Samantha Power’s Worldview

August 11, 2013

This is United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power's Twitter header picture:

White men in uniform energetically unloading a UN helicopter while a downtrodden black civilian lingers in the background.

What does this tell us about her worldview?

(h/t Jon Schwarz)

Posted by b on August 11, 2013 at 14:10 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Nice PR picture, but here’s a video on the UN’s use of private security hired by the UN.
http://therealnews.com/t2/component/hwdvideoshare/viewvideo/76723

Posted by: ben | Aug 11 2013 14:36 utc | 1

A humanitarian with a guillotine.

Posted by: heath | Aug 11 2013 14:39 utc | 2

dark threats white knights

Posted by: anon | Aug 11 2013 16:05 utc | 3

Tea Party Racists detest Obama because he’s “black.” I can’t stand him because he’s a white colonialist at heart.

Posted by: steve-o | Aug 11 2013 16:13 utc | 4

whats in the box, bullits or BBQ?

Posted by: too many wtf | Aug 11 2013 16:50 utc | 5

As a Yankee,my sox are red white and blue;is she a commie?(snark)Is listing your favorite sports team security related?Sounds typically myopic and childish,but what else is new from America?
Another twit in a position of power and so it goes as we(US) continue to become international jokes,but our lethality doesn’t invoke smiles.

Posted by: dahoit | Aug 11 2013 17:38 utc | 6

It’s her responsibility to protect that leads her to impose herself on others.

Posted by: Fernando | Aug 11 2013 17:55 utc | 7

Interesting photo taking into account that most UN forces are actually quite non-white. The white meannie men (and women) seems to be outsourcing the hard tasks to non-whites.
From wikipedia:
As of June 2013, 114 countries were contributing a total 91,216 military observers, police, and troops to United Nations Peacekeeping Operations. Pakistan contributed the highest number, with 8,230 personnel, followed by Bangladesh (7,986), India (7,878), Ethiopia (6,502), Rwanda (4,686), Nigeria (4,684), Nepal (4,495), Jordan (3,374), Ghana (2,859), and Egypt ((2,750).[11] In January 2004, BBC described the highly disciplined Bangladeshi UN Force as The Cream of UN Peacekeepers.

Posted by: ThePaper | Aug 11 2013 18:42 utc | 8

It will be interesting to see if Samantha Power’s position as UN ambassador will be in conflict with her position as a “human rights defender.”
One example: the reported massacre of 450 Kurdish civilians in the town of Tal Abyad on August 5th. Al Nusra allegedly executed 120 children and 330 women and elderly men.
http://kurdistantribune.com/2013/defend-kurds-syria-from-massacre-ethnic-cleansing/
http://rt.com/news/syria-kurds-massacre-lavrov-132/
Sergei Lavrov has called for official UN condemnation, so the Russian government has presumably confirmed this massacre.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/07/317633/russia-urges-un-censure-of-syria-carnage/
The Obama administration will undoubtedly seek official UN confirmation of these executions. If verified, acknowledging the massacre will be problematic: the administration will have to abandon the moral high ground and admit the consequences of arming (albeit indirectly) an Al Qaeda-affiliated organization.

Posted by: Harper Langston | Aug 11 2013 19:56 utc | 9

Knights in White Satin, “responsibility-2-Project”,… “Samantha, Samantha, she’s our gal; if she can’t do it AFRICOM will.
It’s surreal, like everything now, unreal. Even the name Ambassador Power, is like a name out of Terry Southern’s Doctor Strangelove. It names the name, resonates like General Ripper and Major Bat Guano.
And I think every so often it’s good to reread Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize Lecture:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

[…]

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

Posted by: Copeland | Aug 11 2013 19:56 utc | 10

Film director Stone dismisses U.S. A-bomb claim as ‘tremendous lie’
by Mai Iida
Kyodo
Aug 8, 2013
SHARE
HIROSHIMA – American film director Oliver Stone has challenged the commonly held U.S. perception that the 1945 atomic bombing of Japan ended World War II — saving a huge number of American lives in the process — as “a tremendous lie” during his visit to Hiroshima through Wednesday.
“It’s easy to look at the issue simply that Americans dropped the bomb to end World War II because Japanese militarists would not give up . . . (but) that would be the surface explanation,” Stone, 66, said as part of his Japan trip to attend a series of peace events commemorating the 68th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“But those people who looked deeper will find out there is a much more cynical explanation,” he said, noting the Soviet Union’s war on Japan, begun on Aug. 9, was “a strong factor” behind Tokyo’s surrender six days later.
“The United States was able to get away with it because we were the winners. But as a result, we lost our moral compass,” he said. “We were able to use nuclear threats against Vietnam, against the Soviet Union, against whoever we had to get our win.”
Stone, who went to the Vietnam War as “a young man, as a believer I was fighting communism,” said that for decades he used to take as a given the justification for the atomic bombings.
But his view changed after he started research with U.S. historian Peter Kuznick, with whom he produced a 10-part documentary series and companion book, “The Untold History of the United States.”
Coming to Hiroshima for the first time, Stone visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, met atomic bomb survivors and attended the city’s memorial ceremony held Tuesday morning near ground zero at exactly at the same moment when the atomic bomb code-named Little Boy was dropped by a U.S. B-29 bomber 68 years ago.
The blast, fire and radiation from the world’s first atomic bombing devastated the city, with the temperature on the ground at the hypocenter rising as high as 3,000 to 4,000 degrees.
Referring to the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan as behaviors to “trash” those countries, he said the origins of “American empire” come from the atomic bombing and criticized his country for having “no sense of history.”
“We never think about the implications of what we do,” he said, noting the importance of remembering the lessons of history to prevent the recurrence of tragedy.
“When you come to Hiroshima, if you can remember or try to remember, that’s the first step in keeping your humanity,” he said. “The battle of memory against forgetting is the battle of civilization against inhumanity.”
Kuznick, who is traveling with Stone, said he greatly admires the hibakusha, as “they have turned their anger, bitterness and hatefulness into something positive” and “led the fighting against nuclear weapons.”
Kuznick described as a “fundamental contradiction” the fact that Japan has been opposed to atomic weapons while relying on the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/08/08/national/film-director-stone-dismisses-u-s-a-bomb-claim-as-tremendous-lie/

Posted by: brian | Aug 11 2013 21:50 utc | 11

I think her mini-debate with Scahill is incredibly revealing.
Like an impossibly narrow-minded and unemphatic monster, she seems unable to even comprehend that some people might not think the USA is a shining beacon of democracy and freedom. And that’s the most disgusting part.
Just once I’d like to see an American official who can simply acknowledge the fact – even if they don’t accept it – that the US has a bad reputation and has exhibited considerable double-standards in our foreign policy. Instead, you get people who seem to see the rest of the world’s weariness regarding US foreign policy and who thinks the US doesn’t ALWAYS fight for goodness and light are just unreasonable radicals.
I think I said it before: you’d have to be crazy to want that job, which presumably that’s why she got it.
The mini-debate:
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/6/5/must_watch_2008_debate_un_ambassador_nominee_samantha_power_vs_jeremy_scahill

Posted by: guest77 | Aug 11 2013 22:50 utc | 12

“Interesting photo taking into account that most UN forces are actually quite non-white.”
And in fact, the photo is of Chilean personnel, under a Brazilian commander.

Posted by: JustPlainDave | Aug 11 2013 23:11 utc | 13

#12
wow. scahill wiped the floor with power. he’s so much smarter than that harvard professor…

Posted by: anon | Aug 12 2013 0:40 utc | 14

Her photo looks like a glamour shot for a book cover….
But, hey, breaking stereotypes, right?

Posted by: jawbone | Aug 12 2013 0:41 utc | 15

reminds me of a few novels–Joan Didion for one, can’t get more specific otherwise–bad memory
aid is a facilitating phenomenon for the aid providers who participate in all the advanced logistical and technological prerequisites for swooping in and providing succor to those close to death

Posted by: jay meltesen | Aug 12 2013 0:53 utc | 16

@ no. 12
“Just once I’d like to see an American official who can simply acknowledge the fact – even if they don’t accept it – that the US has a bad reputation and has exhibited considerable double-standards in our foreign policy. Instead, you get people who seem to see the rest of the world’s weariness regarding US foreign policy and who thinks the US doesn’t ALWAYS fight for goodness and light are just unreasonable radicals.”
I think American officials are fully aware of the fact that the US has a terrible reputation, and aware of the fact that the US doesn’t fight for goodness and light. They don’t care. They won’t acknowledge it publicly of course, but those officials aren’t naive, they are cynics.

Posted by: sleepy | Aug 12 2013 2:53 utc | 17

“….but those officials aren’t naive, they are cynics.”
Actually, they are whores. You’re right, they do not care. But they do have the ability to discern right from wrong, and they have made a choice between the people’s interests, or their own interests.Theirs is not a pursuit grounded in nationalism, so they care not how we are perceived as a nation. No longer are they concerned with our image as it applies to good versus evil. To them, the image that must be nurtured is the image of power, wielded over the heads of those that oppose the expansion of our quest for global dominance. Elitist and self serving, our body politic has abandoned the basic tenets that a just and democratic government must utilize to serve the people. Unless you are an absolute scumball, you have no chance of achieving high office. And the higher the office, the bigger a scumball you must be. Obama, surely, has earned his position.

Posted by: PissedOffAmerican | Aug 12 2013 3:13 utc | 18

Reflecting on some of the silly things she’s said, I’m wondering if Samantha is related to Austin Powers? We’ll soon find out. Now that Obama has trashed the diplomacy rule book with his cry-baby anti-Putin tantrums, Samantha’s time at the UN is likely to be plagued by people taking pot shots at the target he has painted on her back. In the UN she is the US, after all; and diplomats can be real assholes in delightfully amusing ways. I’m predicting that when she’s not being ambushed, she’ll be reminding us that she’s Austin Powers’ sister and Obama’s cry-baby.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 12 2013 5:16 utc | 19

Samantha has an image problem. Her chosen self-portrait is reminiscent of
Ann (“I love to engage in repartee with people who are stupider than I am”) Coulter.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 12 2013 7:08 utc | 20

But she’s also visibly Irish, like Kerry. They both use body language a lot, especially hand gestures, and they crinkle their eyes in a cinematic US-Irish way. It’s uncanny. By the way, Webster says that John McCain’s new nickname is ‘walnuts’. Would anybody like to speculate on why that might be?

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 12 2013 7:43 utc | 21

Apparently his cheeks resemble those of a squirrel.
Wonkette has referred to John McCain as WALNUTS! no less than 378 times (3 alone since I conducted my “research” this afternoon). It appears that they began calling Senator McCain WALNUTS! on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 in a post entitled, “The Next Two Years Are Already Unbearable.” In this prescient post Wonkette featured the above Youtube by “Salvatore the Intern” in which he argued that McCain was clearly the best candidate for the presidency because of his cute “walnut” shaped cheeks, among other things. Wonkette continued to use the WALNUTS! sobriquet and has often found it synecdochal not just of McCain’s cute cheeks, but also of his foreign policy.
And there you have it: the history of WALNUTS! McCain.
PoliticalCottonCandy-com

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 12 2013 8:11 utc | 22

I see. This says volumes for the rapidity of Webster’s research. But he didn’t really say, “this is MCain’s new nickname”, he just started calling him that, in this week’s broadcast, which I am pretty sure he never did before. And it’s good.

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 12 2013 9:00 utc | 23

yemen-demands-stop-to-us-drone-attacks
http://nsnbc.me/2013/08/12/yemen-demands-stop-to-us-drone-attacks/

Posted by: brian | Aug 12 2013 12:09 utc | 24

Brian, I would not believe that until I see it confirmed by the MSM.

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 12 2013 12:43 utc | 25

“But she’s also visibly Irish, like Kerry..”
Kerry is visibly “stage Irish” I don’t believe that he has an Irish gene in his body. Not that I know or care much, but Ireland has troubles enough (including Ms Power) without being required to carry the burden of having whelped this calculating, cowardly careerist.

Posted by: bevin | Aug 12 2013 12:47 utc | 26

@ 21 and 22

By the way, Webster says that John McCain’s new nickname is ‘walnuts’. Would anybody like to speculate on why that might be?

My first thought was Paulie Walnuts from the Sopranos.

Posted by: sleepy | Aug 12 2013 13:38 utc | 27

Brian (24): I’ve had a little browse around, and there is not a ghost of any “official request by the Government of Yemen to the US to stop the drone strikes.” There is however recognition in the english-language Yemeni newspapers of broad opposition to them, eg:
http://www.yemenpost.net/Detail123456789.aspx?ID=3&SubID=7110&MainCat=3
and
http://www.yementimes.com/en/1700/opinion/2726/The-first-steps-towards-criminalizing-drone-strikes-Obama-take-note.htm
(The latter is not original to the Yemen Times but a reprint from al-Jazeera)

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 12 2013 13:52 utc | 28

Terrorism in Mosques: Undercover in British Wahabi/Salafi mosques http://vimeo.com/71817949

Posted by: brian | Aug 12 2013 14:18 utc | 29

guest 77 @12: Great post, kudos for the link. Scahill is one of the few who’ll expose the truth of US foreign policies.
POA @ 18: “Actually, they are whores” Very true. This has become the new normal for the bulk of USA society. Excellent Synopsis.

Posted by: ben | Aug 12 2013 14:57 utc | 30

Downtrodden black civilian? You don’t know he’s a civilian, or that he’s downtrodden. He’s checking his cellphone right there. Doesn’t look downtrodden to me. This says more about your worldview, then hers.

Posted by: brian | Aug 12 2013 16:47 utc | 31

Re: John McCain (R) Tel Aviv.
Whether McCain is a walnut or not, I still think of him as a silly old fart – a natural progression from his early life as a young fool/spoiled brat. The clincher for me was his appearance on Letterman’s Late Show to announce his Presidential Candidacy in 2008. He came across as a skunk in weasel’s clothing and then got Letterman off-side by cancelling a follow-up appearance 90 minutes before camera time; and then had to go back to (unsuccessfully) put things right with ‘Dave’. The latter interview is here:
McCain on Letterman: Full Transcript
(John McCain’s ‘Late Show’ Interview, 10/16/2008)
http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/johnmccain/a/mccain-trnscrpt.htm
Then there was that oh-so-clever PR stunt of being snapped with Obama’s Syrian ‘rebel’ kidnap/murderers. Poor old John seems to specialise in being as careless as possible and leaving a very turbulent wake with lots of loose ends bobbing around in it like orphans.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 12 2013 19:04 utc | 32

Brian, I would not believe that until I see it confirmed by the MSM.
Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 12, 2013 8:43:58 AM | 25
if i saw it in the MSM id not believe it

Posted by: brian | Aug 12 2013 22:18 utc | 33

Re: Walnuts
I used to spend waaaay too much time on Wonkette. I believe the “walnuts” meme comes 100% from this amazing youtube video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X8dLXvqu8k

Posted by: guest77 | Aug 12 2013 23:59 utc | 34

Welcome to the Matrix, Brian@24. First the US conducts drone strikes in Yemen and creates “Collateral Damage” there (aka kills innocent Yemenis civilians, including women and children). Then the Yemenis, most reasonably so, get all steamed up and threaten retaliation, at which point the US closes Embassies throughout the Region, blaming it on “Credible Threats.” What utter and total hogwash!

Posted by: Cynthia | Aug 13 2013 14:18 utc | 35

Heh the S. Power and ex-UN ambassador Susan Rice totally resemble in their PR efforts – Sarah Palin.
Their are faint echoes as well back to Condoleeza. M. Albright had that post too. The US likes to nominate women in these kinds of posts, it gives an extra edge, like humanitarian BS and any attack will be laid to patriarchy, misogyny, backwardness..
Pose in war zones! Benetton ads anyone?
The UN helicop, prominently featured, won’t endear Power to US audiences.
These women, or profiles of that type, are quite rare on the ground. They must be domineering and subservient at the same time. Their role is to parrot the party line with vague acting skills, naturally in return for serious financial and social reward. It is a role, they have to pretend they believe in it – or that is their life their true calling etc. – Film and propaganda meets reality…
Sarah Palin posting in a bikini with a gun is folklore, these ladies are serious stuff.
Power was a ‘war’ journalist, Bosnia and so on, and Rice is married to one. Power is married to Cass Sunstein, Harvard, Obama buddy, long career, much older, nuff said. Both ladies Democratic shills. Power has some sorties that appear to be beyond the conventional. Like admiring Chomsky or being mildly critical of Israel, clear PR moves. The main thrust remains Humanitarian Intervention – Lybia, Syria, and Darfur after the fact, in the case of Power.

Posted by: Noirette | Aug 13 2013 14:59 utc | 36

Posted by: Cynthia | Aug 13, 2013 10:18:08 AM | 35
the US cant have its War-on-Terror(or WOT!) if there are no terrorists…one thing they can do is manufacture them out of irate locals

Posted by: brian | Aug 14 2013 3:12 utc | 37

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