Kristof’s asinine smarm: the Soft Side of Imperialism redux

For everyone now suffering from Mr Smarm’s documentary – which I’ve only heard about – here’s The Soft Side of Imperialism again. When being irritated or outraged in a way that feels visceral and personal it is useful to be reminded of the structural issues propping up liberalism, and Kristof is an egregious example of apologist for US imperialism.

Numerous people have written to express particular outrage that Kristof’s Facebook game should be like FarmVille, with women taking the place of farm animals, to be looked after. Others wrote to say the word smarmy was just right to describe him. Rescue Industry magnate supreme, fond of bragging about his multiple Pulitzer Prizes – which are circulated amongst members of the same old white-boys’ club eternally – this unattractive man is also a mediocre writer. Is the movie version any good?

Kristof and the Rescue Industry:
The Soft Side of Imperialism

by LAURA AGUSTÍN, 25 January 2012, Counterpunch

Reasons abound to be turned off by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. He is too pleased with himself and demonstrates no capacity for self-reflection. He is too earnest. He claims to be in the vanguard of journalism because he tweets. He is said to be Doing Something about human suffering while the rest of us don’t care; he is smarmy. He doesn’t write particularly well. But most important, he is an apologist for a soft form of imperialism.

He poses for photos with the wretched of the earth and Hollywood celebrities in the same breath, and they are a perfect fit. Here he is squatting and grinning at black children, or trying to balance a basket on his head, and there he is with his arm over Mia Farrow’s shoulder in the desert. Here he is beaming down at obedient-looking Cambodian girls, or smiling broadly beside a dour, unclothed black man with a spear, whilst there he is with Ashton and Demi, Brad and Angelina, George Clooney. He professes humility, but his approach to journalistic advocacy makes himself a celebrity. He is the news story: Kristof is visiting, Kristof is doing something.

In interviews, he refers to the need to protect his humanitarian image, and he got one Pulitzer Prize because he “gave voice to the voiceless”. Can there be a more presumptuous claim? Educated at both Harvard and Oxford, he nevertheless appears ignorant of critiques of Empire and grassroots women’s movements alike. Instead, Kristof purports to speak for girls and women and then shows us how grateful they are. His Wikipedia entry reads like hagiography.

Keen to imply that he’s down with youth and hep to the jive, he lamely told one interviewer that “All of us in the news business are wondering what the future is going to be.” He is now venturing into the world of online games, the ones with a so-called moral conscience, like Darfur is Dying, in which players are invited to “Help stop the crisis in Darfur” by identifying with refugee characters and seeing how difficult their lives are. This experience, it is presumed, will teach players about suffering, but it could just as well make refugees seem like small brown toys for people to play with and then close that tab when they get bored. Moral conscience is a flexible term anyway: One click away from Darfur is Dying is a game aimed at helping the Pentagon improve their weapons.

Kristof says his game will be a Facebook app like FarmVille: “You’ll have a village, and in order to nurture this village, you’ll have to look after the women and girls in the village.” The paternalism couldn’t be clearer, and to show it’s all not just a game (because there’s actual money involved), schools and refugee camps get funds if you play well. A nice philanthropic touch.

Welcome to the Rescue Industry, where characters like Kristof get a free pass to act out fun imperialist interventions masked as humanitarianism. No longer claiming openly to carry the White Man’s Burden, rescuers nonetheless embrace the spectacle of themselves rushing in to save miserable victims, whether from famine, flood or the wrong kind of sex. Hollywood westerns lived off the image of white Europeans as civilizing force for decades, depicting the slaughter of redskins in the name of freedom. Their own freedom, that is, in the foundational American myth that settlers were courageous, ingenious, hard-working white men who risked everything and fought a revolution in the name of religious and political liberty.

Odd then, that so many Americans are blind when it comes to what they call humanitarianism, blissfully conscience-free about interfering in other countries’ affairs in order to impose their own way of life and moral standards. The Rescue Industry that has grown up in the past decade around US policy on human trafficking shows how imperialism can work in softer, more palatable ways than military intervention. Relying on a belief in social evolution, development and modernization as objective truths, contemporary rescuers, like John Stuart Mill 150 years ago, consider themselves free, self-governing individuals born in the most civilized lands and therefore entitled to rule people in more backward ones. (Mill required benevolence, but imperialists always claim to have the interests of the conquered at heart.) Here begins colonialism, the day-to-day imposition of value systems from outside, the permanent maintenance of the upper hand. Here is where the Rescue Industry finds its niche; here is where Kristof ingenuously refers to “changing culture”, smugly certain that his own is superior.

In the formation of the 21st-century anti-trafficking movement, a morally convenient exception is made, as it was made for military actions in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The exception says This Time It’s Different. This time we have to go in. We have to step up and take the lead, show what real democracy is. In the name of freedom, of course. In the case of trafficking the exception says: We have achieved Equality. We abolished slavery, we had a civil-rights movement and a women’s liberation movement too and now everything is fine here.

With justification firmly in place, the US Rescue Industry imposes itself on the rest of the world through policies against prostitution, on the one hand, and against trafficking, on the other. In their book Half the Sky, Kristof and co-author Sheryl WuDunn liken the emancipation of women to the abolition of slavery, but his own actions –brothel raids, a game teaching players to protect village women – reflect only paternalism.

It may be easier to get away with this approach now than it was when W.T. Stead of London’s Pall Mall Gazette bought a young girl in 1885 to prove the existence of child prostitution. This event set off a panic that evil traders were systematically snatching young girls and carrying them to the continent – a fear that was disproved, although Stead was prosecuted and imprisoned for abduction.

In contrast, in 2004 when Kristof bought two young Cambodians out of a brothel, he took his cameraman to catch one girl’s weepy homecoming. A year later, revisiting the brothel and finding her back, Kristof again filmed a heartwarming reunion, this time between him and the girl. Presuming that being bought out by him was the best chance she could ever get, Kristof now reverted to a journalistic tone, citing hiv-infection rates and this girl’s probable death within a decade. She was not hiv-positive, but he felt fine about stigmatizing her anyway.

Then last November, Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid in the company of ex-slave Somaly Mam. In “One Brothel Raid at a Time” he describes the excitement:

Riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence; it feels like something out of the Wild West. (New York Times)

There’s the cavalry moment again. A few days later Kristof boasted that six more brothels had closed as a result of the tweeted raid. Focused on out-of-work pimps, he failed to ask the most fundamental question: Where did the women inside those brothels go? The closures made them instantly vulnerable to trafficking, the very scenario Kristof would save them from.

Some Rescuers evoke the Christian mission directly, like Gary Haugen of the International Justice Mission, which accompanies police in raids on brothels. Or like Luis CdeBaca, the US Ambassador-at-Large for Trafficking, who unselfconsciously aligns himself with William Wilberforce, the evangelical Christian rescuers claim ended slavery – as though slaves and freed and escaped slaves had nothing to do with it. CdeBaca talks about the contemporary mission to save slaves as a responsibility uniquely belonging to Britain and the US.

Kristof positions himself as liberal Everyman, middle-class husband and father, rational journalist, transparent advocate for the underdog. But he likes what he calls the law-enforcement model to end slavery, showing no curiosity about police behavior toward victims during frightening raids. Ignoring reports of the negative effects these operations have on women, and the 19th-century model of moral regeneration forced on them after being rescued, he concentrates on a single well-funded program for his photo-opps, the one showing obedient-looking girls.

Kristof also fails to criticize US blackmail tactics. Issuing an annual report card to the world, the US Office on Trafficking presumes to judge, on evidence produced during investigations whose methodology has never been explained, each country according to its efforts to combat human trafficking. Reprisals follow – loss of aid – for countries not toeing the line. Kristof is an apologist for this manipulative policy.

To criticize the Rescue Industry is not to say that slavery, undocumented migration, human smuggling, trafficking and labor exploitation do not exist or involve egregious injustices. Yet Kristof supporters object to any critique with At least he is Doing Something. What are you doing to stop child rape? and so on. This sort of attempt to deflect all criticism is a hallmark of colonialism, which invokes class and race as reasons for clubbing together against savagery and terrorism. The Rescue Industry, like the war on terrorism, relies on an image of the barbaric Other.

It is important not to take at face value claims to be Helping, Saving or Rescuing just because people say that is what they are doing and feel emotional about it. Like many unreflective father figures, Kristof sees himself as fully benevolent. Claiming to give voice to the voiceless, he does not actually let them speak.

Instead, as we say nowadays, it’s all about Kristof: his experience, terror, angst, confusion, desire. Did anyone rescued in his recent brothel raid want to be saved like that, with the consequences that came afterwards, whatever they were? That is what we do not know and will not find out from Kristof.

Discussing Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe said Conrad used Africa

as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril… The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. (Things Fall Apart)

The latest sahib in colonialism’s dismal parade, Kristof is the Rescue Industry at its well-intentioned worst.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

15 thoughts on “Kristof’s asinine smarm: the Soft Side of Imperialism redux

  1. not

    Are you one of those pedophiles who abuse and molest young girls and women? You sure sound like one. Hope you get arrested soon!

    Reply
      1. Iamcuriousblue

        Unfortunately, this is typical “go to” rhetoric among anti-sex industry types. “You must be a pedophile”, “you’re a rapist”, etc. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard that from some idiot. Social conservatives, both traditional and feminist, have built their entire movement on sexual demonization.

        Oh, and “Not” – pedophiles don’t “molest women”, by definition. I know “women and girls” go hand in hand in the abolitionist imagination, but you might be surprised to know that more than a few females are actually adults.

        Reply
    1. Thaddeus Blanchette

      Dear Not,

      I’ll keep it short and simple.

      You’re such a fuzzyminded fuckwit that you think pedophiles abuse and molest women.

      You obviously don’t understand what a pedophile is, you cretinous mouthbreather.

      Why, then, should any sane person who is concerned about trafficking or the sexual abuse of children give a wet rat’s ass about you or your opinion?

      Reply
  2. nada

    “NOT” is SOooooooo NOT.
    Thank you for your work, Laura- I don’t know how you keep going while facing so much opposition. I just look at the state of things and feel hopeless.

    Reply
  3. Gabe S.

    I also had a hard time watching the PBS documentary. Aside from my general uneasiness when men talk to women about “how hard it must be fore you,” media is a tricky thing. On one hand I think it’s a good thing that anyone (Kristof or Agustín) is telling that story, as skewed as the perspective may be. On the other hand… all the things you wrote about.

    The key is promoting discussion, which posts like this prove it accomplished, in some small way. What I really wish is that writers like Kristof were more explicit in their framing of the debate and that consumers of media would see documentaries as jumping boards for larger conversations, as opposed to passive media to be consumed and filed away as unbending truth.

    There are bigger issues at play about how we (the west, white people, media spectators, the internet) can participate in helping the people who want to be helped (from poverty, sex work, disease, low wages, you-name-it) without falling into centuries of our own unpleasant cultural muck in the process. In Epstein’s “The Invisible Cure,” she talks about the gross misuse of AIDS funding spent in eastern Africa creating western style hospitals, overhead, travel, and buying state of the art equipment – when the best care was given in homes and small scale centers with budget-limited control measures. It’s a similar problem faced with trafficking. How to help without some kind of culture translation? And who’s translation to trust?

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      The conflict in this area is not casual – there are not two sets of equivalent evidence to weigh. One side relies on ideology, the other on a mish-mash of pragmatism, research evidence and the logic of diversity. It’s not simply a question of whose ‘cultural translation’ to trust, alas.

      Reply
  4. CH

    Learning much from these critiques. I would like to see some critique of WuDunn, who co-wrote the book with Kristoff, and also wonder about critiques of some of the on-the-ground women activists with whom Kristof collaborates in developing countries. Are their roles/positions in these efforts also problematic is similar/different ways?

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      WuDunn is a banker, doesn’t do the travel or raiding or PR or seek the limelight as Kristof does. Sometimes in the book her voice comes through but I also have little sense of her.

      There are thousands and thousands of groups one can call ‘grassroots women’ all over the world. The need for funding makes all groups compete with each other in national and international settings. Someone wanting to find ones suited to colonialist ideology, who will act appreciative and submissive, has no difficulty. Thus alliances are formed between a few cherry-picked groups on the ground and humanitarian magnates like Kristof, who pumps up the image of the chosen to make them seem the most significant in the world.

      Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      It’s safe to say he realises nothing about what happens after a raid. I objected to his non-realisation that closing brothels means destabilisation in the local industry, with workers likely to get employment with people they don’t know or trust – in other words, opportunities for exploitation and the very trafficking he fears in the first place. There’s no understanding of the system at work by this kind of saviour.

      Reply
  5. Simon Collery

    Thank you for writing the article and for your response. I shouldn’t be facetious about someone as dangerous as Krystof and I am glad that someone is publicly criticizing him, as he deserves to be criticized. It wouldn’t take a lot of thinking to see that what he is doing is mere posturing, but I don’t expect him to do any thinking. Keep up the good work.

    Reply

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