Gimme Shelter
Charity Hoaxes
Sanitizing Psychopathy
(Africa)
[2009 Jan] Ben Affleck, Rwanda,
and Corporate Sustained Catastrophe by Keith Harmon Snow
The Gimme Shelter campaign set out to raise $23 million for the United
Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) for so-called “emergency
humanitarian assistance” to help displaced persons in the DRC, and now it has
spawned an industry unto itself.
“The Rolling Stones are very happy
to contribute to Gimme Shelter in support of Ben’s efforts to raise the
profile of the conflict in the Congo,” one UN public relations agency quotes
Mick Jagger as saying. “We all need to stand up and support the work of
organizations like UNHCR who are on the ground offering protection and working
hard to ensure the rights and wellbeing of refugees.”
Does UNHCR insure the rights and
well being of refugees? The Gimme Shelter film has been distributed
worldwide via Internet, television, mobile phones, cinemas and hotel chains.
Hollywood actorvist Mia Farrow—the
Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF—also jetted into Congo for the festivities.
Farrow made a three-day visit to the DRC in December, 2008, and then made a plug
for the corporate AID industry by “urging all armed groups in North Kivu to
allow aid organizations to provide life-saving assistance to women and
children.”
The structural violence that allows
for white actorvist jet-setters like Mia Farrow to zoom into and out of such
complex emergencies as Congo or Darfur, to make films in refugee camps or hold
press conferences in war zones, and to urge armed groups to stop fighting so
that business operations can be transacted, is never explored.
[2009 Jan] Ben Affleck, Rwanda,
and Corporate Sustained Catastrophe by Keith Harmon Snow (Part 2)
The Gimme Shelter campaign is but the latest smokescreen by the western
propaganda systems deployed to protect private profits, hidden agendas, and
white-collar war crimes in Central Africa. In this equation, the actors and
actresses themselves are being used like brand names. UNHCR has the Angelina
Jolie brand. UNICEF has the Mia Farrow brand. Save the Children and UNHCR share
the Ben Affleck brand name.
Such smokescreens immunize people
in North America, Europe, South Africa, Israel and Australia against our own
waking up. Using words like ‘humanitarian’ and ‘AID’ and ‘relief’ and
‘peacekeeping’ to misname what are otherwise profitable white operations that
are reliant purely on markets—where the commodities are people of color who have
been uprooted and displaced, physically and sexually traumatized, and murdered
en masse—is another way to justify the exploitation that proceeds both in plain
site (refugee operations, peacekeeping interventions, media productions) and
behind the scenes (extractive industries, weapons proliferation, multinational
dumping, covert operations).