Today bloggers all over the world are blogging about human rights in a campaign called Bloggers Unite. Those of us who enjoy a large measure of human rights bear some responsibility for people who are less fortunate. Bloggers can use their freedom of expression to spread the word. I wrote my main contribution, Human Rights in the History Survey, on Clio and Me, but the situation in Myanmar, also known as Burma, makes me want to write something here too.

Daniel Schorr had a point yesterday, when he suggested on NPR that there might be a case for foreign intervention in Myanmar. The UN now has a “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine on the books, so it could deliver aid to the Burmese without the permission of their government, if it could find the political backbone to do so. I don’t know anything about Burma’s domestic political situation, so I cannot say if such a potentially destabilizing action would cause more harm than good, but it seems to me that we definitely need to work with the Security Council to put further pressure on the government of Myanmar and perhaps deliver aid without its permission. But how much more time do the Burmese people have?

Further calls to use the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine to help the Burmese

• Brown seeks emergency Burma talks, BBC, 5/14/2008
• Force Burmese aid: Canada by Mike Blanchfield, National Post, 5/14/2008
• The UN’s responsibility to protect by Ivo Daalder and Paul Stares, International Herald Tribune, 5/13/2008
• The world’s responsibility to Burma by Caitlin Wall, Foreign Policy, 5/12/2008
• In Burma, a U.N. Promise Not Kept by Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post, 5/12/2008
• Ruprecht Polenz: UN müssen gegenüber Birma Stellung beziehen, Deutschlandfunk, 5/13/2008
• EU fordert mehr Druck der Uno auf Birma: Zur Not auch gegen den Willen der Junta, tageschau.de, 5/14/2008

More about the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine

• A Change to Believe In by Roger Cohen, The New York Times, 2/21/2008
• The U.S. Should Reject the U.N. “Responsibility to Protect” Doctrine by Steven Groves, The Heritage Foundation, 5/1/2008
• Responsibility to Protect Coalition
• Responsibility to Protect: Engaging Civil Society

My son, Jan, has begun putting his music online at last.fm in an album called Quasillogical. So far he’s got seven pieces up, including “String Quartet No. 1: Mvt. 1,” performed by classmates at the Tanglewood Institute last summer, and a short jazz piece, “Orsino’s Love Food,” performed by classmates at Walnut Hill. I can’t say more about the musicians, though I’m hoping Jan will start a blog himself soon and say more about each piece.

By the way, Jan’s name is pronounced like they say it in Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland. Have a listen to the second example on inogolo.

Update (5/14/2008): Jan now has a website that contains information about his music.

The Washington, DC International Film Festival has been around for twenty-two years now, but this is the first time I’ve actually attended. Usually I’m too swamped by end-of-the-semester grading. This was true of this year too, but my wife wasn’t accepting that excuse, and I’m glad. We managed to see four films this week: “Egg” [Yumurta] (Semih Kaplanoglu, Turkey/Greece, 2007), “Tricks” [Sztuczki] (Andrzej Jakimowski, Poland, 2007), “The Edge of Heaven” [Auf der anderen Seite] (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2007), and “With Your Permission” [Til Doden os Skiller] (Paprika Steen, Sweden/Denmark, 2007).

Our favorite movies were “Egg” and “Tricks,” both of which contained not only humor, but a certain magical quality, where time and stress were suspended. As much happened in the people’s faces and as in their words. In “Egg” the looks passed between a man who returned to his hometown to bury his mother and the young woman who had taken care of his mother. In “Tricks” the looks passed between a young boy and his teenage sister, as well as between the boy and the man he was sure was his father. There was also a lot of movement in “Tricks” as the boy explored and played around the train station and town, though most of these actions were part of everyday life, not a dramatic sequence of events. I enjoyed getting lost in the worlds these two films offered.

We wanted to see “The Edge of Heaven”, because we had enjoyed an extremely funny movie by the same directory called “Kebab Connection.” We knew this movie wasn’t going to be funny, but I was surprised by the unpleasant turns of fate mixed with occasional joy and life’s refusal to stop moving on. It could have been an excellent, if sometimes confusing movie, had not the distributors sent the film to the theater with the reels in the wrong order. Instead of seeing the movie’s three parts in the correct order, we saw the middle, then the beginning, then the end. If it had to happen, I suppose this was the movie where it would do the least damage, but it was still disappointing. As it was, I got the story and simple slices of life from Germany and Turkey, but much of the overarching story was lost on me. Afterwards I ended up focusing my attention not on the message, but on trying to re-imagine the film in the correct order. Still not there yet.

“With Your Permission” is a worthwhile dark comedy with an operatic emotional high point. I’m glad I saw it, but it was not in the same league with the first two magical films I saw. Nor was it intended to be, I think. It begins with a man who has a black eye from his wife. She beats him more than once and he acts increasingly strange. His boss on the ferry makes him seek help. Unusual twists in the plot with some hilarious characters follow on the way to an emotionally satisfying result.

I would also like to mention one of the many films we wanted to see but couldn’t. We had time to see “Jazz in the Diamond District” (Lindsey Christian, USA, 2007), but it was sold out and shown only once. Oh well. I hope it gets more play here in DC. It’s not in the same league as the other films I saw this week, but it is about real people who live in my city, not the politicians. It even includes a school my son once attended, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.

Times might have changed, but it seems that some didn’t get the memo. It would be nice if Reverend Jeremiah Wright would trust the next generation, embodied by Senator Barack Obama, to do things its way, instead of clinging to his own experiences and ignoring the great changes that this society has undergone. Why is he trying so hard to wreck the Obama campaign anyway? Maybe he doesn’t believe a black man can get elected and now he is in the business of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy? I dunno.

What I do know is that someone else from his earlier generation is also out of touch with what leaders like Obama are saying. Listen to Bill Moyer’s interview with Wright, and you will see Moyers feeling very much at ease with the man. Moyers (born in 1934) is a little older than Wright (born in 1941), but both experienced the Johnson administration and the Civil Rights Movement as young men. I respect their experiences and enjoy hearing their thoughts on where America is at. I also enjoyed Moyer’s conversation with Fred Harris (born in 1930), the only surviving member of the Kerner Commission, which reported on the racism underlying the social inequality that had helped set off the race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The thing about Moyers’ and Harris’ conversation that stood out most for me, however, was that it appeared on the show right after Moyer’s conversation with Mayer Cory Booker of Newark. Booker (born in 1969) did not speak the language of race and anger. Like Obama (born in 1961), he is very much about members of the community doing what they can to move forward. Watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. (You’ll also maybe want to see him on the national stage at some point.) Watch too how Moyers is almost mystified by Booker’s perspective, one Obama shares. Moyers expects to see righteous anger in Booker. He wants Booker to blame all of Newark’s woes on racism and demand assistance from the federal government, but Booker refuses to follow that path. This conversation made clear to me that a vast gulf separates my generation (I am forty-five) from Moyers’. It also made me glad that leaders such as Obama and Booker are out there.

Obama understands the differences between the experiences of his generation and those of Wright’s. Wright might too, but he seems unwilling to trust the next generation to do the right thing. Instead he is out there doing what he seems to feel is truth-telling, that is, trying to wreck the very real chances that a former member of his congregation has to become the next president. Yet if he has done his job as the pastor of his congregation, he can trust those he helped bring up in his church to do the right thing. Time to let go, Reverend Wright, and give Senator Obama a chance to do it his way.

Yet Wright seems trapped in the experiences of his own generation. He seems unable to acknowledge that Obama’s generation has undergone a different set of experiences. He also thinks in unhistorical terms. As a historian I grew dizzy listening to him jump back and forth across the centuries and millennia, as if injustices here and there were all part of the same unchanging story. Thus I cringed when he called himself a historian of religion at one point in his conversation with Moyers. He knows more than I ever will about the subject, but he was not thinking historically. He could not move across different times and imagine that each period involved different mentalities and experiences. For him it was all one story with one set of values. Thus, he seems to differ from Obama not just in generational terms, but also in terms of the philosophy of history that underlies his worldview. Obama’s major speech on race reflected a keen awareness of the passage of time and its impact on people living in it. Wright, on the other hand, is almost oblivious to it—unless he is just getting carried away by his own intemperate and impolitic rhetoric.