Back to buermann, Flagrancy to Reason, and this post.
He makes this important distinction and provides valuable relief-effort links and more commentary worth your trouble accessing if you’re concerned about this situation.
“Comparisons between Rwanda and Darfur don’t seem very useful: the conflict is far more like the breakup of Yugoslavia – much like Kosovo the Darfur conflict was neglected in US-led peace negotiations and exploded violently when rebel groups attacked government installations – and the catastrophe requiring immediate global response the result of war-induced famine and disease, not machette-bearing butchers.”
I’d like to pass along another link (via Meria) that examines “mass mortality.” History (or more specifically the lack of recording and, in some cases, admitting it) indicates it will continue to be obscured and persist long after any immediate actions are taken in Darfur.
Perhaps if the Darfur crisis has inspired you as you haven’t been before you might realise the necessity of adding your voice to those calling for examination of the root causes of such horrors, recognise that these atrocities occur daily elsewhere and without such immediate respite, and hopefully apply your new-found activism towards efforts aimed at exposing these situations.
The “white-washing” of mass mortality from history is not merely holocaust denial, it is also profoundly anti-scientific and a danger to humanity in that it invites repetition – history ignored yields history repeated. Holocaust denial can never be excused. However a subtle moral distinction can be made between ignoring past events in which we had no personal complicity and denial of on-going mass mortality which can conceivably be stopped through humane consensus.
Some 20 million people in the Third World perish avoidably each year due to deprivation or malnourishment-exacerbated disease. This continuing mass mortality is effectively ignored by our prosperous and complicit First World and may eventually also become forgotten in historiography like the horrendous famines of British India. This extraordinary whitewashing of history by scholars has been described as a “process of pervasive and self-imposed denial” [4]. Racism, both crude and “intellectual”, has played a big part in European crimes against humanity throughout the world and hence in their denial [5].