Word: rieff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...universalist religion of humanitarianism and human rights--a faith without borders, like globalization, or like communism in the old days--has its optimists, who imagine a future of triumphant international decency, and its pessimists, who think expecting people to be nice is a mug's game. David Rieff is a pessimist--a gloomy pessimist at that. At the end of his ruthlessly lucid book A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon & Schuster; 367 pages), Rieff, with disconsolate satisfaction, quotes Alberto Navarro, former director of the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office, as saying, "Mankind is slowly...
...Rieff shares that impression. He is an author and journalist who has spent the better part of the past 10 years observing killers and humanitarians on the job in places like Bosnia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Angola. "As I write," Rieff notes, "there are 27 major armed conflicts taking place in the world; 1.2 billion people are living on less than one dollar a day; 2.4 billion people have no access to basic sanitation; and 854 million adults, 543 million of them women, are illiterate." Rieff expresses his admiration for the humanitarians--Doctors Without Borders...
After an inexplicably fatuous introduction that sounds like Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz singing "Nobody knows the carnage I've seen" (he writes, "I have, at what cost I do not yet know...done my best to rub my own nose in the horror of the world"), Rieff settles into hard, intelligent analysis...