So in my blogging around the b’sphere, I have been battling memes. I am a meme killer! Woo hoo!
Latest is over the immigration issue, Spitzer, the Dems, the third rail, all that jazz. The meme that makes me most murderous is the notion “What is it about illegal you don’t understand?” All of a sudden seemingly liberal bloggers have become law & order Wyatt Earp’s, deciding that the rule of law is far more important than silly feel-good stuff like human rights and human rights abuses. It appears to me that if someone has broken a law, it is then very easy to hide behind that thought even when the enforcement of that law entails violence and punishments far outweighing the crime.
But this essay is not about the immigration issue. One of the biggest frustrations in blogging about what is called “social justice” is there are so many injustices? Which do I choose? New Orleans? Burma? Mexico? Darfur? Gaza?
I choose not to choose. I choose to deny any lines between these injustices. For they all have the same root cause.
I’d like to introduce everyone (or re-introduce if you already know her) to Helen Bamber. She is a remarkable woman with a remarkable story.
From a New York Times review by Sara Ivy of Helen’s biography, “The Good Listener,” by Neil Belton:
Helen Bamber grew up in London during World War II in an embittered Jewish refugee family and was scarcely an adult when she traveled as a relief worker to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just after the end of the war. Struck by the physical and spiritual wreckage she witnessed among the survivors of Nazi persecution, she decided to spend her life helping to rehabilitate torture victims by listening to their stories and advocating against similar abuses.
In his first book, ”The Good Listener,” Neil Belton suggests that for Bamber this work has fulfilled a moral imperative; ignoring human rights violations means being an acomplice in such behavior. It also means invalidating the victim’s experience of suffering and hampering his ability to recover.
Belton has written a comprehensive, thoughtful biography of a woman who possesses a near compulsion to challenge the brutality that those in power sometimes inflict. He includes wrenching recent examples of torture of political prisoners in Chile, South Africa and Israel. He proposes that systematic mental and physical abuses are neither impulsive nor merely sadistic; in this century, torture has become a ”bureaucratic industry’…
I read this book years ago and have recently thought again of Helen Bamber. She was a complex person, did not consider herself a “good” person. Her father read Mein Kampf to her when she was little, he was a fearful and bitter man. Her mother compensated by being overly frivolous and indulgent in socializing.
It has been a difficult time lately for some of us. Not only have we discovered that political symbolism trumps equal protection under the law and the importance of coalition building, at least when it comes to protections for people like us, we get told in the back pages that we really need to shut up about our concerns, that speaking up for ourselves is the crassest form of selfishness.