On April 5th The Sundance Channel will be commemorating the Rwandan genocide with the airing of two documentaries by filmmaker Anne Aghion followed by Steven Silver’s The Last Just Man.
Tip thanks to Helena Cobban, who has been extremely busy in Virginia attending the conference Trauma and Transitional Justice in Divided Societies, where she was fortunate enough to meet Aghion.
Noam Chomsky on his blog Turning the Tide critiques A Charter to Intervene by George Monbiot.
I agree with Chomsky that Monbiot may have incorrectly assigned the Hippocratic Oath in a way it was never intended. Yet it seems to me that both men fail to emphasise, at least in the context of this exchange, the most relevant aspect of holistic healing in that no doctor of principle would choose to wait until the tumour has metastisised before taking action. The true nature of their calling is to prevent illness from advancing to the stage the only alternative is a scalpel. Any gov’t that reserves to right to intercede when disease is rampant has an overriding obligation to build and maintain diplomatic structures that facilitate first and foremost the least invasive of interventions and considers each successive measure a challenge to, if not failure of, their diagnostic abilities. At no time should any “cure” be predicated on prioritising self-serving interests above the best interests of the client in question.
Otherwise, you’re just an amoral quack who should burn your shingle.