By Jan Oberg
March 5, 2018
About 1:50 into this video comment I suggest that we should think of elevating the idea of #MeToo to the international level and apply it when a country is abusing another country against its will – even to the extent that we can justifiably talk about rape and death.
Apart from the obvious similarity – the lack of consent and the violence and humiliation it is expressive of – there is also the issue of proportions:
People – i.e. entertainment celebrities in particular – engage very much (and rightly so) in the present #MeToo campaign – and many also in the issue of domestic gun violence (again, rightly so) but the same people hardly every have a critical word to say about their own government raping entire countries, violating international law, killing thousands of people, building bases and selling the arms that have only one result apart from profit: to make a real conflict-resolution process virtually impossible.
And while I am at it: The pervasive American puritanism was unbearable bizarre already during the Clinton year.
He started the catastrophic expansion of NATO and bombed in Afghanistan, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia and the US Embassy helped with the huge ethnic cleansing of Serbs out of Croatia in 1995 in Croatia – while his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright said she thought it was OK to have killed 500.000 innocent people in Iraq by sanction – the only reason impeachment of the President was talked seriously about was his relationship with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.
It’s good that the #MeToo tells us to look up. But there are more ways of looking up. One is to look from the individual to the global.
Or is that too much to ask in an “atomizing” cultural time – Zeitgeist – where everything is “me”, “I” and “myself” and social bonds are decaying my the day?
