We have reason to worry about many forms of injustice surfacing and being exacerbated by the coronavirus and the economic downturn The power of one
● The entry for “upstander” in the Oxford English Dictionary reads: “coined in 2002 by the IrishAmerican diplomat Samantha Power”.
Speaking last week from her home in Massachusetts, Power still wonders whether she really “coined” the word. It was popularised in her 2002 book, “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, which won the Pulitzer Prize and a couple of years later brought Power to the attention of Barack Obama.
“Until a reporter called me I didn’t know the word hadn’t existed before,” she says. “This idea of bystander versus upstander had morphed into a concept in my mind … It was ‘stand by’ versus ‘stand up’, so turning it into a noun didn’t seem like some path-breaking thing.”
In her recently published memoir, The Education of an Idealist, she describes the difference between bystanders and upstanders in the context of genocide: “I began describing those who tried to prevent or otherwise ‘stand up’ against genocide as ‘upstanders’, contrasting them with bystanders. I noted that very few of us are likely to find ourselves the victims or perpetrators of genocide. But every day, almost all of us find ourselves weighing whether we can or should do something to help others. We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.”
In 2002, Power was a journalist reporting on human rights violations in some of the world’s most conflicttorn countries. Her reaction to winning the Pulitzer was mixed, she writes: “I felt a profound disconnect between my personal good fortune and the state of the world. Around the time the American occupation of Iraq began spiralling out of control, the Western media started reporting about mass atrocities in a place called Darfur.”
When she received the call about the dictionary entry, more than a decade after publication of her first book, Power was US ambassador to the United Nations and the crisis in Syria was raging. Again, she could not fully enjoy news of her literary success.
“I had this dissonance,” she says, “because it was just so clear that none of the things we — the US, the Obama administration, the UN and the broader international community — were doing were convincing the Assad regime to come to the negotiating table in good faith. It was clear that we could spend billions of dollars in humanitarian aid, as we did, or take more refugees, and it wouldn’t deal with the root cause of the problem.
“So the timing of learning about that dictionary entry inevitably bumped up against my own feelings of crushing disappointment that we weren’t able to do more for people who could have used some serious upstanding.”
In The Education of an Idealist, Power describes dozens of instances where she and others have had to choose where to stand on the bystander-upstander spectrum.
An example: In 2016 she led a delegation to hold discussions with the presidents of Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria about the human devastation and displacement being wrought by Boko Haram and mass round-ups by government militia.
As they were driving, Toussaint Birwe, 6, ran into the road and was knocked down by one of the armoured vehicles in the UN convoy. He died in hospital. Power went to see his mother in a Cameroonian refugee camp, thinking: “We had brought $40-million and the promise of high-level American attention … we had invited journalists whose coverage would call attention to the plight of Boko Haram’s victims, almost certainly bringing more money … But whatever good we managed to do, I thought, could not compensate for what had just happened. Had we not come, a six-year-old boy would still be alive.”
On a fundamental level, however, Power believes it is possible to be effective in politics without having to compromise one’s values.
“If you work in any large institution and you’re not running that institution, you’re going to be making compromises, but if you are always telling the truth, if you have built mechanisms in your own life to make sure that what you think is the truth is in fact the truth, if you have people who will tell you when they think you are drifting or rationalising too much, and if you work for someone who always wants to hear what you actually think, as I was lucky enough to do with Barack Obama, you carry your beliefs and your ethical systems with you.”
As UN ambassador, she says: “I could argue for what I believed in — on the International Criminal Court, on Guantanamo, on torture, on how to prevent sexual violence in peacekeeping, on how to build a coalition to deal with a pandemic, how to stop mass atrocities. Did it mean I got everything that I wanted? No, definitely not, but I could continue to push and was able to show a return on this advocacy.
“There’s this sense that you’re an advocate on the outside [of government] and you’re an official on the inside. But you are always an advocate … I think where it gets dangerous is when you feel you can no longer say what you believe should be done because there is some social sanction or professional sanction, and that would be true in the
Trump White House.”
Power pulls no diplomatic punches when it comes to
Donald Trump. One of the motivating factors for her latest book was Trump’s rise to power and his dismantling of many of the humanitarian bridges
Power had helped build.
In the concluding chapter she writes: “The sources of America’s strength — our diversity, our embrace of individual rights and dignity, our commitment to the rule of law, and our leadership in the world — are under severe threat … President
Trump’s contempt and bigotry, his rage and dishonesty, and his attacks on judges, journalists, minorities, and opposition voices are doing untold damage to the moral and political foundations of American democracy.”
And now the coronavirus has made things worse. “On the basis of recent and more distant history we have reason to worry about many forms of injustice surfacing and being exacerbated by the coronavirus and the economic downturn that is happening,” Power says.
It is not just greater economic injustice she fears, but “racial injustice, the temptation to blame the other — whoever your ‘other’ of the day is — for whatever pain you’re feeling, and the tendency we’ve seen throughout history of particular politicians to fan the flames to divert blame from their own failed or at least faulty handling of the pandemic, to seek to blame outsiders or foreigners or migrants or minorities within one’s own borders. There’s a lot of history that renders these fears very valid.”
However, having witnessed more misery and atrocities than any human should have to bear, Power remains an optimist.
“I guess there are two ways to look at the news — glass half-full, glass half-empty. When I go the halfempty route, and there’s plenty that can take me there, it doesn’t motivate me; it doesn’t make me want to do the kinds of things that will eventually get us to a much fuller glass, so it feels dumb, it feels counterproductive. It feels like it’s a gift to these dark forces that want us to give up on truth and fact and science and voting. So I guess it feels like an act of protest itself to just choose to see what’s working.”
As an example, she recalls the months she spent in SA nearly two decades ago, when she was commissioned by New Yorker magazine to write about the Mbeki government’s HIV/Aids denialism.
“I was interested in how such an intelligent person, who was willing to do progressive and important things in other domains, could be led so badly wrong, or how he could lead the country in such a destructive way, but I thought, that’s not going to get anybody to march, that’s just going to take you to a place you don’t want to be.
“So I turned it around into a profile of Zackie Achmat and the Treatment Action Campaign and all that they were doing to change South African politics and public health for the better.
“There are those moments in one’s life when you go, OK, I can go in this direction or that direction — which would leave someone feeling more activated? Chances are that’s the more productive way to go. When things are feeling dark, it’s very easy to lose sight of the pathway, but there is always a pathway to making constructive change.”
Sitting at her kitchen counter and talking via Zoom, Power is warm and engaging but there is also something of the lioness about her
unflinching honesty and uncompromising values. An immigrant herself, she understands the need for international communities to be able to count on each other.
“I grew up the first part of my life in Ireland and if somebody had made the judgment that everybody in Ireland was guilty of the acts of a few, my family would never have come to America,” she says.
“I think we’re all a product of our life experiences. Coming from somewhere that was not a place of tremendous hardship but was marred by conflict and significant economic challenges, and then I land in this country where my parents were able to build a life for us that gave me all these opportunities … then travelling to refugee camps and to Bosnia in my early 20s, and seeing the universality of what it means to experience the fear, the vulnerability, the loss of dignity … and then to see the damage that selfish, unfeeling and sometimes cruel leaders can do … We all have a stake in looking out for people who have been felled by that kind of leadership.
“I haven’t had those experiences but so much of what that person’s life was like before that happened to them was like my life. It’s just the luck of the draw that they ended up in a community where they were targeted in those ways.”
One of her current roles is on the advisory council of the Tent Partnership, a coalition of businesses that hire refugees and improve services and investment in refugee communities. “Having myself been given the chance to move to the US, I am committed to doing what I can to support those working to ensure that refugees and immigrants are protected and treated with respect.”
Power is a strong supporter of Joe Biden in the forthcoming US election. “Biden recognises that the fates of American people are connected to people who live elsewhere,” she says. “Trump doesn’t believe that that’s true. He really believes we can separate America’s fate from that of others. And it’s just wrong. The coronavirus pandemic is not even exhibit A but exhibit Z of how flawed and anachronistic that way of thinking is.”