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Safe Side Off the Fence

EfeCengiz

The documentary is missing because the documentary is as safe as the fence it mocks in its title.
In the beginning we are asked to bear witness to the construction and use of the most devastation weapon of indiscriminate death the world has ever seen, and all the harm the construction of such a tool, yet its construction and its use is justified near instantaneously by repeating the same old propaganda.
In continuation, we are asked to bear witness to the continuous production of similar weapons and the devastation caused by the mishandling of the waste that accumulated in their production, yet why such a production took place is not only left unquestioned, but simple hints of cold war propaganda is left in their places for safekeeping.
In the end, we are asked to bear witness to a sombre victory, same spectres of patriotism and nation-of-God watching over our shoulder, yet how the pitiful situation of being forced to celebrate even such a small victory is never explored.
To sum up, we are shown people, good people, who struggle against the symptoms of a disease, yet this disease itself never named, nor challenged. It could not have been challenged, as it would force a complete change in their discourse.

If we sincerely would like to critique how the bodies of these workers were made disposable; used, harmed, dislocated and discharged as deemed necessary; if we wish to explore this topic as the necropolitical issue it is, we cannot stop halfway through. This inability to stop chasing connections, relationalities wherever it fits our ideology, is not a call for “objectivism”, it’s a call to respect the term of Anthropocene with all its rhizomatic connections.

An investigation of nuclear waste, that does not factor the use of its product, the socio-political effects of said product, and the historical conditions that even led to the possibility of producing it in such ways and such quantities, are of no use for us.  It cannot penetrate the barrier of capitalist realism. If it could, at least a single mention of workers unions would have existed. Instead, it has confessionals by atomic weapons lawyers whose heart goes out to these workers.
An America that refuse to face up to the fact that it is what it is by the great necropolitical project it led for hundreds of years, I struggle to accumulate sympathy for, what I can easily accumulate is rage however, which this documentary is missing..
Wish the documentary would have at least attempted to say something radical, instead of praising these disposable bodies for being patriotic about it. There are lives who never had false fences built as idols for safety, the collective idols of old America, the patriotic nation under God were built upon their broken bodies, what would you ask of them?

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joerene.aviles

Miriam Ticktin is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at The New School For Social Research in New York City. Her research focuses on "what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity" and more recently looks at humanitarianism at various levels. For emergency response her work focuses more on response done for humanitarian aid and displaced peoples. 

http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty/?id=4d54-6379-4e44-4d35

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joerene.aviles

Brian Concannon (executive director) and Beatrice Lindstrom (lawyer) of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a nonprofit in Boston that fights for human rights on the island

Carrie Kahn is an international correspondent for NPR.

President Michel Martelly was the president of Haiti (from May 2011 to February 2016). 

Ban Ki-moon; the 8th and current Secretary General of the United Nations.

Jake Johnston is a researcher "of the Washington-based Center for Economic Policy and Research"

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joerene.aviles

The article describes the situation in post-Katrina New Orleans as one where trauma is constantly happening and more work is going into emergency response than recovery. Instead of construction workers, social workers and the like, the military was sent by the government for aid after Katrina. 

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joerene.aviles

1. There is also a need for further assessment of the impact of violence, both on facilities and organizations, and also on populations served. These knowledge gaps have serious implications for the way the drivers of violence are understood and, by extension, the ability of organizations operating in complex security environments ability to effectively manage the security of their staff and facilities in order to deliver healthcare.

2. Within medical anthropology and sociology, violence is seen a social phenomenon that is culturally structured and interpreted, and the human body can serve as a site of contestation, where various types of power relations play out at individual-, community-, state- and global-level levels.

3. In the same vein, training among health workers and patients in complex security about the importance of reporting attacks and different reporting fora may reduce the number of incidents that go unreported and the accuracy and completeness of those which are reported.

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joerene.aviles

The main argument was that there are "biosocial phenomena" or "structural violence" that lead to the tendency for certain diseases or lack of treatment in populations, particularly those in poverty. Their three major findings were: they can make structural interventions to "decrease the extent to which social inequities become embodied as health inequities", proximal interventions can reduce premature morbidity and mortality, and structural interventions "can have an enormous impact on outcomes.

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joerene.aviles

Stephen Collier is an Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School in NYC. He has a Ph.D in Anthropology from U.C. Berkeley and has conducted research in Russia, Georgia, and the U.S. His expertise is in political systems (post-socialism and neoliberalism), infrastructure, social welfare, and contemporary security. His knowledge in infrastructure and politics gives him a more top-down perspective of emergency response; Collier can assist with creation of organizations and groups for large scale emergencies that would require international collaboration. 

Andrew Lakoff is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, and is an anthropologist of science and medicine. He research is in globalization processes, human science, and the implications of biomedical technology. He has a similar position in emergency response as Collier, where he sees global, political, and technological interactions that would effect how we prepare and respond to international emergencies. He's written essays and other books on emergency preparedness such as "The Risks of Preparedness: Mutant Bird Flu" and "Disaster & the Politics of Intervention".