagement with the problems of the world. But these campaigns do not lend themselves to long-term engagement precisely because, by their nature, they are all about the quick fix. The campaigns encourage emotional reactions instead of critical thinking, and band-aids instead of lasting solutions to systemic problems. They also reinforce old stereotypes about western superiority and about Africa’s need for external salvation, by calling for white rescuers.

Western colonial engagement with Africa, even with the best of intentions, rarely ends well. Western Christians in Uganda, perhaps inspired by Invisible Children, have also successfully lobbied for some of the world’s most homophobic laws, such as the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014, which called for the death penalty for gays and lesbians.

This is not an issue unique to Invisible Children—you can see it in the fund-raising and membership campaigns of most nonprofits. You are asked to donate and perhaps to sign something but nothing more. However noble and uncomplicated it may seem to offer help to those in need, the kind of help, and how it is delivered, matters. As Harvard law professor David Kennedy has said, “Humanitarianism tempts us to hubris, to an idolatry about our intentions and routines, to the conviction that we know more than we do about what justice can be.”17

How many people who joined Save Darfur or Invisible Children were left with the idea that all they needed to do was sign a petition or forward a video? How many were later left with the idea that change is impossible, noting that despite the mass involvement, atrocities are still committed in Darfur, and Joseph Kony is still free?

The “white people know best” activism of KONY 2012 can also be seen in the voluntourism industry, a range of businesses that have sprung up to help make the privileged feel useful by rebranding vacations as generosity. “On the Indonesian island of Bali, for example, a burgeoning orphanage industry exists to cater to voluntourists who want to help children,” writes Rafia Zakaria.

Children leave home and move to an orphanage because tourists, who visit the island a couple of times a year, are willing to pay for their education.

These children essentially work as orphans because their parents cannot afford to send them to school. Instead of helping parents cater to the needs of their children, the tourist demand for orphans to sponsor creates an industry that works to make children available for foreigners who wish to help. When the external help dries up, these pretend orphans are forced to beg on the streets for food and money in order to attract orphan tourism.18

The staff of voluntourism companies are either cynically aware of these issues from the beginning, or they soon become aware. “To be honest, I have never really felt like I truly helped anyone,” writes Alexia Nestora, a former employee of the voluntourism company I-to-I, who blogs as Voluntourism Gal.19 In almost every case, it would be better to stay at home and send money instead.

The individualist responses of voluntourists or Invisible Children make for easy targets. However, the same issues come up in the larger, more professional organizations like the Red Cross. The relief industry is filled with people, however well meaning, who are seeking easy solutions to systemic problems.

As Tracy Kidder wrote after the 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti, “At least 10,000 private organizations perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, yet it remains one of the world’s poorest countries.”20 And in the midst of this poverty, the aid workers always seem to live in the most comfort. One could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the more aid groups are active in a country, the worse things become. At the very least, they do not seem to work with the aim of realizing a world in which they are no longer necessary.

Haiti today is the perfect illustration of the twin legacies of colonialism and neoliberalism. The Nation magazine described it as “the NGO Republic of Haiti,” a country where nongovernmental organizations have far more wealth and power than the government.

Ever since the Haitian people freed themselves from slavery and French rule in 1791–1804, they have faced economic exploitation from colonial powers. In 1825 French King Charles X demanded that Haiti pay an “independence debt” equal to ten times the country’s GDP, a debt they spent over one hundred years repaying. This was followed by U.S. support for brutal dictatorships in the twentieth century, International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans that demanded neoliberal restructuring of the economy, and “gifts” from funds like the Clinton Foundation, which encouraged more sweatshops.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department worked hard to overturn a 2009 law passed by the Haitian Parliament that raised the minimum wage to sixty-two cents per hour. According to State Department documents released by Wikileaks, Clinton’s State Department worked with USAID and private corporations like Levis and Hanes to cut that wage in half for garment workers.21 Both Bill Clinton (representing the Clinton Foundation) and Hillary Clinton (still at the State Department) later pushed for an industrial park in which most workers took home less than two dollars a day.22

The 2010 Haiti earthquake could have been an opportunity for wealthy nations to right historical wrongs. Instead it was a chance for further profit and exploitation by business and aid groups. “Between 2005 and 2009, aid in Haiti ranged from approximately 113 to 130 percent of the total revenue available to the government,” wrote Kathie Klarreich and Linda Polman. “After the earthquake, the flow of relief and recovery aid significantly exceeded—by more than a factor of four—the government’s internal revenue.”

“Our priorities are not the same as theirs, but theirs are executed. In theory, NGOs come with something, but not with what the population needs,” Joseph Philippe, a Haitian government worker told the Nation. “We have no choice but to accept what they bring us. But then, when it doesn’t work and it’s not what we need, the state is blamed, not the NGOs.”23

The representative of one of the largest UN organizations in Haiti was asked by Nation reporters whether the local government of Haiti has ever told them what to spend donor money on. He replied anonymously, “Never. They are not in the position, because they are financially dependent. Recently, there was a government press conference. There was nothing ‘government’ about it; we organized it and told them what to say.”24

In a scathing June 2015 report, Propublica wrote that the Red Cross had raised half a billion dollars for Haiti relief, and all that the money had produced was six houses. Progress by the Red Cross was held back by a reliance on U.S. employees who not only did not have the expertise to do more, they could not even speak the language. “Going to meetings with the community when you don’t speak the language is not productive,” complained one Haitian development professional.25 But people from the United States always see themselves as experts with something to bring, even if they cannot communicate with the people they are claiming to help.

Somali poet Ali Dhux beautifully described the way aid recipients view aid workers:

A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.

He works more tirelessly than even you,

But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.26

In other words, when your job is international aid, you have an interest in your job continuing forever and a ­disincentive to pursue systemic solutions. The United Nations, USAID, Red Cross, and Invisible Children are very different organizations, and the people working there come from a wide range of backgrounds but share (let’s assume) altruistic motivations. This is not about any one organization or any one incident or any individual doing that work. Any aid that is not accountable to the community it seeks to serve, and does not address the fundamental systemic issues behind the problems it claims to address, will only reinforce an unjust system.

Another popular innovation from philanthropist-saviors is the microloan. This capitalist innovation was supposed to make money available for poor communities, erase gender disparities, and encourage small local businesses to thrive. Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for inventing the modern microloan.

But studies show that these loans are not as effective in the streets as they are in the minds of people in corporate boardrooms and university economics departments.27 Instead of heralding a novel way of addressing systemic poverty, microloans are an innovation that give the rich a new way to exploit the very poor, ensnaring communities in a debt economy where none existed before, making more of the world subject to the dictates and violence of finance capital, and making the life of the very poor even more hopeless. In just a few months in 2012, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, more than two hundred victims of a microloan scheme committed suicide. An Associated Press report on the deaths reported, “Originally developed as a nonprofit effort to lift society’s most downtrodden, microfinance has increasingly become a for-profit enterprise that serves investors as well as the poor.”28

So what is the answer? If it’s not troops on the ground or humanitarian aid or loans, how can we help people in need? The answer is to support organizations based in the affected area that are accountable to the people they serve. This takes more time than giving to Red Cross or counting on USAID to step in, but it is more likely to achieve results. If we are not challenging our colonial relationships to the so-called developing world, all our charitable efforts just make for a kinder colonialism.

The Palestine liberation struggle offers a political case study of the problems of international aid. While Palestine and Haiti are very different, both are examples of anti­colonial rebellions crushed by the false generosity of aid. Billions of dollars have been spent on aid to Palestine since the mid-1990s. Much of that money came from donors, like the United States and Saudi Arabia, which are politically opposed to an independent Palestinian state. In fact, the United States at the same time sent tens of billions of dollars in direct military aid to the Israeli state. Palestinians say that their problems come from the root cause of occupation. Massive amounts of money are spent with the goal of not addressing this root cause, and in fact pacifying Palestinians to get them to accept Israeli occupation, and the result is an endless continuation of the bloody and devastating status quo.

In 2009 in Gaza City, I met Dr. Haidar Eid, an associate professor of postcolonial and postmodern literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and a leader of the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. As we drove through a city still recovering from massacres and bombings during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008–2009, Eid told me he saw many Westerners who come to Palestine to help but bring their own assumptions of what that help should look like. “This is my problem with white liberal ideology,” he says, “that kind of postmodern politics that does not take into consideration the perspective of the other. It talks about the other; it claims to be recognizing the other, in order to assimilate the other. When the other comes up with something that is completely different from what the Western self is defending, the other becomes terrorist. The other becomes unacceptable.” In other words, if you do not want what we are offering, there must be something wrong with you.

Another manifestation of the “othering” that Eid critiques is that even progressives from the United States often judge the resistance of other cultures through their own lens. For example, they are hesitant to see anticolonial movements as allies if they are “too Muslim.” Eid is critical of Hamas but also sees them as the legitimate elected representative of the Palestinian people and deserving of praise for their principled resistance against Israeli occupation. Many progressives in the United States cannot see this complexity. Postcolonial theorist Edward Said used the term “orientalism” to describe the patronizing attitude that sees Eastern cultures as fundamentally uncivilized and unchanging.

Eid says that aid has been tethered to an endless wait for a frozen peace process to deliver. This “peace industry” taints the entire Palestinian liberation movement, especially the political parties. “Billions of dollars have been poured into the discourse of the two-state solution. The formation of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestine Satellite Channel. TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, telling people ‘two-state, two-state.’”

Eid sees the two-state solution as fundamentally racist and impractical. Racist because it shapes borders based on “exclusive ethno-religious identities.” Impractical because, like the tribal Bantustan system of the apartheid South African government, it does not offer true independence to the Palestinian people. Eid told me that the Palestinian revolutionary parties, like the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, initially resisted this accommodation for just this reason, but were later bought out by international aid, especially through the Oslo peace process, which Eid (quoting Edward Said) says birthed a new “peace industry.”

“From 1993 up until now, what [has] happened is that their revolutionary consciousness has been pacified,” says Eid.

Eid says that Palestinians do not need aid; they need allies to stand in principled solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. He sees hope in the international grassroots movement, following the lead of Palestinian civil society, which has called for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. Eid, who earned his PhD studying in South Africa, sees the movement that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa as key for ending colonial occupation in Palestine. “In the mid eighties, more than 75 percent of white South Africans voted for the apartheid system,” he explains.

And everyone was saying it is impossible for Blacks and whites to live together in South Africa, and that the overwhelming majority of whites do not want to live with Blacks. But the same percentage, more than 75 percent of white South Africans, voted for the end of apartheid in 1994. Now doesn’t that raise a question? What was the reason behind that type of change? I would go back to the BDS campaign. When every single white South African felt ostracized whenever visiting a foreign country. Nobody wanted to buy South African products. Nobody wanted to shake hands with white South Africans. And that is why, in 1994, they understood that there has got to be an end to this. When Israelis start feeling the same thing, Israelis will be forced to look at the world and say, “What do you exactly want?”

Even human rights NGOs sometimes fall into the trap of not listening to the needs of those they claim to support. Activists with Al Qaws (“The Rainbow”), an LGBTQ organization based in Palestine, are critical of international LGBT human rights organizations, saying they do not see the larger issue of occupation. “‘Gay rights’ has become the new global measure of whether different nation states and peoples are progressive or not,” says Haneen Maikey of Al Qaws. “It’s a colonized/colonizer dynamic, this savior complex where LGBTQ activists go to ‘save’ people in other places. In order for me to convince you to be saved, I need to convince you to hate your community. This disconnects people from their own communities and societies.”

Rights as an approach is not something I personally and al Qaws as a collective relate to. . . . And what does it even mean to demand gay rights—from whom? From the occupier? Or the occupier arm in the West Bank? What does that mean, to get your gay rights without getting your human rights, or dignity, or basic food, work, basic conditions of being a human being? We think in Palestinian society, and without a broader critique, “gay rights” is an unethical approach. . . . The focus on a single issue (homophobia) is tempting, because it is easier than thinking about the complexity of our experiences and how our bodies and sexualities are used and abused by different layers of power.29

For members of Al Qaws, the idea of separating homo­phobia from other systems of oppression is part of the colonial project, and furthers pinkwashing, the use of LGBTQ rights to “cleanse” from discussion other forms of oppression. “You cannot have queer liberation while apartheid, patriarchy, capitalism and other oppressions exist,” writes Al Qaws member Ghaith Hilal. “It’s important to target the connections of these oppressive forces. Furthermore, pinkwashing is a strategy used by the Brand Israel campaign to garner the support of queers in other parts of the world. It is simply an attempt to make the Zionist project more appealing to queer people. This is another iteration of a familiar and toxic colonial fantasy—that the colonizer can provide something important and necessary that the colonized cannot possibly provide for themselves.”30

What leads people to give up on change? Is it the slow pace required by asking questions and listening to communities most affected? Or are people driven out of social movements because they are fundamentally disempowered by the inevitable failures of shortsighted campaigns?

If the energy that went into KONY 2012 went toward pressuring a government that the United States has more influence with, like the Israeli state, this could have incredible influence. Through the international BDS movement, the Israeli government would be forced into real negotiations that could bring lasting peace. By focusing on an individual rather than a state or systemic change, Invisible Children set their goals far too low, yet still out of reach.

Whether it’s aid for rebuilding in Haiti, human rights advocacy in Palestine, or hunting warlords in Africa, there is ample reason to be suspicious of gifts from wealthier nations. If the aid does not address the structural issues that create injustice, then it only creates a more stable status quo, locking injustice into place.

The U.S. position in the world—in fact, the very existence of the United States—comes from a history of colonial domination. If we want to make amends for that history, kindness is not enough. We need to stop thinking we can “rescue” the world from problems we helped create. Haiti has no money because the United States, France, and other colonial powers stole it. When we buy a twenty-dollar shirt that a Haitian was paid pennies to make, we are continuing to steal from them. When a U.S. aid worker in Haiti is paid a salary equivalent to that of fifty Haitians, we are continuing to steal from them. This is not aid. Aid is reparations. Relief is overthrowing the system of colonial domination, and eliminating debt. Support is standing in solidarity with Haitians and Palestinians and the Diné, all of whom are organizing and fighting and leading their own struggles for an end to colonialism.

Through her struggles around decolonization with Black Mesa Indigenous Support, Berkley Carnine sees many examples of both principled solidarity and the savior mentality, which she defines as “an internalized superiority added to a history of settler colonialism and genocide.”

Carnine often sees a pattern among non-Indigenous volunteers. They are confronted with the deep injustice of Native American genocide and don’t know how to deal with those feelings. That produces guilt and shame, which then trigger another set of emotions. “I’m feeling bad, and I want to be able to take some action and alleviate that bad feeling. So then the goal becomes not alleviating suffering for others but alleviating one’s own suffering.”

Carnine grapples with how to fight for change without putting herself at the center. What does it mean to not be from a community but still be accountable to their struggle? She seeks the answer through principled, accountable work as an ally. She has not sought to be a leader or a spokesperson but to help make space for indigenous activists to lead themselves, by taking on tasks like herding sheep that might otherwise take up their time.

“Decolonization is about mutual self-determination between people groups without the colonial state as mediator,” adds Carnine in a document written with fellow BMIS organizer Liza Minno Bloom. Among the other steps they advise for activists seeking decolonization:

 Know whose land you’re on and “acknowledge that you are on occupied land when you say where you are or where you are from.”

 Shift the entitlement inherent in settler experience by asking permission to be on the land.

 Know where your water, heat, electricity and other resources come from.

 Incorporate an analysis of settler colonialism into all of your organizing work, even if you are not working explicitly on Indigenous solidarity.31

These examples are a good baseline for any kind of solidarity work.