In praise of UNESCO
Apr. 4th, 2007 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm not sure what you've done this past week, but it's probably not much in the grand scheme of things. This is because, like me, you're just a puny individual rather than, say, an international educational, scientific and cultural organization with an impressively stylish Cold War headquarters in Paris presided over by a Japanese diplomat.
I was lucky enough to get a guided tour of the UNESCO building a couple of years ago from my friend Akane, who works there. Later Star Forever Karin Komoto tried to get a job there, abandoning her lucrative career with a top-flight accountancy firm. It seems to be a bit of a Japanese niche, a dream. "I'll go to Paris and I'll work for UNESCO." My Japanese friends certainly feel strongly about its benign aim to protect precious sites and aid international peace and harmony through education.
Watching a documentary about the painter Balthus yesterday, I was impressed by the poise of his wife Setsuko, and wondered what she'd been up to since his death in 2001. So I googled her, and discovered that the Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, as she's formally known, is now doing a lot of UNESCO work. She's helping children, promoting cultural exchange, and being their Artist for Peace. And peace is really what you feel when you sit in the Tadao Ando-designed Peace Chapel at the UNESCO headquarters.
Whatever you've done this week, it's a drop in the ocean compared to what UNESCO has done. It's hosted an "Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention" in New Delhi to safeguard and regenerate oral traditions, belief systems, folklore, traditional knowledge systems and art forms. It's debating whether Langkawi in Malaysia should become a Unesco geopark. It's funding community radio stations in India's tribal belts and giving the marginalised weaver communities of Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh a community multimedia centre. It's declared ten Nigerian artists "living human treasures". It's formed an "innovative teachers forum" with Microsoft. It's praised the United Arab Emirates' commitment to protecting its heritage. It's expressed concern over rapidly expanding tourism to Machu Picchu, where a new bridge threatens the famous Peruvian ruins. It's awarded the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize postuhmously to Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and human rights campaigner who was killed last October. It's holding a meeting in Iran to discuss whether the Sivand Dam in Bolaghi Gorge threatens the nearby Pasargadae World Heritage site. It's called for the release of a BBC journalist abducted in the Gaza Strip three weeks ago, deploring the proliferation of hostage-taking involving media professionals.
I must say, I'm impressed by UNESCO's attempts to be a sort of global good fairy. I'm not kidding, it's wonderful. Although some have been quick to declare the UN a toothless propaganda stooge, a pretty Picasso dove fluttering a few moral metres above the jets and weapons of Anglo-Hegemony World, UNESCO often turns out to be the best stick to beat Angrael with -- the line it sets for others, then fails to reach itself.
On March 26th I built on the conclusions of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions to endorse, with UNESCO, a "point to point" model of culture which would counterbalance the emerging imperial model of an Anglo-dominated "hub and spoke" world. It's precisely the Anglo "hub" which is currently posing the biggest threat to exactly the sort of diversity UNESCO exists to champion.
And although UNESCO was founded in 1945 by the Anglo victors of World War II to “build peace in the minds of men” (its constitution states that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed”), the organization pissed Britain and America off royally when the nations swung rightwards in the 1980s.
Whereas Thatcher and Reagan were redefining "freedom" as capitalism and "freedom of the press" as the right of moguls like Rupert Murdoch to say what they liked, UNESCO's MacBride Report saw freedom as democratization of the media and egalitarian access to information. Quite different -- the opposite, in fact. In 1984 and 1985 first Reagan and then Thatcher withdrew from "communist" UNESCO and stopped paying their membership fees. Singapore ("Disneyland with the death penalty", as William Gibson called it) followed suit. Britain only rejoined in 1997, and the US in 2003. Singapore still hasn't rejoined.
My only reservation is this. UNESCO does things like adopt "The Seville Statement on Violence", a 1989 policy document which refutes the notion that humans are somehow biologically predisposed to organised violence. It makes Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola an "Artist for Peace". Yet I'm unable to find any of Setsuko's paintings online. What I find is her husband's work, which is rooted in his reading of the Marquis de Sade and Bataille and made up of "images charged with eroticism and barely contained violence", as it says on the video box of the film I just rented about him. In the documentary, Balthus himself attributes the latent violence in his paintings to Scottish ancestors (entirely fictitious ones, it turns out), whom he describes as a particularly bloodthirsty clan of Celts.
Now, is this contrast between violence and peace a contradiction -- a choice to believe Balthus or his widow about human nature, but not both -- or a dialectic whose contradictions we should accept? Violence and peace, husband and wife, eroticism and menace, young and old -- they can co-exist. Nobody is being a hypocrite just because this dialectic doesn't resolve. The useful dove we call UNESCO was, after all, born at the end of a war; its idealistic paperwork wafted in on the hot white breeze of two nuclear explosions. No wonder its halls throng with Japanese.
I was lucky enough to get a guided tour of the UNESCO building a couple of years ago from my friend Akane, who works there. Later Star Forever Karin Komoto tried to get a job there, abandoning her lucrative career with a top-flight accountancy firm. It seems to be a bit of a Japanese niche, a dream. "I'll go to Paris and I'll work for UNESCO." My Japanese friends certainly feel strongly about its benign aim to protect precious sites and aid international peace and harmony through education.
Watching a documentary about the painter Balthus yesterday, I was impressed by the poise of his wife Setsuko, and wondered what she'd been up to since his death in 2001. So I googled her, and discovered that the Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, as she's formally known, is now doing a lot of UNESCO work. She's helping children, promoting cultural exchange, and being their Artist for Peace. And peace is really what you feel when you sit in the Tadao Ando-designed Peace Chapel at the UNESCO headquarters.
Whatever you've done this week, it's a drop in the ocean compared to what UNESCO has done. It's hosted an "Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention" in New Delhi to safeguard and regenerate oral traditions, belief systems, folklore, traditional knowledge systems and art forms. It's debating whether Langkawi in Malaysia should become a Unesco geopark. It's funding community radio stations in India's tribal belts and giving the marginalised weaver communities of Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh a community multimedia centre. It's declared ten Nigerian artists "living human treasures". It's formed an "innovative teachers forum" with Microsoft. It's praised the United Arab Emirates' commitment to protecting its heritage. It's expressed concern over rapidly expanding tourism to Machu Picchu, where a new bridge threatens the famous Peruvian ruins. It's awarded the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize postuhmously to Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and human rights campaigner who was killed last October. It's holding a meeting in Iran to discuss whether the Sivand Dam in Bolaghi Gorge threatens the nearby Pasargadae World Heritage site. It's called for the release of a BBC journalist abducted in the Gaza Strip three weeks ago, deploring the proliferation of hostage-taking involving media professionals.
I must say, I'm impressed by UNESCO's attempts to be a sort of global good fairy. I'm not kidding, it's wonderful. Although some have been quick to declare the UN a toothless propaganda stooge, a pretty Picasso dove fluttering a few moral metres above the jets and weapons of Anglo-Hegemony World, UNESCO often turns out to be the best stick to beat Angrael with -- the line it sets for others, then fails to reach itself.
On March 26th I built on the conclusions of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions to endorse, with UNESCO, a "point to point" model of culture which would counterbalance the emerging imperial model of an Anglo-dominated "hub and spoke" world. It's precisely the Anglo "hub" which is currently posing the biggest threat to exactly the sort of diversity UNESCO exists to champion.
And although UNESCO was founded in 1945 by the Anglo victors of World War II to “build peace in the minds of men” (its constitution states that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed”), the organization pissed Britain and America off royally when the nations swung rightwards in the 1980s.
Whereas Thatcher and Reagan were redefining "freedom" as capitalism and "freedom of the press" as the right of moguls like Rupert Murdoch to say what they liked, UNESCO's MacBride Report saw freedom as democratization of the media and egalitarian access to information. Quite different -- the opposite, in fact. In 1984 and 1985 first Reagan and then Thatcher withdrew from "communist" UNESCO and stopped paying their membership fees. Singapore ("Disneyland with the death penalty", as William Gibson called it) followed suit. Britain only rejoined in 1997, and the US in 2003. Singapore still hasn't rejoined.
My only reservation is this. UNESCO does things like adopt "The Seville Statement on Violence", a 1989 policy document which refutes the notion that humans are somehow biologically predisposed to organised violence. It makes Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola an "Artist for Peace". Yet I'm unable to find any of Setsuko's paintings online. What I find is her husband's work, which is rooted in his reading of the Marquis de Sade and Bataille and made up of "images charged with eroticism and barely contained violence", as it says on the video box of the film I just rented about him. In the documentary, Balthus himself attributes the latent violence in his paintings to Scottish ancestors (entirely fictitious ones, it turns out), whom he describes as a particularly bloodthirsty clan of Celts.
Now, is this contrast between violence and peace a contradiction -- a choice to believe Balthus or his widow about human nature, but not both -- or a dialectic whose contradictions we should accept? Violence and peace, husband and wife, eroticism and menace, young and old -- they can co-exist. Nobody is being a hypocrite just because this dialectic doesn't resolve. The useful dove we call UNESCO was, after all, born at the end of a war; its idealistic paperwork wafted in on the hot white breeze of two nuclear explosions. No wonder its halls throng with Japanese.