Dear Vice Magazine: How Could You Do This?

When I was sixteen, Iris Chang gave the graduation address at my high school, from which she had graduated the decade before. It remains, to this day, one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen.

Statue of Iris Chang at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial

I wish that I could find a video or transcript of the speech, because it is difficult to do justice to it without access to the text, but she exhorted us to resist the forces of cynicism and disappointment, and told us that we had the power to change the world, and somehow managed to make it seem more like a road map than a collection of graduation-day platitudes.

At the time, Iris was only thirty, but she had already published two books, including The Rape of Nanking, a meticulously-researched account of Japanese atrocities during their conquest of that city during World War II. At sixteen, I was not yet planning to go into the human rights field, but I remember watching her give that speech, and thinking that if I grew up to be someone like her, who did the things that she did, that would be something to be proud of.

Many times, since then, I have thought about her speech when I have felt tempted to be the kind of person who just gets on with life and doesn’t bother reaching for something better. At those times, I have remembered seeing her, up on that stage, telling a room of fascinated children that we would have moments when cynicism and surrender seemed like attractive options, but that she believed we would be strong enough to overcome them. And then I have decided that cynicism can wait for another day.

I am not the only one she affected that way. Author Paula Kamen once wrote in Salon about turning “Iris Chang” into a verb, meaning to think big. She encouraged her university students to “Iris Chang it”: “Just decide what you want and go get it. To the point of being naive.”

This isn’t a funny post, because six years after she gave that graduation speech, Iris Chang killed herself.

And then this week, for reasons beyond my understanding, Vice Magazine decided that the way to remember her, and the personal costs she bore in her attempts to stand in solidarity with the victims of horrific crimes, was to publish a photograph of a fashion model reenacting the scene of her suicide. Which was accompanied by a caption explaining where to buy the outfit the model was wearing. And which was part of a multi-page spread called “Last Words,” which also contained stylishly accessorized reenactments of the suicides of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sanmao, and Elise Cowen, and of one of Dorothy Parker’s unsuccessful suicide attempts.

Iris had a son, who was two years old when she died, and is only eleven now. She had a husband, and parents, all of whom are still alive. If seeing the photo was enough to make me burst into tears, I can only imagine how her family must have felt when they saw it. (I fervently hope that they did not). There is no question in my mind that Vice did her family a disservice when they decided to publish it.

But the magazine’s decision to publish this spread was also a disservice to its readers. Iris and the other writers depicted in the spread have expanded our world through their work, and made it a more interesting, vital, and just place. Vice could have depicted them in a way that honored that work, and encouraged their readers to seek it out, thereby making their own worlds bigger and more exciting. Instead, it depicted them as nothing but a group of high-gloss deaths, good for selling clothes and not much more. There was nothing about that photograph that would lead someone to, say, read Iris Chang’s Atlantic piece on the “Oskar Schindler of China.” How unfortunate that is. I cannot understand why anyone in the writing business would want to so undermine the value of extraordinary writing, but apparently Vice did.

Vice has removed the article from their website, and replaced it with an unimpressive apology of the “sorry you felt offended” variety. I hope that they will do more than that to make this right.

Troubling Numbers

This is a weeks-overdue post to recommend that you check out Mike Spagat’s piece on the myth that “economic sanctions aimed at Saddam Hussein and his regime killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children in the 1990s and early 2000s.”

Spagat explains how, despite the retraction of the results by the original researcher, mistaken findings on Iraqi child mortality were a prominently cited justification for the war in Iraq. He also makes the worrying point that the seemingly-permanent place in the discourse occupied by these erroneous estimates is part of a larger phenomenon wherein shocking statistics become dogma, regardless of their accuracy.

I’m filing this one under “reasons to keep fretting about the relationship between evidence, advocacy, and policy-making.”

p.s. For another riff on the same theme, check out the NYTimes’s “Revisiting the ‘Crack Babies’ Epidemic That Was Not.”

WTF Friday, 5/31/2013

I’ve been reading Carla Del Ponte’s memoir, “Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity,” and happened upon some surprising information about former war crimes ambassador David Scheffer. From “Appendix C – Dramatis Personae” on p. 403:

 Don’t remember anything like that coming up in Scheffer’s autobiography

WTF Friday, 5/24/2013

This week’s entry is a rare WTF inspired by awesomeness: The Onion’s “9 Photos Of Jennifer Lawrence That Will Make You Reassess The Scope Of The 1986 Vienna Convention On The Law Of Treaties Between States And International Organizations.”

What’s the connection between Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence and an obscure, not-even-in-force, multilateral treaty? Unclear. Who on The Onion staff is even aware of the VCLTIO, and why? Also unclear. Why do they refer to the ICJ’s 1996 Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons as an advisory “paper”? Mystifying. And what’s their problem with Article 66, anyway?

We may never know.

Data! Beautiful Data!

Jumping on the international justice blogger bandwagon, I concur with Mark and KJH that you should all go read Daniel McLaughlin’s new report for the Leitner Center: “International Criminal Tribunals: A Visual Overview.”

If you’ve ever wondered “how much money in reparations has been paid out to atrocity victims worldwide” or “how many ICTR indictees are still at large” or “can the Special Tribunal for Lebanon conduct trials in absentia,” then this is the resource for you.

It’s also the resource for me, combining my love of brightly colored charts and international criminal law. For instance:

Seriously, go check it out.

WTF Friday, 5/17/2013

This just in: Witches in Swaziland can no longer fly their broomsticks at altitudes higher than 150 meters.

This news comes courtesy of a spokesman for the country’s Civil Aviation Authority, explaining the aviation regulations in the aftermath of the arrest of a detective accused of “operating a toy helicopter equipped with a video camera.”

Local media seem unsure whether the prohibition was meant seriously, although one report points out that while Swazi witches are known to employ brooms to “fling potions,” they do not use them for transport.

In any event, witches: you have been warned.

Greetings from Guatemala!

Hola from the Land of Eternal Spring/Land of Eternal Shenanigans in Genocide Trials. That’s right – I’m in Guatemala.

Yesterday morning I went to observe the Rios Montt/Rodriguez Sanchez genocide trial. (Why, what do you do on your vacation?)

The highlights:

  • Rios Montt’s entrance. He shuffled into the room, looked around, and then walked over to the prosecution table and shook hands with each lawyer, one by one, before waving and blowing them a kiss. It was so bizarre that I still can’t quite believe I saw it, but I’m reasonably certain that I did. I was too far away to hear their conversation, but Xeni Jardin was closer, and she said that it was “mostly small talk.”
  • My successful achievement of a nearly 1/1 correlation between “hours spent on an airplane” to “minutes of trial observed.” After Judge Barrios called the hearing to order, she explained that Rios Montt’s attorney, Francisco Garcia Gudiel, had called her this morning to complain that he was suffering from “problemas de salud,” (health problems) and would therefore not be attending the hearing. Without him, it could not proceed. (The judge’s decision to temporarily eject Garcia Gudiel at the beginning of the trial has proven to be a problem for the tribunal. So, unsurprisingly, she seemed unwilling to take any risks, even though the lawyer’s sudden “illness” is highly suspect.) I think the whole thing took about six minutes, from “all rise” to the dismissal for the day.
  • The dress code: jeans and linen for the human rights lawyers. Suits for prosecutors and defense lawyers, and a couple of nervous-looking students in the audience. (I wore my usual NYC work clothes, which led to me being mistaken for one of the aforementioned nervous students. Oh well.) Spectacular traditional dress for the Ixil women, but button-downs and slacks for the Ixil men. And one extremely snappy red skirt suit for Judge Barrios.

WTF Friday, 5/3/2013

Do you have an interest in human rights and / or climate change? Are you “able to provide a resume”? Do you have 30,000 extra dollars lying around? Do you love the idea of working for free so much that you want to pay to do it? And are you tired of pesky internship selection processes in which applicants are unfairly pitted against each other on the basis of their actual qualifications for the position (and / or nepotism)?

Well, good news.

The RFK Center has the auction item for you. It’s a 6 week internship with the NGO Committee on Human Rights. All you have to do is fork over five figures plus $9.95 shipping and handling. (Apparently they’re going to mail the internship to you? I don’t know.)

Bidding’s currently at $26,000.

WTF Friday, 4/26/2013

Exciting follow-up to last week’s WTF Friday. One of the three men deported from Saudi Arabia for excessive handsomeness is apparently this gentleman:

His name is Omar Borkan Al Gala and according to his Facebook page, he is a photographer, actor, and poet.

You know, I don’t agree with the Saudi government about much, but it’s possible he is excessively handsome.