Sunday, August 04, 2002

What good is Amnesty International?

In the Sziget festival there was this Amnesty International tent with all these pictures of tortured people and children and stuff. I felt really bad for them. Then I realized that no matter how much we support Amnesty International there is no way that all that will stop. Amnesty International only has a say in what happens in civilized countries. The only people who look at the loads of crappy and poorly thought out reports that they put together are people in civilized countries who do not need an organization like AI to tell them that torturing innocent slave children is bad. The people who do need to hear it are the people in these crazy Fucked up countries like the Sudan where this stuff actually goes on. However the AI reports are not really widely distributed in these countries, and AI has no real teeth, neither does anyone else have the ability to stop this.

So in short, people who do not sit around indiscriminately killing people are innudated with AI propoganda about how bad they are because of these tiny infractions that they commit (think lack of Korans in Guantanamo Bay), and their jobs of fighting terrorists and criminals are made that much harder, while the people int he Sudan can just keep on doing what they are doing because AI has little access to then. So what is the point of having this organization in the first place? To keep America democratic? We need AI for that?