The two distinguished guests
Professor Michael W. Charney and Dr Katherine Southwick (see their bios here) dialogued with the host Maung Zarni, on a wide rage of
real-world-relevant issues in the first of a new dialogue series “Decolonizing
Minds and Democratising Knowledge”.
WATCH ON FORSEA YOUTUBE CHANNEL
They touched on the following
thematic issues:
1) the complicity of silence of
the Burma Studies academics in the Rohingya genocide commissioned by the State
of Myanmar (including state and non-state actors such as the country’s criminal
military, NLD party and Rakhine nationalists); based on their professional
interests (for instance, entry visa, residency permits, projects, field works,
access to the ruling party and military, etc) these international academics
have not only maintained deafening silence but they have attempted to
marginalize and silence a handful of scholars who stand up and speak out
against the slow-burning genocide (see https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wilj/vol23/iss3/8/ );
2) the two colonial and
post-colonial regimes – British and American – which established
inter-generationally maintained “Truth Regimes” – NOT for the sake of Truths,
but in pursuit of their respective interests and agendas, economically,
ideologically, strategically, geopolitically, and culturally, through the uses
of pliant and pliable state-centred academics and scholars, trained in the
Anglo-American academies;
3) successive generations of
students, academics and researchers schooled in these colonial-and
post-colonial (neo-colonial, really) knowledge systems, have come to serve,
wittingly or not, as proxies for the Western colonial regimes, both before and
after the dissolution of formal empires at the end of WWII; these witting and
unwitting proxies have also been operating among their own populations under
post-colonial, “nationalist” regimes, in various types of symbioses (for
instance, technocrats, strategic advisers, peace-builders, developmental
economist, human rights commissioners, legal minds, and so on)
4) the pure-blood-based view (that is, Fascist or
Nazi-like) of immutable “races” and “ethnicities” and the resultant historical
narratives that exclude or erase certain groups typically form part of
genocidal processes: they enable identity-based policies of exclusion,
discrimination, dehumanization and ultimately destruction;
5) Protecting different groups from atrocities and genocide
requires us to look beyond the technical scope of the Genocide Convention of
1948, which is itself a politically compromised inter-state treaty;
6)
the institutions – laws, courts, codes – need to be created within
nation-states that can prevent genocides, but their creation needs to be seen
dialectically vis-a-vis shifts in consciousness for better (that is, decolonized minds);
and finally
7) genocides are a clearest
indictment of the failure of Human or World Civilization, as
such, that is, unless “civilization” is defined as “a pile of human corpses” as
Rabindranath Tagore had rightly done; the United Nations (or the post-Holocaust
system of political states), has let GENOCIDES to happen over and over and over
again, since the closure of Auschwitz on 27 Jan 1945.
Maung Zarni
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