Events happening today
-
ALL
DAY
22 March 2026 25 April 2026
This event began 03/22/2025 and repeats every year forever
Easter is always between March 22nd and April 25th .Easter was April 12th in the year 2020, the name is derived from Ēostre the real or unreal germanic goddess but the date and most modern traditions refer to Pascha which roughly translates to passover, the Jewish holiday. But, I want to focus on Ēostre. For easter, include the real or unreal traditions attributed to Eostre, like rabbits, or make your own.You can show photos of art OR text of fiction
The photos can be to->sculpture/knitting or sewing/graffiti/tattoo or any craft depicting Eostra real or unreal traditions
The text can only be fiction based on the following: Real or unreal traditons of Eostre. Orthodox catholic easter comes a week after roman catholic easter.
Story 1 https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/261-eostre-art-or-text-craft-parade-good-news-blog/?do=findComment&comment=892
Story 2 https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/261-eostre-art-or-text-craft-parade-good-news-blog/?do=findComment&comment=893
STORY 1
It is April 12th 2020, Ess Mae Murard walk by her Easter painting aside her grandchildren.
The boy ask: “I never seen that painting before”
“No you have not Hakim, it is one I did a while back but I only present it for Easter”: gently replied Ess Mae.
“Why grandma S?”: reply a girl.
“I was going to ask that Shaniqua!”: cut in Hakim.
“No need to shout Hakim, it was a good question anyway right?”: Grandma Ess tickle Hakim and Shaniqua, either laugh.
Grandma Ess continue: “to answer the question you both want to know, I must go back to earlier days”. She take a photo off a desk.
“Grandpa Clay!”: reply both children in unison.
“yes, your grandfather with me before church,1947, I was a little sad, a commission I was hoping to get was obtained by D. Scott, made me quite mad”: recall grandma Ess, and she continue: “We went to church, your grandpa Clay had to do some work in a white man’s house, So I chose to go to St. Nicholas park and sit to gather my thoughts and that is when I saw her…”: the children are attentive:“Eostre”:the children interrupt Grandma Ess.
“who is Eostre”:ask Hakim.
“yes, please tell us grandma S”: Shanique pull on her grandmother’s arm.
Grandma Ess continue: “… hmmm, well, at first I did not know who she was and I said, nice hat, she found that amusing and seemed interested in what I had to say… I learned she was the Earth”: the children look confused and Grandma Ess continue: “well, the spirit of the Earth who once every turn around the sun makes an appearance as a human to humans”
Grandma Ess look to the children who are still confused, and smile. She continue: “think of it like this, we live on a planet, called Earth, and she is living so, she has a spirit, but her spirit is special, not like a humans, her spirit can inhabit many kinds of bodies.”
“why grandma Ess”: ask Shaniqua.
“The earth is very old and powerful, I can not explain all in why Earth reacts the way it does in any way… but we talked about many things, and when she was done she offered me a chance to paint her”
“So that is her, the spirit of Earth”: ask Hakim.
“hmmm rather, that is the form the spirit of Earth took”: reply Grandma Ess.
“but why only show it during easter”: ask Shaniqua.
“well”: a car horn cut off Grandma Ess, and she speak to the matter: “you two, lets go , we can talk about it later ,lets go outside”: she take a photo.
The three leave the house and meet a woman waiting by a wall.
“come on Ma!”: speak the woman.
“coming chile, now go on you two, go to your mother”: suggest Grandma Ess, but Hakim shake his head and Shanique tighten her grip.
“So you two want to bother your grandmother about something, alright, but just get in the car, ok”: and after the mother speak, the grandchildren usher into the car quiet and wait for grandma Ess.
…
while driving to church Grandma Ess was active on her tablet and asked the children: “you two ready to learn why that painting can’t be shown”.
“I see now what is going on”: the children’s mother smile.
“Don’t say anything mommy”: request Shaniqua.
“yeah, we want to hear it from grandma”: demand Hakim.
“ok ok, may I listen to”: ask the mother, and the children nod.
Grandma Ess smile and say: “take a look at the image on the tablet”: and she hand the tablet to the children in the back seat. Hakim plus Shaniqua look at the image.
Grandma Ess begin to finish her story: “well… once long ago, great birds existed, these birds could be ridden like a horse. Humans lived well with adult ones but could never breed children, but it didn’t matter for they continued to be born in the wild, until one day…”: the children gasp in preparation and grandma Ess continue: “the earth changed. These birds had only one nesting ground, and it was destroyed in a great earthquake, that burned the sky so none could fly away… the humans who used these birds was very angry cause these birds was the only way they could reach some of the remote locations where they lived. They asked the Earth to make more of the birds to restart their bloodline… but the Earth refused. The humans who rode these birds, became very angry and cursed all our mother… do you have an idea why the painting can not be seen now?”
Hakim think, but shake his head. Shaniqua think and say:“ the eggs? ”
“Yes, Shaniqua”: smile Grandma Ess, Hakim cry out in agony, their mother laugh.
“But, those little eggs in the painting are the eggs of those huge birds”
“no, but they are the map… The Eostre made a map of eggs, utilized correctly, which I will not say how, they provide a map, the painting gives clues to those who know, thus the spirit of Earth demanded I not make that publicly shown… and I have kept my promise, and as your mother has kept it , I demand you two”
Shaniqua plus Hakim smile: “yes grandma Ess”
“Ok guys, we at church your”
“Daddy!”: yell the two children in unison cutting off their mother’s instruction. The mother open the car doors and the children are out; she blow a kiss to her husband.
“You know my sweet Roe, you can make a few more eggs for me to tell my story too”: explain Grandma Ess to her daughter.
“Momma , I am not going to be laying tons of eggs, I know you and Rick been talking and plotting, now enjoy your church, I will be back to take us all to Black Fort for lunch”: say Roe, as she watch her mother exit the car and meet up with the husband plus kids.
STORY 2
Each child from Earth is part in a community and between each perihelion the Earth must speak to each child's community at least once, per the agreement with the Sun. In the oldest swamp from Earth the human season come again, the time of Eostre, when the spirit in Earth take a humanoid form to speak to her human children. She slowly form the body deep in a swampland so thick, the morning sun seem a sunset.
It is said if you are lucky to witness the spirit of the Earth before she settles her form, the Earth will allow you to take a piece from in her. But, I myself have never been able to witness such a thing to prove it myself.
The spirit of Earth, after forming the body, begin to walk out from the swamp to speak to the humans. She meets a hare, basking in the sunlight. The hare turn to look to her and cognize her immediately. It hop to her feet and ask:" what can I do for the earth Spirit". The Eostre ask the hare:" please take me to the human tribe". The hare bow and escort The Eostre out the swamp, out the wood and into a human roadway. A human man turn a sharp corner near the wood exit and is astonished at the figure before him. He ask The Eostre if he can take a photo of her. She nod her head. He ask her to take a look at it.
He ask her name, and she look down at the Hare, who head shake in disagreement. The man sulk off looking at the photo.
The Eostre look down at the road and ask the hare: "how far are the humans from their.... road"
"Not far earth spirit, about ten thousand hops, but beware humans wearing odd smelling metal clumps"
And The Eostre leave the hare, at the side of the road.
The Eostre walk and walk, observing the humans in cars going by. In the late morning, she observe a small human girl carrying eggs in one hand, picking up an egg in the other. The Eostre go over to the girl and ask: "why did you take that egg and have an egg basket?"
"Its easter": the little girl reply.
"YEs, I know but egg is meant to be cared for not, thrown about, you never know what kind of life it may bring"
The little girl stand confused or bored. The Eostre ask her to sit the egg she just found down. After the little girl did, the Eostre tap her foot once and the egg grow, and grow, wiping away decorations and a small dragon pop out.
The little girl is very happy, even though the baby dragon tried to snap her finger off; she place the baby dragon in her egg basket. And, grab The Eostre hand and say: "Please, come home, my parents will love to meet you, my dad does magic and my mom loves dragons"
"you think it is wise for your mom to see a dragon"
"yes, lets go": and the little girl drag The Eostre to her home. The little girl ask The Eostre to notice the eggs on the table and say: "my dad made them"
The Eostre look at the eggs and smile. You know, it will be good to talk to your parents. And The Eostretime happened successfully, albeit an initial shock of nudity from the parents to the little girl.
RMWorkCalendar 0 Comments · 0 Reviews
25 April 2026
This event began 04/25/2025 and repeats every year forever
Malintrashadowmoon 2025 BDay gift 04/25/2025
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Malintrashadowmoon-2025-BDay-gift-1187178030
IN AMENDMENT
Princess Mononoke: More Relevant Than Ever
froom The soak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUoLoNFidik
TRANSCRIPT
0:07 to search for evil with eyes unclouded to me this line is both the essence of 0:12 Studio jibles Princess monoke and the most profound takeaway that I had from the film I think the movie's most 0:18 obvious message is the stuff about how we treat nature and how we should better live in harmony with it but I have no 0:25 interest in talking about that not because it's not relevant or important but because I think everybody has talked 0:31 about that to death already in this video I want to talk to you about another message entirely one that I had 0:37 missed until recently the ability to see with eyes unclouded by hate or more 0:42 specifically to learn to see the goodness in others even when it seems like they're not on your side I doubt 0:48 when hay Miyazaki made princess monoke in 1997 that he could have predicted the age of social media tribalism and 0:55 political turmoil that we find ourselves in in the 2020s but the film explores all these ideas in the complex subtle 1:03 yet pointed and sometimes inscrutable way that all jibli films explore their themes watching and rewatching the film 1:10 today I was surprised by how the struggles of the protagonist Ashi taka act as an incredible parallel for the 1:15 journey we all have to navigate in the Modern Age and it gave me a lot to reflect on how we can do it to learn to 1:22 navigate a divided world with eyes unclouded now don't get me wrong this is not going to be a video essay that's 1:28 just an allegory for Centric is M or that both sides any issue are bad and that we should sit on the fence I think 1:34 to read the film that way would be wrong and we'll talk about how the real message is so much more profound and 1:40 relatable than that in fact there's lessons in here about class Warfare dehumanization and how even in a bleak 1:47 world we must find the value in life stuff that hit me so much harder than 1:52 when I watched the film when I was younger so let's take a look at Studio ji's monoke Hime a film whose English 1:59 translated title of Princess monoke is in of itself a misunderstanding of what the film is trying to say because I 2:05 think there's a lot we can learn from its characters even today about what it means to navigate a broken world at more 2:12 with itself [Music] Part One: To See With Unclouded Eyes 2:26 [Music] the context of this quote to see with eyes unclouded comes from fairly early 2:34 on in the film ashitaka who has just reluctantly killed the bore God turn demon that was threatening his village 2:40 finds himself cursed and The Village's Oracle tells him that this curse will likely kill him but there is a chance 2:47 that there could be a cure if he travels far to the west where the boore and the source of the curse came from it is 2:54 during this section that she tells him that on his journey he must search for evil with eyes unclouded 3:00 the reason I think this line is so important is that it sets up the theme for the entire rest of the film at least 3:06 in terms of what Ashi taka's approach and philosophy is throughout the movie people will constantly try to pull Ashi 3:13 taka to one side or the other and they will frequently question his Allegiance multiple times a character asks out loud 3:19 towards ashitaka whose side are you on and time and time again he defies that 3:25 categorization he helps one faction then the other and no one can quite figure him out this is why for some people I 3:31 think it's easy to read this as a metaphor for essentially a both sides approach to life both sides are bad 3:38 therefore I won't pick a side but again I think it's a lot more interesting than that it's not that ashitaka just refuses 3:45 to pick sides he refuses to see sides in the first place to me that is the 3:50 precient message of the film that is so applicable to a society that seems so divided today in the age of social media 3:57 we'll explore this idea at length later in the video rather than get too abstract too quickly 4:02 let's first talk through some key scenes in the film then I'll explain how I interpret them the first important scene 4:08 for me at least in terms of ashitaka's philosophy comes when he arrives at the Iron Works and he meets lady eboshi at 4:15 this point in the film he's just saved two residents of the Iron Works from certain death and carries them all the 4:20 way back here in a pseudo mystical Journey to the dear God's Woods I think pretty quickly on arriving at the Iron 4:26 Works ashitaka realizes that the thing he's searching for is here he's looking for the source of the iron musket pellet 4:33 that came from the body of the bore God who cursed him and he hopes that finding the source and dealing with it in some 4:39 way might lift the curse that plagues him he talks to Lady eboshi The Matriarch who runs the Ironworks and 4:46 explains why he's here she asks him if you find the source of this pellet what will you do and it is here that ashitaka 4:53 repeats that Central quote that I spoke about earlier and in doing so sets up the philosophy he will adhere to in the 5:00 entire film he tells her that I will see with eyes unclouded and decide hearing 5:06 this lady eosi laughs and guides ashitaka to her inner sanctum sharing with him what she says is her Greatest 5:12 Secret she shows him the place where she's having guns and weaponry made and here she confesses that it was she that 5:17 shot the pet that corrupted the Bor God and it is at this point that we get the first of many moral dilemmas for 5:23 ashitaka and where we can start to paint a really fascinating picture of what we can learn from the film in initially we 5:30 see that ashitaka is full of rage and he wants to condemn Lady eboshi this is such a beautiful and complex moment the 5:37 kind that appears so often in ji films because there's so many reasons and emotions at play here for our 5:42 protagonist firstly I think the very Way Lady abushi lives takes off ashitaka he 5:48 is a member of the Mishi tribe in fact not just a member but the prince the emishi live in harmony with their 5:54 environment and do their best to respect nature when the bore God Appears outside the village Ashi Taka first instinct is 6:00 to simply try and reason with it he begs the Bor God to quell its rage and calm down to leave the village in peace for 6:07 they mean him no harm but when it's clear that the God is about to attack and kill some of the girls from the 6:12 village including ashitaka's sister only then as a last resort does he strike and 6:17 take down the boar but even after this the Oracle of the village arrives and treats the boar god with respect doing a 6:24 little ritual and telling him that they will erect a monument in his honor here because they bear him no ill will and 6:29 they hope he will do the same for them so I think on a philosophical level ashitaka finds ibushi's way of life to 6:35 be abhorent not only does she confessed to killing the bore Spirit but she very casually tells the tale of how she 6:41 burned down half the forest and took over this area to mass-produce her iron with which she seeks to take over the 6:47 country this is the complete opposite of the way the emishi live but there's more than that there's also a personal 6:53 grievance here from ashitaka because it is eos's actions that directly led to him being cursed and you can see a 6:59 vindictive anger in him here where maybe he just wants revenge for giving him this curse that might well kill him and 7:06 finally of course there's the actual curse ashitaka's arm Bubbles and boils to life threatening to act on its own to 7:13 draw his blade and strike down neosi the curse itself is demanding retribution 7:19 she asks him your right hand wants to kill me and then must it kill us all to 7:24 find peace but ashitaka resists he holds down his arm because he doesn't want to be this kind of person and this is when 7:31 the idea of seeing with eyes unclouded will really manifest during this tense confrontation one of the other people in 7:37 the room speaks up because this inner sanctuary of eois is home to a few dozen outcasts who suffer from leprosy and who 7:44 are the ones who design and make ibushi's weapons one of them speaks up and he says a beautiful line young man 7:51 he says I too am cursed I understand your rage and grief the leper relates to 7:56 ashitaka and he tells him that while his anger is just ified he should not see Lady eboshi as an evil person he tells 8:03 ashitaka about how lady eboshi is the only person who ever saw the lepers as people and treated them with respect 8:10 tending to them and washing and bandaging them herself While others shunn them and then he says a line that 8:16 really hits home for me and is another theme that we will investigate in the last section of this video he says life 8:22 is suffering and pain the world and its people are cursed but still we wish to 8:28 live hearing all this both ashitaka and we the audience are reminded that people are not just one thing they are not 8:34 straightforwardly evil or straightforwardly good they are complex creatures for all her greed destruction 8:41 and lack of sanctity for the natural world lady abushi is also kind gentle and empathetic she looks after not only 8:48 the lepers but in the first scene that we meet her she's considerate towards the villagers too she knows them all by 8:55 name apologizes for the harm that comes to them and is thankful that they are okay when she sees that ashitaka has 9:00 carried them back after this scene with the lepers ashitaka walks around the rest of the settlement and he sees the 9:06 women working in the Forge even helping them with their work he talks to them and they tell him about how Lady eosi 9:13 treats them earlier when ashitaka is talking to the men in the tavern we learn that anytime lady eosi encounters 9:18 a woman who is being enslaved she frees them and gives them work in the Iron Works while a few of the men Express 9:25 that the women here are a bit spoiled ashitaka replies that a good V has happy women what he means by that I think 9:32 whether consciously or subconsciously is that a good place is one where even the most marginalized and endangered people 9:38 are happy and protected and so to confirm this for himself Ashi taka later 9:43 asked the ladies of the forge is life hard here and they tell them that it is but it's far better than life anywhere 9:50 else they do have to work long days but they're well-looked after and the men here behave themselves it is through 9:56 these encounters that ashitaka learned something really important something that is Central to the idea of seeing 10:01 with eyes unclouded he learns that even a place that can produce evil in the form of weapons and destruction can also 10:07 be a place that produces so much goodness the Iron Works are both a weapons Factory that desecrates its 10:13 environment but also egalitarian Utopia where everyone is able to live with happiness and respect no matter their 10:19 background gender or disability if Ashi taka was more straightforward if this was a different film with a different 10:25 message he might just have come in killed lady eosi and acted the Vengeance that his curse demands an eye for an eye 10:33 but seeing with eyes unclouded means recognizing both the good and the evil in something without preconceived bias 10:40 even if he doesn't agree with how eboshi lives her life and runs the Iron Works he can't deny that she's made something 10:45 valuable and worth protecting as I mentioned in the intro I think this is the most profound message of the film 10:52 there is always more to a situation that meets the eye and we can only see that when we put aside our hate I think we 10:58 can confirm this by looking at another quote that actually comes directly from the film's maker hay Miyazaki who is 11:05 quoted as saying the following you must see with eyes unclouded by hate see the 11:10 good in that which is evil and the evil in that which is good pledge yourself to neither side but vow instead to preserve 11:17 the balance that exists between the two now problematically I was not able to find the direct source of this quote 11:24 lots of websites attribute this as a quote from Miyazaki but don't site where he actually said it but if we trust that 11:30 this is a real quote I think it does resonate a lot with ashitaka's approach in the film this philosophy of seeing 11:36 good and evil and evil in that which is good I think speaks to a cultural difference too it is very much in line 11:42 with Shintoism and Buddhist beliefs which I think can feel a bit foreign or Mystic to many in the west where 11:47 individual action and oppositional factions are a lot more common as I've spoken about in previous videos but 11:54 regardless I think it's an idea that is equally relevant today in a world that seems so thoroughly divided on so many 12:00 fronts being able to see the value in things that on the surface don't seem to be on your side is something so vital 12:06 and important for us to do but I also think both we and the film can go much deeper because I don't think any of this 12:13 means that we should arbitrarily stay in the middle of any dispute or that there isn't a right or a wrong that we should 12:18 adhere to it's actually about making sure we find the right by looking for it with unbiased or unclouded eyes and the 12:26 real profound Insight that I felt from watching the film and thinking a lot about it is that actually there are no 12:32 sides both in the movie and in our lives and even when there are sides it's people being pushed to fight each other 12:38 for misguided reasons it's parties who actually have a shared goal and are not realizing it I think ashitaka is the 12:45 only person in the film who realizes this at least until the end and to illustrate what I mean and elaborate on 12:51 that further let's pick up where we left off in the film because not long after the conversations ashitaka has with 12:56 eboshi the Iron Works is under attack by none other than son the mon noime of 13:02 the title son breaks into the Iron Works makes her way to where eboshi is and risks her life to try and kill her eosi 13:09 in turn tries to shoot down son with guns and it culminates in the two having a sort of intense Street KN fight once 13:16 again what's fascinating is that both sides of this confrontation are justified in their beliefs and abushi 13:22 even acknowledges it when son is stood on the roof eosi calls out to her and says you seek Vengeance for your tribe 13:29 well there are some here who seek Vengeance for their husbands killed by your wolves this sets up another theme 13:34 in the film The idea of a cycle of hatred it's a vicious cycle where one grievance justifies another and then 13:40 another in return till no one can remember where it started but both sides feel grieved and justified in their 13:47 pursuit of Vengeance son and her wolves killed the loved ones of the people in the iron works but those people burned 13:52 the forest and killed other spirit gods but those gods were stopping the villagers from getting natural resources 13:58 they needed and so on and so forth the buck can always be passed one further step back but the end result is a 14:05 destruction of both sides and we can see that literally as s and neosi fight to 14:10 the death both ready to die in the pursuit of destroying the other ashitaka 14:15 however is the only one capable of seeing that this cycle of hatred will never end like this he yells at s first 14:22 and then eosi and her people to stop the fighting but when it's clear that no one will listen he is forced to physically 14:28 step this is where you can see the curse flare up and manifest because the curse 14:34 is born from Rage and hatred and it's fueled by the resentment and Malice that all the people present are holding for 14:40 one another ashitaka physically walks in between eboshi and Son telling them there is a demon inside you and her then 14:47 he turns to everyone else and tells them to look at the bitterness and hatred that curses him what he's trying to 14:53 explain to everyone is that this demon is there within all of us whether literally as in his case or 14:59 metaphorically as in the case of son and neosi the demon is the hatred and resentment it is the anger and the 15:06 malice that we all hold and he desperately implores everyone that they shouldn't give into it what he wants is 15:12 for people to strive to see things with unclouded eyes to see that nature and humans can live in harmony but 15:18 unfortunately for ashitaka and for everyone in the film The Message falls on deaf ears eosi and Son don't listen 15:25 and ashitaka is forced to physically subdue them as he tries to carry son out one of the ladies of the Iron Works 15:30 draws her weapon on him she threatens to shoot ashitaka and her justification is so interesting because she simply says 15:37 you hurt lady eosi and in return comes this look oh This brilliant look I feel 15:43 like I've never seen disappointment better shown on screen without a word being said than this ashitaka simply 15:49 looks back at this woman with eyes that just kind of speak for him as if to say you still don't get it despite 15:55 everything I'm telling you and showing you you're still going to say that because saying you hurt lady abosi so 16:00 thoroughly misses the point of what ashitaka was trying to illustrate yes he hurt lady abushi but that is the point 16:07 that there's always a step back he could turn and say well I only hurt lady eboshi because she was going to hurt son 16:13 and then eosi would say well I was only going to hurt son because she was going to hurt me and so on and so forth the 16:19 cycle of hatred it can never be broken by more hatred more anger more Vengeance 16:25 cannot stop the destruction only a genuine attempt to look Beyond it to forgive where possible and make amends 16:31 where it's not that is the only way anyone here can move past it but this lady refuses to see it and while she 16:38 doesn't try to shoot ashitaka her gun accidentally goes off and hits him directly in the back this of course will 16:44 kick off a different section of the film where Ashi taka will now spend his time in the forest with son but before we 16:50 talk about her I want to reiterate something that I spoke about earlier I don't think the message of the film is that ashitaka is not picking aside 16:57 that's certainly not the message of what I'm saying what I think is profound about what ashitaka does is that he's the only one 17:02 who sees that there are no sides because as everyone realizes at the end of the film the humans in the forest can live 17:08 in harmony ashitaka's emishi tribe is proof of this these sides can work 17:14 together they're just so blinded by their rage that they can't see that the dear God who is Central to the film is 17:20 the perfect representation of this idea that there can be a balance and Harmony between seemingly oppositional forces 17:26 because he is both life and death and yet so many characters don't see that the bores for example are angry at 17:33 the dear God because they think the dear God is only supposed to protect the forest when son brings the injured 17:39 ashitaka to him the dear God heals him but didn't heal Nago the boore that eventually became the cursed demon which 17:46 upsets the boore tribe to them the dear God should be picking sides he's supposed to be about life and protection 17:52 for the forest so why did he not help one of them and then goes and helps a human meanwhile the humans only see the 17:59 dear God as the source of death and danger in fact I think one of the most profound illustrations of this comes 18:05 right at the end of the film from a very small easily missed line after a dramatic climax where their dear God is 18:11 shot and killed by aosi he then transforms into a vengeful version of the night walker and nearly destroys the 18:16 entire forest in pursuit of his head finally when his head is given back by ashitaka andan he collapses into the 18:23 water bringing with him a wave of healing and regrowth before seemingly dying it is that this point that koroku 18:30 one of the villagers says aloud I didn't know the dear God makes the flowers bloom to me this represents the 18:36 fundamental misunderstanding of the humans in the Ironworks you can see it as misinformation you can see it as 18:42 propaganda or you can see it as simple ignorance but they don't actually understand what the dear God or the 18:48 forest does we'll talk about specifically eboshi later but as a whole the people at the ironwork seem to have 18:54 this mistaken belief the forest is only a place of danger to them what they don't realize is that the dear God is 19:00 life as much as it is death it is not one side it is not either or it is both 19:07 this is what ashitaka sees and understands throughout the film and what we can all learn from on the flip side s 19:14 doesn't understand this either because she says that even restored these are not the dear God's Woods their dear God 19:20 is dead once again it is ashitaka who is the only one able to see the truth and he says that the dear God cannot ever 19:27 die because he is both life and death and that in this act of regrowth he's 19:32 telling us all to live this is another theme we will explore in the final section of this video about the value of 19:37 life itself but before we talk about that let's elaborate more about s's behavior and attitude because like 19:44 almost every other human in the film she too is unable to let go of her hatred in order to see the truth in front of 19:53 her one of the central questions about son in the film is who and what is she Part Two: Who Is Mononoke-Hime 19:59 there's ambiguity about her identity itself but also is she human wolf or 20:05 something else entirely again she views herself as part of a binary a wolf 20:10 fighting against humans but others also view her binarily when lady eosi first 20:15 describes son she says that she is a girl whose Soul the Wolves stole and she thinks that if she destroys the forest 20:22 it will break their hold on son and she'll go back to being a normal human this is probably a good point to talk 20:28 about the of the film that I promised I'd explain because the original title of the film in Japanese is monoke Hime 20:35 which actually translates to monster princess this is actually the title that the residents of the Iron Works give her 20:41 so what it speaks to is how they view both her and the spirits monsters now 20:47 whether she is the princess of the monsters a monstrosity of a princess or a princess belonging to the monsters it 20:53 is a pejorative term they attach to her the English translated title of princess monoke Ashley misses a subtle but 21:00 important part of this description because princess monoke just sounds like a name like that's what this character 21:05 is called but she is son she has a name it's just that the people of the Ironworks either never got a chance to 21:12 learn it or never bothered to and their referral to her and the spirits as monsters says more about their approach 21:19 than her reality in fact it's interesting that when they first encounter ashitaka they fear he might be 21:25 a monster too in this scene as ashitaka is carrying Koro Who and the other villager he's rescued back to the Iron 21:31 Works these guys sitting by the river see them approaching and one of them says the phrase Mona now monoke means 21:38 monster as we've discussed and the C indicates a question so he could be asking if it's a monster in general 21:45 that's approaching or you could be worried that monoke hee is approaching either way it represents his paranoia 21:52 anything coming from the woods is a monster to him even though it's three people two of whom are his own friends 21:58 all of this is to say that the villagers have a one-dimensional view of son and she has a one-dimensional view of 22:04 herself son refuses to accept herself as a human and in fact her stance at the end of the film is telling and how she 22:11 refuses to grow as a character over the course of the film one of jbl's rare prominent female characters to do so 22:17 after the dear God's head has been returned and order is somewhat restored son turns to Ashi taka and says I love 22:23 you ashitaka but I cannot forgive the human race and so the two come to an agreement that ashitaka will help the 22:29 people of the Iron Works rebuild a better home something we'll talk about soon while son will remain in the forest 22:34 with the Wolves and the two can meet whenever they want now of course what son is saying is equal parts 22:40 understandable but equal parts ridiculous it is understandable that she's unhappy with what the people of the Iron Works particularly lady eboshi 22:47 did in terms of killing the deer God or at least his corporeal body but son is 22:53 also being a massive hypocrite firstly she says she cannot forgive the human race but of course she doesn't include 22:59 ashitaka in that she loves him and she's able to separate him from the idea of humanity but even more hypocritically 23:06 she's excluding herself from this distinction too she's giving herself a benefit of the doubt that she refuses to 23:12 extend to any of the iron work's residents she recognizes that she and ashitaka might be human beings that are 23:18 able to live respectfully and harmoniously with the forest but she Paints the rest of the entire human race with one brush condemning them as 23:25 essentially evil and incapable of Behaving well this again really spoke to me as a line of thinking that so many 23:31 people still use today to tarnish entire groups of people as dangerous and irredeemable whether that's immigrants 23:37 or trans people or whoever is so fundamentally wrong especially when that characteristic is innate not based on 23:43 the evidence of their behavior like being human for example the vast majority of the people of the Ironworks 23:49 are just trying to live their lives and doing what they're told you can argue that eosi is the villain that s views 23:55 all of humanity to be and we'll talk about her soon I promise but you can't say the same for the rest of everyone 24:00 else they're no more at fault for what happened than a random boar from the forest is and yet in her stubbornness 24:06 and petulance son refuses to see that Nuance now you might argue that she doesn't view herself as human but I 24:13 think clearly on some level she knows she is if she didn't she wouldn't be in love with ashitaka she wouldn't react 24:19 the way she does when he calls her beautiful everyone even the forest Spirits know that she is human they just 24:26 accept her regardless right after the scene where ashitaka carries her out of the Iron Works one of the monkey Spirits 24:31 says wolf girl not care wolf girl human when talking to S which anger one of her 24:37 Wolf brothers and he threatens to bite the monkey's head off this shows us that everyone here is aware of the reality of 24:43 what son is her brothers are sensitive because they don't want her to feel different to them but she is Morrow 24:50 acknowledges this too when she's talking about son with ashitaka ashitaka demands that son be freed because she is human 24:57 to which Morrow barks fact that she is neither human nor wolf and calls her my 25:02 poor ugly lovely daughter Maro in fact holds a similar style of thinking to s 25:07 in that she too sees things as oppositional Maro dismissively asks will you join s and fight the humans Nashi 25:15 taka replies that no that will only breed more hatred which goes back to this idea of the cycle of hatred that we 25:21 spoke about earlier which ashitaka is right in asserting cannot be broken with more hatred then when ashitaka asks her 25:28 can't the humans in the forest live in peace Mora replies that nowhere is safe as long as humans are around again she 25:35 doesn't believe this about son or even ashitaka but spous it as fact regardless 25:40 showing how she like son refuses to accept complexity rather than binaries 25:46 and here there's also a fascinating parallel with what she says about son's relationship with the forest with what 25:51 eosi said Morrow says that s is now tied to the forest and that if the forest 25:56 dies s will die too this is the actual opposite of what eashi says if you remember who claims 26:03 that destroying the forest will actually liberate son ultimately maybe they are both right and wrong because if the 26:09 forest dies maybe monoke Heime the child of the Wolves will die but perhaps s the 26:15 human will be freed either way the fact that they both make this claim confidently shows how they are not 26:21 viewing things with unclouded eyes but rather through their biased lenses as it happens the forest isn't destroyed it's 26:28 saved andan chooses to forsake Humanity displaying an inability to view the world with the nuance and unclouded eyes 26:35 that ashitaka has been doing and asking for others to do too funnily enough there is one woman who he does get 26:41 through to by the end of the film lady eosi after son's declaration that she cannot forgive humans we then shortly 26:48 cut to lady eosi talking to her people she remarks that she can't believe she was carried to safety by a wolf of all 26:55 things then she says that the people of the Iron Works will start over but that we will build a good Village here 27:02 suggesting that she wants to build a better home this time to me I think that's a pretty clear indicator from her 27:08 especially in light of those two lines coming back to back that eboshi has seen that she can in fact live in harmony 27:14 with the forest that the wolves are not an evil force they're just living creatures trying to protect what they 27:19 hold precious and that she can build a version of the Iron Works that doesn't desecrate or seek to destroy the forest 27:26 this is also why I think ashitaka chooses to stay because he also believes that it can be done that the humans can 27:32 rebuild in a way that resembles how his Mishi Clan live in harmony with the world around them now as for eosi there 27:39 is another theme I want to talk about one that is definitely not explicit in the film but stood out to me as a great 27:45 metaphor for how the world works today and that is the lies of the 1% screwing 27:50 over the rest of the Part Three: The Lies of the 1 27:55 99 as I've mentioned earlier in the video ashitaka is Keen to emphasize that there are no sides to this situation and 28:02 everyone can live harmoniously but on the occasions that there are sides it's 28:07 the wrong people being pit against each other and perhaps the biggest example of this is lady eboshi now don't get me 28:14 wrong ibushi is not a victim or some innocent Damsel in Distress quite the opposite she's shown to be ruthless cold 28:21 when needed and deeply ambitious she half jokingly half seriously declares her desire to rule the entire our 28:28 country but as we've discussed she's a nuanced character who is kind gentle and 28:33 Noble at times as well her beef with the forest Spirits though is largely based on misinformation and ignorance like I 28:40 mentioned earlier where she seems to believe that not only is the dear God a threat and a source of death but also 28:45 that killing the forest will restore son back to her human self at one point she even posits that the blood of the dear 28:52 God is set to cure any illness and she could use it to cure the lepers that she houses of their condition 28:58 the people of the Iron Works don't realize that the dear God also brings life and provides the resources that 29:04 they're using and the person seeking to exploit this ignorance is the character of Goo the reason I want to talk about 29:10 the 1% and the 99% in this section is because goo is very directly the voice 29:16 and the will of the emperor in princess monoke in this scene he comes to eboshi 29:21 and shows her a letter from the emperor that demands that she kill the dear God and bring his head to him eboshi is 29:28 initially reluctant and feels like the iron production is going well enough but Joo softly threatens her that all the 29:34 men they've supplied her with weren't just sent to get iron and you can see his expression change from serious to 29:40 the fake innocent that he pretends to be as he adds or at least that's what his majesty would say all of this is a 29:47 reminder that not only can he take ibushi's resources away but he can use those very men against her but funnily 29:54 enough one sentence later when eboshi questions of the emperor believes that the deer God's head will give him 29:59 immortality jico claims oh I don't know what the emperor thinks this is of course a direct contradiction to what he 30:06 just said and it reveals J's true nature and purpose he's here to get what he wants one way or the other it's clear 30:13 that jico is a substitute for the emperor acting as a force of coercion that makes the central conflict arise in 30:19 the film and we can see that coercion not just from the verbal and financial threats but also before this scene J has 30:26 a horde of goons that he brings with him he tells them to hide and wait for him which is to imply that if eboshi didn't 30:33 willingly agree to kill the dear God he'd make her do it by force and eboshi 30:38 understands this because right after agreeing to kill the dear God she tells jico that he can summon that shady Bunch 30:44 hidden under the cliff and joico simply laughs with this fake innocent expression again and says oh you saw 30:50 them did you what all of this shows us is that eosi is aware of the threat that jico brings with him for her own part 30:57 she's ly fighting a war with a human the nobleman Lord asano who's trying to steal the Iron Works from her not only 31:04 is this guy a wealthy powerful Samurai but he's also a bit of a scumbag because we learned through dialogue that he 31:10 tried to conquer this area himself and was driven back by the Boors but now that eboshi has managed to conquer it 31:16 he's demanding that she give him half again under the threat of violence so if 31:21 taking the wealth from someone else's labor without doing anything of your own isn't a Marxist allegory I don't know 31:27 what is it's all subplot so none of the following is discussed explicitly but it feels pretty clear to me that eboshi is 31:33 essentially caught in a tough political sandwich on the one hand she has a wealthy established Noble trying to 31:39 forcibly take her business and it's not a stretch to say that this guy likely has the emperor's favor whereas the 31:45 upstart woman in neosi probably doesn't on the other side she has J requesting 31:50 but really demanding as we've seen that she go to kill the dear God in the emperor's name and of course the minute 31:57 she goes off to to do so and leaves the Iron Works relatively unguarded Lord oano attacks with his army you have to 32:03 wonder where would he have gotten this information from that the Iron Works are currently unguarded I think it's almost 32:09 certain that jico is pulling the strings on this getting everything he and by extension the emperor wants which is the 32:15 dear God's death the appeasement of one of his Nobles and the removal of an ambitious Rogue element in abosi J in 32:23 fact actually directly tells eboshi there is no time to fight men just give a all the Iron Works fulfill your 32:30 promise to the emperor so it's pretty clear that he doesn't care what happens to her and later when they're in the 32:35 forest one of his Scouts asks if they really even need eosi and J declares quietly that when it comes to hunting a 32:42 god they should let her do the dirty work so all of this is to say that while eosi is herself ambitious and dangerous 32:49 it's clear that she's being manipulated and coerced by a higher authority who arbitrarily creates the conflict between 32:55 the Iron Works and the dear God for his own ends in fact everything in the film is basically a consequence of J's 33:01 actions first in the town when he first meets Ashi taka he is the one who convinces everyone that the little gold 33:07 pellet that ashitaka gives the woman in exchange for rice is super valuable but 33:12 he does so in such a loud and obvious way that it inevitably draws the attention of everyone around including 33:18 these people who want to Rob ashitaka and then conveniently jico is there again to war Nashi taka and run away 33:25 with him was this all part of his plan possibly he then tells ashitaka to go to 33:30 the Iron Works and the dear God's Forest to find the answers he's looking for again to me at least the class parallel 33:36 is pretty clear despite him being an Envoy of the emperor J manages to convince everyone in this little village 33:42 that this humble traveler from a remote tribe is somehow super wealthy and turns them against him while hiding his own 33:49 power and Status constantly both here and later he's peing people against each other to mask his own ends and if we 33:55 continue down the idea that he's essentially a substitute for the Emperor then this is a pretty clear and I'd argue astute metaphor for a class 34:02 struggle and the way in which the truly wealthy and Powerful manipulate others into fighting for relative scraps while 34:07 they get what they want once Chico reaches the Iron Works himself he specifically asks about ashitaka and if 34:14 abosi has seen him presumably because he wants to use Ashi taka again to which aboshi replies that he came and went 34:20 already and I'm finally and perhaps most tellingly there's this line he says when the hunt for the dear God is taking 34:26 place ashitaka having seen the Iron Works is already under attack goes to find ioshi he finds the men from the 34:32 Iron Works who describe the horrors of what's just happened including how they were used as human Shields Joo and his 34:39 crew had planted bombs and grenades underneath where the men of the Iron Works were told to hold the line and 34:44 when the bores approached the bombs were set off and all lives were lost human 34:50 and animal J's plan clearly did not care about collateral damage but ashitaka 34:55 again refusing to see sides rescues one of son's Wolf brothers from underneath the pile of bore corpses and even 35:02 convinces the men of the Iron Works to help him do so I think it's really telling that when we see this first 35:07 instance of the animals and the people of the Iron Works working together it's J's guards who try to stop them again 35:14 trying to keep the two sides divided but when they attack ashitaka it's the men of the Iron Works who revolt and fight 35:21 back as they realize that the wolves are not their enemies rise up against your greedy overlords comrades the men then 35:27 work together to free the wolf and the Wolf in turn also doesn't show any hostility towards the workers once it's 35:33 freed and instead proceeds to guide ashitaka to where son is on the way ashitaka stops in front of eboshi and 35:40 tells her what's happening that the Iron Works under attack and that she should abandon her hunt for the dear God you 35:45 can see J's nervous expression here as if he's worried that he'll actually convince eboshi to stop doing his dirty 35:51 work for him she replies you want me to kill Samurai instead of the dear God to which ashitaka says no can't the forest 35:58 and the Iron Works live in peace and it's at this point that jico says a really telling line he says whose side 36:05 is he on this is a pretty clear distillation of the point I've been building to here is ashitaka saying that 36:10 the forest and the people can live in harmony once again it's not that he's not picking sides he refuses to see 36:17 sides and here is goo in return telling him hey whose side are you want trying 36:22 to insist that there are in fact two binary factions that must try and destroy each other 36:28 but we know he's wrong we've just seen ashitaka unite the two sides in a unified goal without hostility or 36:35 conflict but no matter what he claims J doesn't care about what happens to the people of the Ironworks and even the men 36:41 realize that when ashitaka comes to find them and they say they're willing to sacrifice us all they're using lady 36:47 eboshi now thankfully eosi has an inherit distrust of men which she explicitly States the ladies of the Iron 36:53 Works she says she's more afraid of men than monsters and tells them to be on their guard while she's away and so Toki 37:00 and the others are able to fend off the attack on the Iron Works of course her and other lady's distrust of men is 37:06 valid in the context of what they've been through but I also think it doubles as a mistrust of hierarchy because eashi 37:12 doesn't distrust ashitaka who she very quickly asked to join her cause after first meeting him nor does she distrust 37:18 her right-hand man but she does distrust Lord asano and jico men with power and authority the 1% who are recklessly 37:26 willing to sacrifice lives to get whatever they want this is Illustrated in another really poignant line that 37:31 jico says right to the end of the film here he's fleeing with the dear God's head even while watching the entire 37:37 forest and Iron Works be destroyed by the way which really clear metaphor here guys San and ashitaka stop him and tell 37:43 him to give the head back to which he says something that completely illustrates his world view he says The 37:49 Thirst to possess Heaven and Earth is what makes us human this is so interesting because it's demonstrably 37:55 untrue here is goo standing in in front of two humans who clearly do not share this Instinct of his and yet he declares 38:01 so confidently that what he was doing was in fact human nature again to me 38:06 this just speaks to joo's inherently manipulative nature where he's trying to convince everyone that they should all behave like him but Ashi taka and son 38:13 refus and they begrudgingly do get through the chico getting him to give up the head which they then take and return 38:19 to the dear God all of this is to say that this is just another part of princess monoke that struck me as so 38:25 relevant when watching it now in a time where the wealth divide between the richest and the poorest in society has 38:30 only grown in most of the western world for the last 50 plus years the theme of the powerful minority manipulating the 38:35 majority could not be more profound the tactics of misinformation misdirection and coercion blaming a vulnerable group 38:43 for problems they didn't cause these are all things that are probably even more true now than they were when the film 38:48 released in 1997 but while this is a rather Bleak worldview and indeed it's a pretty 38:53 brutal life depicted in Princess monoke there's also subtle optimism that permeates the film and that's the last 38:59 thing I want to talk to you about because I think it's another thing we could really do with hearing in the modern day that life may be hard but 39:05 it's worth [Music] living I've already spoken so far about Part Four: Life Is For Living 39:11 the idea of seeing with eyes unclouded about not seeing ourselves or others as one-dimensional or as binary opposites 39:18 and of resisting the manipulations of the elite and Powerful but there is one other recurring message that appears 39:24 throughout princess monoke and that is the idea that the world world is a cold bitter place but the value of life is 39:30 still sacran and as long as we're alive we can make the world a better place 39:36 there is lots of ambient misery depicted throughout princess monoke the emishi tribe are dying out and now forced to 39:42 give up their prince Samurai and natural disasters are destroying Villages the forest gods are dying out and getting 39:48 weaker and even the people of the Iron Works live difficult lives all of this while an outof of touch Emperor focuses 39:55 on trying to find immortality but there there are also times when The Bleak state of the world is made verbally 40:00 explicit it first comes from jico when he's sitting down to talk with ashitaka for the first time remarking on the men 40:06 who were potentially looking to Rob ashitaka he says that it wasn't always like this but that Hearts have grown 40:11 cold throughout the land he says that the area around here was a fine Village once but whether it was a flood or a 40:17 landslide it was destroyed and now the land presumbly referring to the country as a whole teams with bitter ghosts dead 40:24 from war sick or starved and Fallen where they stood a curse you say the 40:30 world is a curse if you remember from earlier in the video this actually Echoes what the leper will say later in 40:35 the Iron Works that life is suffering in pain the world and its people are cursed but we still wish to live but notice 40:42 that what the leper says and what Chico says as well end with slight optimism the world may be a curse but we still 40:49 want to live as human beings and Cho has a similar philosophy when he tells ashitaka that everyone dies some now 40:55 some later but the trick is to avoid the jaws of death or so his master used to say at this point ashitaka L man said I 41:03 shouldn't have gotten into that fight I killed two men referring to the fact that as he was riding here he 41:08 encountered a samurai raid on a village and when they attacked him he was forced to defend himself and kill the two men 41:14 in the process ashitaka feels guilt for this act but jico tells him hey you may have killed those guys but you helped me 41:21 and others escape this is a reminder of course of the pragmatic worldview that the film espouses that life and death 41:28 are very closely related and indeed in this instance ashitaka's actions bring both death and life simultaneously much 41:36 like what the dear God does this little optimistic spin on things does seem to get through to ashitaka and what we see 41:42 for most of the rest of the film is that he spreads a rather hopeful message to everyone else that he meets and that's 41:47 simply to live live just for the act of living and the value all life has but 41:53 also because through living you can make the world a better place and also express your gratitude to those who have 41:59 sacrificed to get you here ashitaka does this both through his actions and his words in his actions he's basically as 42:06 much of a pacifist as you could realistically be in the film at every occasion before he enters a physical 42:11 conflict he beseeches the life in front of him to stop to not fight first he does it with the curse for Nago 42:18 imploring him to quell his rage multiple times before he's finally forced to strike when the demon is about to attack 42:23 other people with the aformentioned samurai who were attacking G and the others ashitaka again yells at them to 42:30 let him pass it's only when they refuse and attack him does he fight back the same again happens twice more at the 42:36 climax of the film first he's riding towards the Iron Works when Lord aso's invading Samurai spot him he again 42:43 implores them to let him pass but they start firing on him regardless then a short while later they send Riders to 42:49 chase after him and again ashitaka implores them to put down their arms when it's clear that they won't he 42:55 shoots down one of the men but still lets the other one Escape so time and time again ashitaka avoids taking life 43:02 or even attempting to do so unless he absolutely has to and in the verbal message he gives to others he implores 43:09 them to live when he carries son out of the Iron Works after her fight with eosi she questions why he helped her he says 43:16 I didn't want you to die to which son replies I'm not afraid to die if it will drive away the humans this is another 43:23 area where the two of them are philosophically Polar Opposites and Son shows an image maturity of attitude that 43:28 speaks to someone who hasn't really gotten the chance to mature and develop as a person repeatedly son seems happy 43:34 to throw her life away for seemingly nothing she does this later as well when she charges in with a boes of the climax 43:40 of the film to attack Chico in eos's encampment even though she admits it will be certain death but Ashi taka is 43:46 always trying to get her to stop thinking like this even as son draws his blade against him and threatens to kill 43:51 ashitaka he simply replies live before Rising her up by telling her that she's 43:56 beautiful which completely throws her off guard partly because I think it reminds her of her Humanity I'll have to remember this 44:03 tactic if an attractive woman ever points a sword at my throat at the end of the film when the dear God has seemingly died s says that all is lost 44:11 because the dear God is dead to which ashitaka replies that the dear God cannot die for he is both life and death 44:16 and that through this Final Act he is telling us to live again this is a really optimistic message in a world 44:23 that's so full of pain and misery as we've discussed live because you're Alive live because you can do something 44:29 with that life because giving up is not just illogical but flies in the face of all of those who are dead who no doubt 44:35 would have loved a chance to live longer themselves and that's what ashitaka's plan is at the end of the film s just 44:40 Retreats back into the woods which is a great metaphor for how she hasn't grown at all throughout the film she just goes 44:46 back to being the exact same person in the same location as before Ashi taka by comparison decides to live in the Iron 44:52 Works to help them make a more ethical Society he could just as easily go back to the Mishi tribe now that his curse is 44:59 lifted and return to the life he lived before but that goes against his message live because you can still make this 45:05 cruel world a better place and that's what he plans to do in this new location indeed I think the wisest characters in 45:11 the film shared this message again towards the end of the film koroku The Iron Works villager who ashitaka saved 45:18 watches the fire envelop the Iron Works and he says once the four stars to burn it's all over to which his wife Toki 45:25 replies no it isn't we're still alive again like son koroku is too concerned 45:30 with the temporary and the physical if we lose this material thing we lose it all what is the point of life without it 45:37 but Toki and ashitaka are there to act as reminders to them and us the audience that hey you're still alive aren't you 45:44 so nothing is lost because within you there's an infinite potential to make and create more things worth living for 45:51 and that's the note I'd like to end this video on because I do believe that it's a really valuable lesson for us to carry 45:56 on into our lives amongst the many relevant contemporary messages that I felt the film brings even today the 46:02 world is a bleak place in our real lives too sometimes we're living through an era where it feels like social progress 46:08 is going backwards more and more people are being made to suffer through exploitation and more than anything 46:14 people's empathy just seems to be fading the passive cruelty and vindictiveness of so many has been so starkly on 46:20 display but even when it seems like all is lost it isn't because we are alive 46:26 and with that life life we owe it to those who've lost Theirs to keep going and with this life comes endless 46:32 possibilities of things we can do to change the darkness around us to keep striving to make the world a better 46:37 place for all of us to live in and I hope by making this video and reaching out to you I've helped do so in some 46:44 small tiny way if you've made it all the way to the end of this video then please listen to 46:50 just one more thing easily the hardest part of making video essays like this one is the copyright is issues I won't 46:57 go into too many details so as to not bore you but media analysis like this is covered by a law called fair use which 47:04 allows the use of copyrighted content for the purpose of transformative analysis however big media companies 47:11 love to abuse the power they have and make false copyright claims on videos like mine because well they can and 47:18 there's no punishment for them what this means is that my videos are always at the risk of being flagged temporarily 47:23 taken down or the copyright holder can take all the revenue from the video for themselves all of this is to say that I 47:29 would really really appreciate it if you would consider becoming my Patron and supporting this content directly the 47:35 soak is now my full-time job and it's very stressful to rely primarily on YouTube Revenue as I currently do 47:41 because that's always liable to be cut from or taken away entirely copyright strikes can hit at any time literally 47:48 years later and three strikes result in the termination of a YouTube channel if I don't contest the strike and win which 47:54 thankfully I've managed every time so far but my latest video for example had to go down for 2 weeks while I fought a 48:00 copyright battle with studio jibli and all that time it was taken down for mened got killed in the algorithm as you 48:06 can see here not only does patreon help me feel more comfortable making video essays but I'm also able to provide my 48:12 patrons with access to the videos even if and when they do get taken down and also give Early Access before the rest 48:18 of the public if youve made it all the way here I'm going to go out in the limb and say you at least somewhat enjoy this video so I hope I might have earned some 48:25 of your support and if you'd prefer to use a onetime donation and the link to my PayPal is in the video description as 48:30 well anyways that's it for the financial plug I want to thank you so much for watching the video all the way through 48:36 and I hope you enjoyed it thank you to all my current patrons and do let me know in the comments what you'd like to see me cover next and I hope I'll see 48:42 you very soon for another video have a great day
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25 April 2026
This event began 04/25/2025 and repeats every year forever
Mermaid 2025 DTIYS Black Artist OF Tumblr 04252025
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IN AMENDMENT
Why The Disposable Black Girlfriend Is A Problem
from
Princess Weekes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDOUXna8EA
TRANSCRIPT
0:00 I am a pretty solid fan of the series the first season was incredible the 0:05 memes were fantastic and with there being so many different superhero deconstruction shows and adult animated 0:11 series it managed to still feel fresh I will also watch almost anything with JK 0:18 Simmons in it almost anything but there was one aspect of the show I've always 0:24 strongly disliked I heard you took a few on the chin for me again Invincible was originally a comic book series by Robert 0:31 Kirkman who also co-created and co-wrote The Walking Dead it began publication in 0:36 2003 and lasted for 144 issues and 25 volumes ending in 2018 as the show has 0:43 been adapted for the animated am*zon Prime series Kirkman has admitted to rewriting certain parts of the series 0:48 and updating it the comics had a lot of very Peak 2000's humor gay jokes rward 0:54 poorly written female characters messy depictions of sexual assault so with over a decade Plus distance changes were 1:01 made and I think that's commendable I think that it's really cool to be able to know that your work can be updated 1:06 and then when you're given the opportunity to do so you take it Kirkman told radio times when we sit down with 1:11 the source material if we feel like everything is working we just try to make sure that we uphold what existed in 1:17 the comics trying to put a Fresh coat of paint on it trying to expand things where we can expand them truncate things 1:23 where you feel like that's necessary following the finale for this past season a lot of attention was made to 1:28 the monologue that the character Conquest made that was not present in the original comic no one wants to be my 1:34 friend they think I am unstable [ __ ] me too when I write an episode I always go 1:40 through the comic and think about how I can make things more interesting because I'm writing myself I feel an extra 1:46 responsibility if I'm going to write the same thing a second time I need to make it interesting for me and hopefully make 1:53 it better for the audience one change that happened while 1:59 making the new series series was having the main character Mark Grayson also known as half Korean I think 2:05 representation matters not to get on a soap box or anything especially in the world of superheroes you didn't start 2:11 getting nonwhite superheroes regularly until the 70s and even then through the 2:16 ' 80s and '90s and 2000s they're still somewhat rare yeah but they don't tell them that they all think it's organic 2:22 diversity there's nothing about his race that is essential to that character his race could literally be anything I think 2:28 because we were in that position we decided it'd be a responsible thing to do and a really cool thing to do and do 2:35 something with his race that was interesting in the animated series and that's why we decided to go down that 2:40 road down down down the road down the witches Road in the comics Mark and his 2:46 mother Debbie are very white-coated and I did see the arguments about the our style being ambiguous but using just 2:54 kind of like media General literacy like we can inert that they are white because that is the default in American comics 3:00 and I think up until Mark was confirmed to be Korean in this I don't think anyone would have doubted his whiteness 3:05 anyway Steven Yun is Korean and was cast as the voice actor for Mark and Sandra o voices his mother and so visually they 3:12 were changed to be more Korean in design the show however has never really given 3:17 a lot of cultural markers for the characters beyond that not even the obligatory like no shoes in the house 3:22 but that's not my culture or background to critique it is just interesting that I think the most explicit mention of 3:29 Mark's non whiteness recently was like Dr seismic calling him like token diversity which is like it's my old 3:36 friend's token diversity and gender stereotype another character whose race 3:41 was changed was Amber in the comics Amber was a white character who is L show the difficulty of being the 3:47 girlfriend of a superhero it's very like early Gwen Stacy Lana Lang except she 3:52 gets to live so in the adaptation they wanted to add a bit more layer to the character make her more fleshed out and 3:58 because she is voiced by zaz beats she was turned from a white character to a 4:03 black character and this as often happens with race bending is where the 4:10 trouble [Music] begins hi I am princess weeks if you 4:17 enjoyed this video please like share and subscribe I talk about the intersections between pop culture and gender race etc 4:24 etc and so forth I also have a podcast called open tabs where where I talk 4:30 about fanfiction it is not safe for work but it is very enjoyable uh so if you are interested in 4:37 something about fanfiction uh that is a little bit you know like having a dirty conversation with friends over you know 4:44 the smudy queer fanfic that you enjoy uh check it out we all know that data collectors and spammers have found ways 4:51 to collect the personal information we have floating around the internet often without our knowledge or consent we 4:57 don't think about where we put it and then when certain companies go bankrupt 5:03 we suddenly realize that we have given sites a lot more information than we should have and I think we have all 5:09 recently seen the importance of cyber security when it comes to phone numbers and group chats incog is a powerful 5:17 service that helps you reclaim your online privacy by removing your personal information from data broker databases 5:24 here's why I love it it automates the process of contacting data Brokers to remove your information it is incredibly 5:30 userfriendly and does all the hard work for you and it provides regular updates on the status of your data removal 5:36 requests I have been using incog for a while and it always is updating and I'm constantly getting alerts that there are 5:42 just too many things about me that I have to remove um you know I feel very popular but not in a good way within a 5:49 few months of just starting to use it I saw a significant reduction in spam calls and emails try and cogn for 5:55 yourself and see the difference it can make use code princess weeks at the link below to get exclusive 60% off an annual 6:01 incog plan that's 6:20 incognitomotion shows especially the women essentially the dbg is a black 6:26 female character who exists in a relationship as a orary placeholder for the main relationship the black woman in 6:33 this case is there for diversity she is there to be a foil to whomever the end game romance will be 50/50 she has 6:41 natural hair and the character doesn't have to be poorly written but she is fundamentally a prop and is never a real 6:48 genuine romantic Choice while I am being specific to black women in this Trope people of color in general can often be 6:54 written to fill this role I can think of many black men who have served this 6:59 function oh my God you're Jimmy Olen the photographer from The Daily Planet but let's get back to Invincible even before 7:06 I looked into the comics I felt like Eve was always intended to be endgame for Mark I always got the feeling that he 7:13 was into Eve and that if she hadn't been daing Rex he'd probably have gone for her in the first 7:19 place and when Mark and Amber started dating at least for me it never felt like this was like his great one first 7:26 love it always felt like I'm going to watch him go through all of this just to get to his actual soulmate Eve who is 7:34 non- derogatorily the like comic cliche of overpowered busty redhead who can't 7:40 actually use all her powers because then she would just break the format tragically boring but a friend of mine is working on a video about that and 7:46 they'll cover that there but like yeah that undercurrent poisoned my entire experience of watching Amber Amber was 7:52 already not liked by fans because she was seen to be the worst kind of thing a woman on a show like this can be 7:59 a hypocrite did you hear what I just said I know you're a superhero you know 8:05 you you know I'm not an idiot I figured it out weeks ago oh she knew he was invincible the whole time oh does she 8:12 not want him to save people why is she so mad about the goddamn soup kitchen 8:17 it's not about the soup kitchen she's not really mad about the soup kitchen it's about the whole lying thing but no 8:24 one cares and I'll say this I think Amber was always going to fail with an audience because that kind of character 8:31 is always hated the CW arse hate boards are filled with angry comments about 8:37 women who don't understand why their partner is always ditching them and they don't understand the mission and their 8:43 struggle and their Journey like this happens all the time on Arrow despite the fact that we the audience knew that 8:50 Oliver cheated lied and kept personal stuff from his then partner Laurel in 8:55 their relationship including the fact that her sister who he cheated on Laurel with was alive Laura was always framed 9:01 as the bad guy because her reaction to being lied to was an endless patience 9:08 plus they already had like two cool girl side options on the roster for him anyway but people already hate the kind 9:14 of character narrative Amber was a part of tie that with a character who is opinionated and assertive and black mess 9:22 and even when they do this as well as they can you are never really set up to 9:28 take the side of the person you were always made to feel like that woman is tripping it's already hard and then on 9:34 top of it this is not an important long-term relationship it is meant to teach him a lesson and it's a lesson 9:41 that we have seen done all the time so that's annoying and then on top of it 9:46 because Amber is black we now have to experience racism and Amber is now the only female black character of note in 9:53 the entire series as of right now and when I brought this up on Tik Tok there was a question of if Amber was always 10:00 meant to be sort of a disposable character as a love interest why does it matter if she's black or white why is 10:07 this so of Merit that it has a name and any relevance 10:17 well I have another video coming up shortly about the tragic motto stereotype so I don't want to repeat 10:23 things over and over again so for the sake of this video I need to accept a few things that I would hope you you 10:29 know but here we go race is a construct but it matters in terms of society 10:34 before we had the concept of race as we know it now a lot of stereotypes about women men sex Etc was all nationalistic 10:42 if you look at something like genital herpes which has existed for as long as there have been humans in England they 10:48 call it the French disease in France they call it the napole disease you know white on white violence very elegant um 10:56 which is why when people say they want European nationalism it's like the global impact of the transatlantic 11:01 slave trade and then later European colonialism did help refine race along 11:07 different Norms than previously nationalistic borders this is why even though there has always been slavery 11:13 imperialism Empire Etc we talk about this so much as having an impact because we are still actively dealing with those 11:20 repercussions today that's why we like oh whatever was over Savannah we know Savannah I hear 11:27 you but we have sociology that tells about how it infects us right now in Sabrina strings fearing the black body 11:32 she explains the racial roots of European and American fat phobia in early parts of the book strings 11:38 discusses beauty standards in the 14 and 1500s when the Portuguese started the slave trade major cities became more and 11:45 more familiar with African women and therefore they became part of the regular conversations and trius on 11:51 beauty African women were described as well proportioned and plump and consequently viewed as physically 11:56 appealing yet the burgeoning discourse about African suggested that their purported distinctive facial features 12:02 made them facially unattractive black women were further denigrated due to their surval status therefore despite 12:09 black women's reputations as well-formed Beauties their purported African physiy 12:14 and status as slaves became the early basis of social distinctions between low 12:20 status African women and their High status European counterparts strings then explains that one of the big 12:26 cultural Transformations from African women being seen as physically appealing to a more hypersexualized way was the 12:33 exploitation of Sarah Bartman also known as the hot and tot Venus Bartman was an 12:38 African woman who was part of an erotic freak Show in the 19th century she was a slave who was brought to places in 12:44 Europe where people especially white men would gawk at her cartoonishly depicted large backside it was usually very 12:51 exaggerated and used to place the African female body as Savage and primitive but also inherently sexual 12:59 this racial ftiz worked to do two things hypersexualize black bodies and establish their sexuality as something 13:06 that did not belong to themselves but to white people in the public sphere when 13:11 we think about the role of gender in this time under the patriarchy the ideal woman was meant to be an innocent 13:17 domestic being and this was one way to remove black women from Womanhood 13:24 culturally but then especially in the Americas it was also done legally In 13:30 1855 the state of Missouri prosecuted a slave named Celia Celia murdered her master Robert Nome while he was in the 13:37 process of sexually assaulting her something he allegedly did to her since he purchased her as a teenager during 13:42 her trial her lawyer argued that the laws in missoury concerning ravishment included enslaved women courts rejected 13:49 that as IR rationale the enslaved could neither give nor refuse consent nor 13:55 offer reasonable resistance yet they were criminally responsible and liable 14:01 the slave was recognized as a reasoning subject who possessed intent and rationality solely in the context of 14:08 criminal liability as a result Celia was found guilty of murder and was hanged adding on to this Dynamic of black women 14:15 not being able to be under the law while being subj to the harassment of their owners white women who were married to 14:21 these slave owners possessed resentment towards black women for being their husband's Mistresses which could 14:29 contains so much more agency than an the slave woman would have Mary boyin chestn not known for her diaries about the 14:35 Civil War and probably like the Confederate version of Lenny refall said that slave women were the culprits 14:40 responsible for their husband's downfall and forced decent white women to live with disgraced white men and be 14:47 surrounded by prostitutes I know sometimes when you're asked why a Trope 14:52 exists and someone gives you this long historical answer it can be like really overwhelming because for many people 14:58 it's just not that serious ious they are viewing the experiences of these characters from show to show but to 15:03 understand what the Disposable black woman is a problem you need to understand the social construction around the disposability of black women 15:09 in this country black women could be violently gang and the white men could brag about it and nothing would be done 15:15 it wasn't until the rap of Betty Jee Owens in 1959 that white men in the South were sent to jail for her and one 15:23 of the men who was convicted was paroled tried to kill Owens murdered another black woman and put her in a shallow 15:29 grave this was 66 years ago the new Senate's median age is 15:36 64.7 years which is down from 65.3 the start of the previous Congress and let's 15:42 think about this the transatlantic slave trade starts roughly around what people say is like 15:48 1526 the first significant case of a black woman getting legal justice for 15:54 her sexual assault happened in 1959 do you think that 433 years of seeing 16:01 black women as sexual trinkets as disposable goes away in 60 years or does 16:09 that mentality evolve and translate into other ways that black women now are still spoken and treated sexually in the 16:16 modern era especially when it comes to dating and relationships especially when 16:22 you have to watch dating shows Temptation Island is a humiliation 16:30 ritual where women take men that have cheated on them and test them to see if they're done cheating at least that's 16:36 what I got from the season that I watched they're all beautiful if you guys can take them you can have them 16:42 they get 12 hot men and 12 hot women to serve as Temptations one of the couples 16:47 on the show on this latest season was Taylor and 16:53 Tyler Taylor noted that Tyler's type is Tiny and blonde but during the first 16:58 opportunity they have to pick a date Tyler picks Courtney this beautiful sexy 17:04 black woman and the reaction was telling who do you think that he was 17:09 going to pick yellow dress that is his type to a tea to be honest I'm really proud of him at first I was like Taylor 17:18 what do you mean that it's really Brave of him that's weird however as the series progressed she clocked that tea 17:23 because the girl that Taylor initially clocked as being someone that Tyler would have dated is who he hyper fixates 17:30 on for the rest of the season Courtney this beautiful black woman was simply being used as a prop in this moment for 17:37 him to say something about himself on national television and to stun on his ex let's talk about it so in that moment 17:45 in which Tyler chose me for the first 17:51 date the entire group of girls standing beside me gassed but their gas wasn't in 17:58 a happy gasp it was more in a disappointment gasp in her book The End 18:04 Of Love yeah she's back Sabrina strings quotes from B hooks's 1992 essay eating 18:12 the other while teaching at Yale I walked one bright spring day in the downtown area of New Haven and found 18:18 myself walking behind a group of very blonde very white jock type boys seemingly on aware of my presence these 18:24 young men talked about their plans to [ __ ] as many girls from other racial SL ethnic groups as they could catch before 18:32 graduation they ran it down black girls were high on the list Native American girls hard to find Asian girls all 18:39 lumped into the same category deemed easier to entice were considered Prime targets talking about this overheard 18:46 conversation with my students I found that it was commonly accepted that one shopped for sexual partners in the same 18:52 way one shopped for courses at Yale that raisin ethnicity was a serious category on which selections were B B to these 18:59 young men and their buddies [ __ ] was a way to confront the other as well as a 19:05 way to make themselves over to leave behind white Innocents and enter the world of experience as is often the case 19:12 in this Society they were confident that non-white people had more life experience were more worldly sensual and 19:19 sexual because they were different getting a bit of the other in this case engaging in sexual encounters with 19:25 non-white females was considered a ritual of transcendence a movement out into the world of 19:31 difference that would transform an acceptable right of passage give me just 19:37 half a second what the [ __ ] black women are acceptable to have sex with and date but 19:43 their roles as wives and mothers is not seen as prominent as them being sexual 19:49 objects it doesn't go away when the media attempts to craft characters who were once white into women of color in 19:55 general it often happens with a lack of understanding of what changes about that character due to those dynamics that to 20:01 be a woman of color in the west carries a lot of sexual sociopolitical baggage that needs to be accounted for in 20:07 writing characters if only to be aware of what tropes exist you don't have to like reinvent the wheel but you should 20:15 know a little bit about the women that you're going to be writing 20:23 about the thing about this troop is that when it shows up in media it's like this 20:28 death by a thousand paper cuts because a lot of people are again viewing this Dynamic solely from the perspective of 20:34 the one show itself they're not trying to automatically build connections it is a building block and usually from shows 20:41 that want to be inclusive but they still put black characters in very cliche roles or they race Band characters and 20:48 ignore race hoping that it will be received as a colorblind accomplishment Allah a Hamilton or a brandy Cinderella 20:56 that ignores that the stage in the Disney musical are almost most very organic moments for colorby and casting at least a couple years ago and that 21:03 they are short content compared to a long television series one of the most 21:08 recent examples of this that really gets on my nerves has been the casting of the members of the House valan on House of 21:16 the Dragon uh just spoilers for what's on the show no spoilers for the future just generic book wiing your lips are 21:23 moving and you're complaining about something that's winging this one's been killed six times 21:29 you don't hear him bitching about it in the book series H Valerian is one of the surviving houses along with the 21:35 targaryens from old Valeria and they often have silver gold hair and purple eyes they've intermarried with the House 21:42 Targaryen quite often and they even arrived in Westeros before their dragon flying kin for example Egon the conquer 21:49 and his Sister Wives had a father who was a Targaryen and a mother who was from house Valyrian actor Steve tucon 21:56 was cast as Lord corus valy and his family has been portrayed as an interracial black family the problem I 22:02 had with this casting was not the the cast themselves they're all really excellent the problem is that if you read Fire and Blood you know that Lor 22:10 and Lena were going to die so there is already that element now being added onto them as being these biracial black 22:17 visibly characters who are like the in between spouses for Damon and rira in 22:22 the show's defense they do try to make Lor a more complex gay man and I think that's really good but it's not that 22:29 great either and with Lena they completely admit Damon actively courting her mourning her trying to saved their 22:37 life you know Lena and Rene's relationship which is also somewhat sapply coded is completely ignored and 22:43 other than like when he's tripping balls there's no indication that Damon valued their marriage or their daughters which 22:49 is deeply [ __ ] annoying you know like even in the Next Generation Baya is engaged to Jace and yes they have spoken 22:56 to each other but these characters are super hardcore engaged and there is zero romantic attention given to them at all 23:02 it's like I know there's a war but his mother has room to kiss so why not he they made an entire house of characters 23:10 mixed race most of them are going to be characters that are not going to do anything relevant give them little to no development on top of it and they have 23:17 framed it in a way where like the targaryens and the valyrians are visually racially 23:23 distinct and in reality they wouldn't be because if you're going to say that house valaran is black 23:28 and house Taren is white and even when that combination happens you can have a blackl looking character like Baya who 23:35 according to this is like 1/4 black if we're going to use pundit Square weird race science and they still look like 23:42 that I'm just saying R could look like hi Berry if we're really going to keep it a bug 50 like there it doesn't really 23:48 make that much sense they're just kind of hoping that we don't think about it and I find that to be a little annoying 23:54 cuz I do enjoy the show but that racial Pol politics of it and and just kind of 24:00 like putting them into all these spaces while omitting actual black characters it it greates the nerves flipping onto 24:07 another genre brierton which I'm only bringing up slightly cuz I can't talk about that franchise but other than 24:13 Queen Charlotte the series has yet to have a black woman at the center of a romance and we will see what happens in 24:19 the next season CU they did do the whole um gender bent and I discussed this in a previous video but Marina that character 24:26 was plucked from an entirely different book to be a false romantic rival in the relationship between Colin and Penelope 24:32 that became very racist and very racialized coded and if they keep the same element around for the book cannon 24:39 with Eloise is going to be an issue again but I think my favorite example of this that really gets on my nerves is 24:44 the originals which is the spin-off series of The Vampire Diaries if your life would Chang to a 24:51 man you left you despite your devotion what choice would you have but 24:56 to break fre Elijah Michael has two kinds of Love interests white brunettes 25:02 and black women and three of those white brunettes are pretty much the same person okay and I could go on and on 25:08 about how that series totally played in the face of every single black character on it but I won't today but it would be 25:14 exhausting to like have time to spend with alijah having these very deep intricate relationships with these black 25:21 women in his past only for them never to matter as much as his Precious Precious Haley they will constantly have these 25:28 these men these white men having sex having these intimate relationships with all these black women even like in the 25:34 case of Elijah with one character AA who is like this really big epic relationship who does she get merked by 25:45 [Music] Haley played in our faces like the most 25:52 successful relationship between a Michaelson and a black person are it's it's oh my God it's 25:58 Freya and her and her girlfriend who's a werewolf who she tortured when they start who she tortured the whole time um 26:06 um Marcel and Rebecca who are also related cuz they're like step aunt and step nephew Julie PL is never going to 26:12 see Heaven if if I go to heaven and Julie ple is there I'm leaving expeditiously it's not just women as I 26:18 said before you have Jamie James olon from Supergirl hail from Lost Girl dolls from her Robin from Buffy Finn from 26:27 [ __ ] star Wars oh my God my 26:33 Shayla my Shayla anyway now to address the 26:40 counterargument that I can hear some people saying does this mean that every single ex-girlfriend who is Black is 26:47 this tro no no actually I think a really good example of this oddly is from the 26:54 show you well hello there he was about this stalker 27:00 serial killer named Joe who attaches to a woman in a very unhealthy way while giving some very intense voice over 27:06 every season and in season 3 The Twist starts off as that he's interested in one woman at first but then that woman 27:13 dies and eventually he ends up falling for this character named maranne who is played by iconic blazion tati Gabrielle 27:20 and she is treated with the exact same kind of attention Vigor and intensity as Joe's other love interest she's also one 27:28 of them who doesn't die okay Joe Al Al 27:34 Ally Al no no impossible and there's actually another black girl who Joe does date in season one who is somewhat Adas 27:41 to this Trope but she is a never expected to be treated like a traditional love interest like it's very clear like what she that she's being 27:48 used in that sense and B not only does she survive but she left the relationship with such dignity that it 27:54 actually makes her a more memorable character despite being only in like I think two episodes you're 28:01 dumping me I'm not dumping you you're amazing I'm amazing but you kind of what 28:07 don't want to do me anymore there's never a good time do not talk for a minute please oh she's going to slap 28:13 me my curling iron okay then that's it like the problem is not them breaking up 28:19 or the relationship not being endgame it's the framing the treating of them as a stepping stone to a better wider 28:27 relationship this this is why even though boy meet's world ended with Shawn and Angela not being a couple them being 28:32 open-ended enough was already having the possibility of them getting back together especially because this is a show with unrealistic romantic 28:39 expectations only to then jump to the spin-off and make it so that Angela was married to some random man hasn't had a 28:44 relationship with the cor cast in years and returned to give Shawn her blessing 28:49 to marry a tiny blonde white woman so that he could be Sabrina Carpenter's father-in-law and I love Sabrina 28:55 Carpenter now but that was very hard for me for some people that's one of the rare places where you saw a very white 29:01 show have a black woman Be Loved These Things Are deeply frustrating we have so 29:06 little representation and it's not that we needed to be perfect we would just want it to be done with like care and 29:12 consideration and concern from the beginning it shouldn't take you like three seasons to finally figure out how 29:19 to style Anna joke properly as Starfire you know like although it is Titans and everyone 29:25 did look busted so in that case there is a a little a little bit of Grace to be had it's deeply frustrating it's deeply 29:31 frustrating to have such a rampant whitewashing of certain characters of color and comics and moves and adaptations but in the comics they can 29:38 be turned into like whatever prompt people need them to be it is frustrating that even when they're like the kindest 29:44 most cam androll race B version of a character that they can be turned into a villain for being in the way of a 29:49 non-existent gay ship it is deeply unserious to show a character dating and having deep relationships with a black 29:56 woman all the time but then make every important screen time for a relationship with them be a white woman so we remain 30:03 connected you and I in spite of everything that you have done and then to turn off the screen and then live in 30:09 a society that doesn't want to teach or acknowledge history or social context when you in habit and existence 30:15 constantly being dictated by said 30:20 realities the Disposable black girlfriend is a frustrating Trope I think the reason why it's so difficult 30:26 is because it sits at this intersection of sexism racism and bad writing especially that last one going back to 30:33 Amber from Invincible the fact is that female love interest for superheroes often get caught in this Dynamic that if 30:39 they are not totally at the whim of the man they are villainized into someone un 30:44 trustworthy who doesn't get the life you know add Racin to it and you end up in a situation like Iris West Allen on the 30:51 flash where the audience is so antagonized about the idea of Iris being 30:57 like in important like the reaction to Iris saying We Are The Flash should be 31:03 studied how Candace pad was treated as a race band character is like literally like academic worthy I know that often 31:10 when you talk about issues of race people who are reactionary go to this idea of like oh you're teaching black women not to see themselves as lovable 31:17 by repeating this stuff and there is something to the fact that people are very quick to to weaponize statistics 31:23 about black women's relationships at the same time black women already know these things because they date 31:28 we live in the world we know how we're hypersexualized we know how we're stigmatized it isn't new and for me just 31:34 thinking back to myself explaining that it was invented purposefully to reduce you might be a new experience and that's 31:42 why it's important to talk about it because these things are not written in stone it doesn't mean it has to be this 31:47 way and for the record also before someone says it I'm also not saying that you need to date black women okay uh if 31:53 you don't want the little taste of Africa get away from me okay you don't have to date black women and that's not what anyone is saying uh but it is worth 31:59 examining why you think of black women as an inferior pick same with latino women or any kind of women it's not 32:06 about changing your preference it's about examining your racism your 32:11 internalized racism that's see how it's different you know my preference is Jin 32:17 Wu from solo leveling and toi from jiujitsu Kaizen and somehow I manag to 32:23 wake up every day and not treat other people like [ __ ] some at the middle of the night I like I think about Andromeda 32:30 in Greek mythology Andromeda is the princess of Ethiopia and because her mother talks about 32:36 aphrod first mistake she is chained to a rock to be fed to a monster like classic damsel and distress stuff Ethiopia as 32:43 far as we know in the ancient world is probably around like Sudan ancient Nubia 32:49 the word allegedly means like burnt faces and again there was no Africa or African identity at this point it was 32:55 very tribal so you have Andromeda this princess this ultimate archetype of 33:01 Damsel in Distress looking less like the classical images that we see of her in 33:06 the text is is said to be a darker skinned woman and it's Ved between like African Asian they don't really know how 33:13 geography Works back then so but we can we can say likely probably African right 33:19 there's nothing inherent about the way people have treated black women it is programming and learn behavior and it can be unlearned it just has to be named 33:26 and called out because black women CIS and trans have been taught to be strong 33:31 in the face of every disrespect but the people who started that those who perpetuate it fixing it should be their 33:39 burdens to carry we have always had this potential to be loved and we deserve to 33:44 have it be seen on TV and if you're going to put black women in your shows put some goddamn respect on our 33:52 names thank God for Castlevania doct turn season 2 33:59 actually let me go rewatch that right now thanks for watching 34:04 [Music] 34:28 n [Music] 34:59 n [Music] 35:22 [Applause] 35:28 he 35:34 [Music] 36:02 he [Music] [Applause] [Music] 36:26 [Music] 36:52 oh [Music]
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25 April 2026
This event began 04/25/2025 and repeats every year forever
corridors of power pbs 04252025
VIDEO
https://www.pbs.org/video/the-corridors-of-power-k8hoys/
REFERRAL
https://www.pbs.org/show/the-corridors-of-power/
TRANSCRIPT
♪ ♪ ♪ [Radio chatter] ♪ [Airplane engine] [Explosions] ♪ [Footsteps] [Indistinct conversation] Paul Wolfowitz, voice-over: When I think about the Holocaust and what came after World War II ended and how many times people said, "Never again, never again," and it happens over and over again, after a while, you wonder, "Is this just hot air? Are these just words?" ♪ I can tell you for sure, too often there are cases where we make a mockery of this idea of "never again." ♪ Henry Kissinger: If you look at human history, you have to say that genocide has occurred much too frequently. Yes, we should oppose it, but you cannot simply say the United States has an obligation by military force to oppose evil wherever it exists in the world. Are we then willing to stay involved in getting an outcome that we... Anthony Lake, voice-over: With power comes responsibility, and if you have huge power and there are problems in the world that you could fix and you don't fix them, then you're being irresponsible. Lake: Conflicting impulses out of this phenomenon from abroad... Colin Powell, voice-over: We can't go everywhere. We are not the world policeman, although, as has been famously said, guess who the world calls for whenever there's a mugging. Bush: We will have a continuing responsibility... James Baker, voice-over: When the body bags start coming home, if you don't have a significant national interest at stake, you will lose the policy, and you won't be able to sustain it. The human toll shows... Albright, voice-over: There are always people in the room that will argue and say, "Oh, well, you know, why should we care? What does it matter to us?" I believe in peace, but I'm not a pacifist, and I believe that there are times when using force can actually bring stability in the long run and save a lot of people. Barack Obama: Change doesn't come from on high. If you're waiting for Congress... Sandy Berger, voice-over: "Never again" is a moral statement, but is it a guiding operational principle? Does it help answer whether to go into Bosnia or not, whether to go into Syria or not, whether to go into Rwanda or not? ♪ I don't think so. I think it is a moral statement by the world that it should not stand by and watch mass atrocities. It is not neither legally binding or politically binding. [People cheering] ♪ Good evening. These are the sights and sounds of the continuing celebration. The Berlin Wall, once it divided East from West, now on its way to becoming an artifact of history. ♪ Woman, voice-over: In the last few months, the reign of communism ended in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. The U.S.S.R. that controlled Eastern Europe with an iron fist for 4 decades is now dissolved by Mr. Gorbachev. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. stands as the only global superpower. Powell, voice-over: My whole adult life to that point was participating in the Cold War. Everything that I had trained for, every tactic that I had mastered was now gone because they're gone, you know, and Gorbachev said to me one day at one of the summit meetings-- and his eyes were twinkling-- he said, "Ah, Generale, Generale, "I'm so very, very sorry. You will have to find a new enemy." ♪ Bush: A new world order can emerge, a new era, an era in which the nations of the world-- East and West, North and South-- can prosper and live in harmony, a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. [Chanting] [Explosion] [Artillery fire] Woman, voice-over: Fighting raged anew in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina today. Albright, voice-over: With the end of the Cold War, all the different kind of worms started crawling around in terms of the ethnic dislikes that people had of each other, and that was true in the Balkans. ♪ People wanted a new world order, but I think instead, it became a new world disorder. Man, voice-over: The Serbs are trying to reverse the decision to establish the independent Muslim state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. [Speaking Serbian] Woman, voice-over: The Serb logic of the conflict is to create areas that are ethnically cleansed from Muslims. Man: [Speaking Serbian] [Explosion] ♪ [Explosion] ♪ [Dog barking] ♪ Samantha Power: When I graduated from college, I actually moved to Berlin first. While I was living there, thousands of refugees were pouring in from the former Yugoslavia, and, I mean, they were the picture of desperation, and here I, a sentient 20-something, I'm seeing these people, and all I wanted to do was run away. In other words, you know, I just was sad for them in the abstract, but it was not my problem. ♪ [Child crying] ♪ I think for a lot of people, the sense of what one ought to do derives a lot from what one feels one can do, and when you think that you're a 22-year-old liberal arts graduate who has nothing to offer these people, your internal reflexive mechanisms almost seem to say to you, "Then don't bother learning more "because it's going to break your heart "and you won't be able to do anything about it, so, you know, just go check out the soccer game." ♪ Man, voice-over: While shelling continues today in Sarajevo, the news focused on reports of Nazilike detention camps being run by Serbs. Power, voice-over: I moved back to Washington, and I was an intern working for a man named Mort Abramowitz, who had been in government for 35 years. He was consumed with what was happening in Bosnia, and my job as his intern just was to basically prepare him for his speeches, his op-eds, edit what he did, and then, because it was my job, I began learning, and, honestly, I don't know if it was my head or my heart that nearly exploded, but I just could not believe what was being done. ♪ Once I'd had this inconvenient knowledge, then I was off to the ra-- then I had to figure out-- oh, my gosh-- what was I going to do to help, so I went to Bosnia to cover the conflict. [Explosions] Arriving for the first time in Sarajevo, I was most struck by a sense of claustrophobia just by this topography. The hills all around were just lined with gun positions, and, whether that was snipers or actual artillery positions where they were just raining artillery and shell fire onto the city, you just had a sense of vulnerability. [Gunfire and explosions] [People screaming] [Gunfire continues] [People shouting] Aah! Aah! Bush, voice-over: I am very concerned about it, and I'm concerned about ethnic cleansing. I'm concerned about attacks on Muslims, but it isn't gonna be solved by sending in the 82nd Airborne. [Applause] Governor Clinton, you have one minute. We can't get involved in the quagmire, but we must do what we can. It's enormous responsibility to step into the White House, to take over the world in terms of your responsibility. In Clinton's case, we were running against George H.W. Bush, who'd spent his life in foreign policy. Clinton: There are things that can be done... Berger, voice-over: Here's this governor from Arkansas, and our goal was to make sure that Clinton lost no votes because of foreign policy. We weren't going to beat Bush on foreign policy. Clinton: I would begin with air power against the Serbs to try to restore the basic conditions of humanity. History has shown us that you can't allow the mass extermination of people and just sit by and watch it happen. ♪ Man: Ladies and gentlemen, let us all join together in welcoming the next President of the United States of America. [Cheering and applause] Clinton: On this day, the American people have voted to make a new beginning. [Cheering] ♪ Leon Panetta: Every president goes through a learning process. You suddenly walk in the Oval Office, and you're having to deal with national security issues, and you suddenly get a group from the Joint Chiefs of Staff-- all in uniform, all with their medals-- all telling you something that should or should not be done, and, very frankly, it's intimidating because, you know, you may have been a senator, you may have been a governor, but you never had to make decisions that involve life and death. Gore: Or at least that's what all the managers believe. Leon Fuerth, voice-over: There was a peculiar situation as the Clinton administration took over. It inherited the possibility for a different world order because the old world order was gone, and so the question was what the Clinton administration's attitude going to be about the use of force as an instrument of national policy. Yes, you were trying to come up with a policy solution for a given country, like Bosnia, but at the same time, it had to somehow fit into another equation that related to American power almost anywhere in the world. [Explosions] [Siren] Power, voice-over: At the beginning of the war, the Bosnian people had such hope with President Clinton that we were going to act, and that's their sense of curiosity, and, I mean, they knew everything. They knew McCain, Biden, you know, who was up, who was down, who's up for re-election. I mean, when your life depends on it-- And I was struck in the most remote parts of Bosnia how knowledgeable people were who were just desperate for salvation. [Indistinct conversation] Berger: There remain areas of fundamental difference. Berger, voice-over: Beginning of '93, there are a series of meetings in the White House, and there were sharp disagreements, particularly about the use of force. The military was strongly against it. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that point, General Powell, national hero, was adamantly opposed to it. Albright: We were all new, and Colin Powell had just won the Gulf War. He was the hero of the Western world, big, handsome man with medals all over... Minimum loss of life... Albright, voice-over: and he was the best briefer ever. We would ask him, "So what can we do?" and he would always say, "Well, we can take this mountain, and we can do this," and ultimately, he would say, "But it would take several hundred thousand troops and then many billions of dollars," so he would walk us up a hill and say we could do it and then drop us off the other side, but he was the expert. Powell: I never intended to intimidate anyone. I always intended to give them straightforward military advice as to how force could be used, and it was theirs to make the political decision. What Madeleine overlooks in that is that, even though my uniform is very lovely and I know how to brief a group, there was no enthusiasm within that group to send military force into the former Yugoslavia because it looked like it was coming apart. Albright: I have to admit in my case, that I was deeply moved by what I had seen of people being killed or ethnically cleansed not for anything that they had done, but who they were, and I thought, we "We have to do something." I actually got into an argument with him over this, and I finally said to him, "Colin, what are you saving this military for?" and he got really mad at me, and he said, "Our soldiers are not toy soldiers." "Why can't we use this wonderful army you're always talking about?" and I just made the point to her, "We can use it anytime you ask if you have a clear purpose of what you're trying to achieve"... I want to have a strategic force capability that still preserves... Powell, voice-over: and I don't know what objectives would have been set or what political goals the president might have articulated at that time. He didn't articulate any. Look. You know as much about this as I do right now. We'll just have to look into it, and we'll see, but meanwhile... Lake, voice-over: I think the president's instincts were always for stronger action, but I think by temperament, while he was always prepared to act, he also always wanted consensus, and that, I think, for the first year, certainly, of the administration was a particular problem because then he was always looking for the compromise, the consensus. He wasn't making the hard decisions and saying, "Sorry. I'm going with this and this." ♪ [Indistinct conversation] [Dog barking] ♪ Power, voice-over: When you would go into so-called Republika Srpska, you knew you were entering the heart of darkness. You would drive down a road in this little ethnically cleansed statelet run by Bosnian Serb nationalists, and you would see the home lights. You could imagine the hearth inside, windows intact, and then the very next house would have on it graffiti that would say, you know, "Muslims go home"... [Dog barking] and then 4 houses down, you'd see another bright, warm house where people were just going on with their lives. ♪ The sense in the air that evil had transpired is-- I mean, the air felt thick with that recent history somehow. [Whimpers] [Insects buzzing] ♪ Weixiong Chen: Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, I thank you for giving CTED the opportunity to brief the Council on the 14th report... Albright, voice-over: As U.N. ambassador, I saw on a daily basis other members of the Security Council, as well as the representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, [Indistinct], would come to me every day and say, "Your president said he was gonna do something. You're not doing anything. Do something"... ♪ and I could judge what was going on in Sarajevo because I went a number of times... [Explosion] and driving through Sarajevo, I was just stunned that this kind of a thing could possibly happen. We're talking about the 1990s. ♪ Then the question is, how do you go back and not sound like a blithering idiot, emotional? And I went back to the White House, and I said, "I was in Sarajevo, where buildings had been bombed, "where there were fires still burning "and smoke coming still from a variety of buildings and people huddled on the street." [Gunfire] Man: This--if this-- ♪ Albright, voice-over: "Why should we not help people "that also were living in a war zone that didn't need to be a war zone?" and I said something like, "Gentlemen, history will judge us on this." They would say, "Don't be so emotional, Madeleine." [Gunfire] Woman: [Wailing] ♪ [Gunfire and wailing continue] ♪ [Gunshot] Man: [Speaking Serbian] Girl: [Crying] Woman: [Speaks Serbian] Girl: [Speaks Serbian] Elie Wiesel: Treblinka, Birkenau, Auschwitz-- these names and others were known to officials in Washington. The Pentagon knew. The White House knew. Most governments knew. Mr. President, indifference is a sin, and I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia. I cannot sleep since. We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country. [Applause] Man: In response to the bloodshed in Bosnia, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel asked you yesterday to do something to stop the fighting. Is the United States considering taking unilateral action such as airstrikes against Serb artillery sites? Well, first, let me say, as you know, for more than a week now, we have been seriously reviewing our options for further action, and, to be fair, our allies in Europe have been willing to do their part. I do not think we should act alone unilaterally, nor do I think we will have to. Berger: We finally agreed to a position that we would use NATO air power to strike Serb positions if they continued to shell indiscriminately. We took that to the Europeans, and they wanted nothing to do with it. We discovered how boxed in we were by the Europeans. ♪ The Europeans said, "That's not acceptable because "our troops are on the ground "trying to keep the peace "and you can't start a war "with our troops in the middle of this. "You Yanks, you just don't understand. "You're not willing to pay the price, "you're not willing to come in here on the ground, "don't talk about lift and strike. You don't get it"... [Gunfire] so there was friction between us. They were taking losses. Soldiers did die. Man on television: [Speaking French] ♪ [Gunfire] [Men shouting] Lake, voice-over: Being a superpower does not mean you can put up a little sign on your desk saying, "We are the superpower," and then there are buttons you can push and you push a NATO button and the NATO will do what you want, et cetera. You know, superpower means that you have leadership, and that leadership involves bringing along coalitions, bringing along your allies and others, or you're gonna fail. Man: For 22 months, the world has watched and often tried to ignore the bloody civil war in Bosnia. It is hard to watch and impossible to ignore what happened there today. At least 60 civilians-- men, women, and children-- were killed, at least 200 injured when a market full of Saturday shoppers was shelled. Man: Very concerned about the efforts by some elements... Different man: In Africa today, a plane carrying the presidents of two African nations has apparently been shot down in the capital of Rwanda, where a civil war formally ended a few months ago. Woman, voice-over: After the death of the two presidents, the racial tensions between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority might spark again into an ugly ethnic war. [Birds chirping] Nancy Soderberg: I was sitting in my office, which was just off the Situation Room, and the Situation Room brought me a alert, which back then, a really serious alert had two red dots on it, literally two red dots, and that was like, "Pay attention to this right away," so I read it, and I had the CIA brief, and I said, "Well, what's the worst-case scenario with these two presidents gone?" and they said, "Another round of violence, maybe 20,000 killed," and I thought, "Well, what should we do to stop that?" and they didn't really have an answer. That's not the CIA's job. Prudence Bushnell: When the airplane went down, I sent the memo up saying that the peace agreement is at risk. You know, there's chaos in the streets, and worst-case scenario, if we don't do anything, hundreds of thousands of people could be killed. Man on radio: [Speaking Kinyarwanda] ♪ [Indistinct conversation] ♪ Man, voice-over: Massacres continue in the Central African nation of Rwanda. The killing is a calculated attempt to exterminate the minority Tutsi that makes up 10% of Rwanda's 7 million people. ♪ Lake: I can recall the first time this really came to my attention, and I remember explicitly asking afterwards one of the people there from the Defense Intelligence Agency, "What's going on? Who's killing whom? Why?" and his basically saying, "Don't know," and I should have when I got back to my office said, "I want to know more," and insisted on getting more involved, and I was at the time arguing about whether to intervene in Haiti and Bosnia and all kinds of stuff, and I didn't, and that was-- that's on me, and I'll regret it forever. Clinton: There are about 250 Americans there, and I'm very concerned about their safety. Man: ...is clearly part of the threat that we have to deal with. George Moose, voice-over: I think it's fair to say that Africa tends to fall to the bottom of the list in terms of our American priorities. You're talking about a lot of factors that lead to that. Some of them have to do with how we calculate our national interests. Some of those are, I would say, racial and racist. All of those things, though, result in the fact that Africa and Africa's concerns and African interests and needs tend to fall to the bottom of that list of priorities. ♪ [Indistinct conversation] ♪ Bushnell, voice-over: Within 24 hours, there were two things that I learned almost simultaneously. One was Madame Agathe, the prime minister. [Cheering] I cannot tell you how she was slaughtered, but she was slaughtered-- she was pregnant-- in front of her husband and her children. At the same time, we were learning that the Belgian peacekeepers who had been there to provide protection for her had been kidnaped and taken to the airport and killed. Oh, my gosh, we knew if they started killing white people, it would be over. We in African Affairs did not have the rose-colored glasses and thinking that, yes, this is a continent like any others and we look upon African people as we look upon European people. John Shattuck, voice-over: The fact that they decapitated the Belgian peacekeepers so gruesomely and that the killings were so violent in that sense, one has to assume that the genocide planners very carefully said, "Let's really kill "some representatives of the international community early in this process to get them to withdraw," and they succeeded. Clinton: I have had extended conversations about the situation in Rwanda, and I just want to assure the families of those who are there that we are doing everything we possibly can to be on top of the situation, to take all appropriate steps to try to ensure the safety of our citizens there. ♪ Laura Lane, voice-over: I remember when the order came that we were gonna start evacuating nonessential personnel and then move eventually to closing down the embassy. ♪ We were focused on how we would get Americans to centers and then move them overland to Burundi and negotiate the ceasefires so that those convoys wouldn't be fired on. [Radio chatter] ♪ Bushnell, voice-over: The deal we made was that in return for safe passage of diplomats-- not only Americans, but diplomats of other embassies-- we would not take any Rwandan citizens with us, and we left our U.S. government employees, colleagues, to fend for themselves. ♪ Lane, voice-over: We could have, you know, any host of other nationalities join our convoy, just not the Rwandans, and I remember thinking at that moment, "How can that be? "The orders that I'm being given, "I get to live because I was born in Evanston, Illinois, "but that woman that just brought her child "to the embassy begging that someone take that child, we're going to condemn that child to death?" [Radio chatter] ♪ You saw images. ♪ The bodies that I saw, I couldn't make sense of it, right? As you're driving along, you just think how out of place it is to see the bodies laying by the roadside. You didn't know how to-- Like, conceptually, I knew that someone had been killed, and I guess I tried to just keep moving on and focus on the task at hand. ♪ Bushnell, voice-over: As soon as the Americans were out of Rwanda, the interest of the White House evaporated. Point of fact, the president had come to State Department for an official dinner and stopped by the crisis group to say thank you and congratulations for getting Americans out, and that was the last I heard about Bill Clinton's interest in Rwanda. Man: They authorized war crimes. Richard A. Clarke, voice-over: It's very easy in hindsight to say that the United States should have dropped the 82nd Airborne into Kigali, but remember the time. The Clinton administration had just suffered enormous political problems by the American people waking up one day and finding out that we had troops in Somalia and that some of those troops got killed, and the American people, the American media, the American Congress asked, "What the hell are you doing in Somalia?" [Helicopter whirring] Man, voice-over: What started as a humanitarian intervention to feed starving people turned into a nightmare. 18 U.S. servicemen were killed today when two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down. They were dragging him by ropes, and they paused every once in a while to allow people in the crowd to abuse the body by kicking it or stomping on it and spitting on it. Berger, voice-over: A horrible thing to watch because they kept running the film of our soldiers being dragged through the streets. It was horrifying to watch, horrible, horrible day. It was one of the worst days for me in the White House. Clarke: After that experience, everybody in Washington and everybody around the country said, "Let's not do that again. "When American interests are not at stake, "Let's not put American forces in a situation where they can be killed." ♪ Bushmill: We saw the United States government take the lead in removing peacekeepers in the face of a genocide. I will never ever forget the look on the face of team members, including our desk officer from Rwanda, when I was notified that we were going to remove the peacekeepers. He looked at me and he said, "Do you know what's going to happen?" It was a look of utter horror because both of us knew what was going to happen, and it did happen. [Distant siren] Clarke: Rwanda was discussed. President knew about it. The senior leaders of the government all knew about it. People were aware. What I'm saying is that no one of all the senior leadership in the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House-- no one ever said, "Gee, let's drop in the 82nd Airborne." Nobody cared. That it was the only way I can--I can put it. Nobody wanted to hear about it. Nobody wanted to do anything about it because the decision had been made we would not. [Helicopter whirring] [Radio chatter] ♪ Shattuck, voice-over: I wanted to actually go and see for myself what was happening. I was the first person in the government to actually fly over Rwanda. I had the plane fly as low as possible, and the most vivid example of what I saw was on the border area between Tanzania and Rwanda, where there was a river. From several thousand feet, it looked as if there were these little logs that were flowing in the river down toward Lake Victoria. I said, "I don't understand this. Let's go down." ♪ These were not logs. These were bodies, and there were many of them. They were flowing down the river, and that's why they looked like logs, there were so many. ♪ The physical elements of the genocide, it's just something that stays with you that you can't ever get out of you. ♪ Sometimes when I'm in a small river, I think I see bodies floating in the river. ♪ I went from this trip to Geneva, and in Geneva, I gave a press conference in which I said, "Genocide is going on in Rwanda," and then I was told by Washington, particularly by the Legal Advisor's Office of the State Department, that that was not the policy. We don't call this genocide. It was against policy. Ha ha! The U.S. policy was that we haven't determined yet that this is a genocide. It was unbelievable. ♪ Frankly, a lot of us, especially after John Shattuck's visit out there, that question was answered. If anything could be called genocide, this was it, and the next step was, "OK. "If you acknowledge "it's genocide, "then what are you going to do about it?" right? If you say it's genocide and we have a genocide convention, what's your obligation? ♪ Alan Elsner: Does the State Department have a view as to whether or not what is happening could be genocide? Well, as I think you know, the use of the term "genocide" has a very precise legal meaning, although it's not strictly a legal determination. There are there are other factors in there, as well. Before we begin to use that term, we have to know as much as possible about the facts of the situation. How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide? Alan, that's just not a question that I'm in a position to answer. ♪ Moose: The case of Rwanda revealed our bureaucracy at its very worst. ♪ It took us forever to get a paper up to Secretary Christopher that would make the case that this was genocide and we had to declare it as such, even if it meant we did not know what the next step was. ♪ Clinton: I have come today to pay the respects of my nation to all who suffered and all who perished in the Rwanda genocide. During the 90 days that began on April 6 in 1994, Rwanda experienced the most intensive slaughter in this blood-filled century we are about to leave. It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world, there were people like me sitting in offices day after day after day who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror. I did feel, even though I think his apology was genuine, that it was a very hollow moment. It was hollow because, heh, 800,000 people had perished and nothing had been done. The fact is, where there is a political will, there is a political way. I cannot imagine that the President of the United States could not have influenced the policy process, and he did not, and to say later on it was because of ignorance is, to me, unbecoming of the leader of the free world and the American foreign policy, unbecoming. ♪ Power: Walter Laqueur, the Holocaust historian, had a line that I will never forget. He wrote, "By 1943, the vast majority of Americans "knew that more than a million Jews were no longer alive, "but that did not necessarily mean that they knew that they were dead," and, to me, this horror of a concept really speaks to the two kinds of knowledge that people can have, you know-- a sort of surface knowledge where you're processing clinically, cognitively, but nothing is really reaching you and then a different kind where you're, you know, "They've been killed. They're--" and this idea of no longer alive versus dead, I feel, really speaks to a lot of the numbing that bureaucracy can facilitate. Man: Good evening. More than 3 years after the beginnings of the hostilities, the war in Bosnia is still charging a bloody toll on the civilian population. The Serb army is reinforcing its forces positioned around the Muslim enclaves of Zepa, Gorazde, and Srebrenica and is slowly closing in. ♪ The town of Srebrenica was the first of 6 areas in Bosnia that the United Nations Protection Force vowed to actually protect. ♪ Power, voice-over: In the summer of 1995, we began to get word that the Serbs were moving toward what had been declared a safe area. Thousands of civilians did what civilians all around the world do in times of crises when the U.N. is around. They see that blue flag, and they go toward it. That's all they got. Woman, voice-over: From positions less than a mile south of Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb tanks and several thousand soldiers overran a battalion of 400 Dutch peacekeepers. [Speaking Serbian] Power, voice-over: Srebrenica was special to the Serbs, special in the sense that it was atop the list of places where it wasn't just territory they wanted. They wanted to inflict a degree of harm that made it impossible for these people ever to live in this territory again, and the way you do that is genocide. [Indistinct conversation] Power, voice-over: I watched from Sarajevo on Serb TV as Ratko Mladic went, was patting the heads of children, offering them candy. "Nobody will be harmed. Women and children this way, men this way," and you just saw the faces of these people. They knew. Like, we didn't know, but they knew. Mladic: [Speaking Serbian] Peter Galbraith, voice-over: Ratko Mladic was just-- He was a psychopathic murderer. I think that's the only way to describe him, a man of extraordinary cruelty who directed the ethnic cleansing. [Speaking Serbian] Shattuck, voice-over: General Ratko Mladic and his Bosnian Serb forces basically rounded up all of the people of the town, separated men from boys and women and children and old people, sent the women and children and old people on busses out of the town, and basically began to go after the men. ♪ Man: [Speaking Serbian] ♪ Galbraith, voice-over: At this point, everybody is focused on the women and girls who were being bused out and the fact that, you know, the women are being robbed and a few of the girls are being taken off the busses and raped, and so that's the human rights story, and I'm trying to get people to focus on the missing men and boys. [Speaks Serbian] ♪ [Distant machine gun fire] Man: [Speaks Serbian] [Speaks Serbian] [Speaking Serbian] [Distant machine gun fire] [Birds chirping] ♪ [Speaks Serbian] Man: [Speaks Serbian] [Cocks rifle] [Gunshots] [Gunshot] Man: [Speaks Serbian] [Machine gun fire] [Machine gun fire] [Gunshots] [Gunshots] [Gunshot] [Distant gunshot] [Machine gun fire] [Indistinct conversation] ♪ [Gunshot] [Gunshots] ♪ Shattuck, voice-over: Nobody knew quite what had happened to these missing men, and at that stage, I said, "I've got to go." ♪ I went to Tuzla, and I was able, with the help of the local U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Office, to identify half a dozen men who had escaped from Srebrenica, and we interviewed them... ♪ and they told this extraordinary story about how they were forced out and marched to these open pits, and there, 7,000 of them were executed, and later on, two young CIA officers came up with the actual photographs of the sites with mass graves before the graves were dug, and then afterwards, men standing in a field, and then they were shot. ♪ You know, I said, "It's-- This is genocide again." [Distant siren] Shattuck: Let me tell you, from the perspective of my participation in the trip... Shattuck, voice-over: When I came back from Srebrenica, I was asked to describe literally what I had seen and heard, and there was deathly silence. You could almost hear a pin drop. ♪ Panetta: Now you have another massacre taking place. It's happening today, not 40 years ago. It's happening now, and in many ways, the blood of those who are dying is on your hands, and you've got to deal with it. It's the third year of his presidency, and he's finally saying, "Excuse me. "This is my presidency. "It's my legacy, and history will say "whether or not Bill Clinton did the right thing "in this situation, and, you know, I'm prepared to take that risk." ♪ Lake: I think, frankly, what changed him was, one, he was moved by what he saw happening, and secondly, the political calculus changed also because we got closer to the presidential election in 1996, and the president's political advisors, I think, changed from, "Be careful. Let's not get too involved," to, "You really need to resolve this before 1996." ♪ Clinton: My fellow Americans, in this new era, there are still times when America and America alone can and should make the difference for peace. ♪ The United States led NATO's heavy and continuous airstrikes. Those airstrikes, together with the renewed determination of our European partners, convinced the Serbs finally to start thinking about making peace. ♪ Warren Christopher: The agreement saved countless thousands of lives by ending the fighting between the communities in the Republic. Serious obstacles remained... Lake, voice-over: When we got the signing of Dayton, it was just-- I just felt sad at all the bloodshed, all that had gone before this. They were all so somber. It was, uh-- Bosnia was just sad, I'm afraid. I would love to say that it was a moment of euphoria, but it had been so painful. [Helicopter whirring] ♪ Power, voice-over: When I left Bosnia, being a young correspondent, I felt part of a world that hadn't done enough. ♪ You know, I just had a sense of how many lives could have been saved sooner, you know, had the decision that was belatedly made been made before, and that was a question that long ago as a much younger person I had asked myself about the Holocaust. ♪ My high-school understanding of the Holocaust could be reduced to, "Hitler was exterminating the Jews, and, therefore, we went to war," and I would later learn that the issue of the extermination of the Jews just didn't rise within the system in the way that you would have expected-- or that I would have expected. The idea that the fate of an imperiled people when it came to refugee admissions, bombing the train tracks to just make it a little bit harder, it just was striking to me that those issues in and of themselves just didn't rise. ♪ As somebody who believed in America and the idea of "never again," I just was struck by that because that wasn't ever part of kind of the history lessons that I got in this country. ♪ What I was struck by when I came back from Bosnia was the extent to which our culture was having a surge of commemoration and remembrance related to the Holocaust... ♪ and yet I had just come from this experience where the Bosnian Serbs had attempted to wipe out a people in Europe 50 years after the Holocaust, and the connections weren't really drawn. ♪ It was at that point, then, that I go to the library and, you know, thinking maybe there would be books on the decision makers, on the bystanders. I'll never forget being at Harvard's huge library and it just being very, very clear that question, at least as I was understanding it, had not been posed and the question had not been answered, so initially for a paper for a class, because I was in law school, I began sort of exploring, going back over the cases that I didn't know a lot about-- like the Armenian Genocide, Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge, what Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds-- and then coming up to the present and my own recent experiences... ♪ and so that paper, then, it became clear there was kind of something there, that this fulsome consensus about applying the lessons of the Holocaust, that was living in great tension with what policymakers were doing, and yet the tension seemed one that was not being grappled with. [Typing] ♪ [Mouse click] ♪ [Typing] ♪ When I was working on my book, "Problem from Hell," what was clear was that there is a sense in many circles that promoting your values is somehow discordant with your interests. My own view is that more often than not that that's a false dichotomy. ♪ The most powerful rendition of this, I think, came when I looked at the Iraq-related cables from the eighties where the cable actually read, "Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, comma," our interests run parallel to those of Iraq"... ♪ and so it's right there. You know, they're just saying that really crummy things are happening through chemical weapons use and horrible human rights abuses, but our interests are divorced from all of that. ♪ Traditionally, our conception of our national interest would include preventing chemical weapons use, and yet here it was, "Chemical weapons use aside, we're good. You know, we've got trade to do." Reagan: Our countries share common interests in developing practical solutions to the problems... Clarke: We certainly knew to some degree what was going on, and we knew that Saddam was using chemical weapons inside his country against Kurds and others. I don't think the Reagan administration, or later the Bush administration, could ever claim that they were unaware of it. They were aware of it... and two administrations were willing to put up with a fair amount of obnoxious activity by Iraq in order to contain Iran. ...our instructions to our ambassador to give him some negotiating room. Dror Moreh: Doesn't it undermine America's credibility when you have relationship with someone like Saddam Hussein while you know that he is engaging in a chemical warfare against the Kurds? You're acting as though anytime you see something you don't like, you pick up and leave, and basically, that would leave you outside of most parts of the United States and in no place in the world. I don't know where you would hold up. It would certainly not be Washington, D.C. Maybe it would be Santa Barbara, California, but there are hardly any places where there's nothing-- where there's nothing wrong... ♪ so problems are everywhere. You got to deal with them. It's the ultimate alibi, right? It's, the interests are just an infinitely elastic concept, so if you want to do something, you say it's in your interests. I can make an argument for why cutting off aid to Saddam Hussein after he gasses his people is in our interests. It's in the interest of U.S. soldiers for chemical weapons not to be used in the battlefield... [Explosions] ♪ and in this instance, this ally ended up invading Kuwait, and the same individuals who thought it had been in our interest to work with him were in a position of having to mobilize vast expenditures, put a huge number of U.S. lives on the line in order to counter his aggression. ♪ [Indistinct conversation] Man, voice-over: Saddam Hussein's tanks and soldiers poured over the Kuwaiti border. Within 24 hours, Saddam came in control of 1/5 of the world's oil reserves, and the Iraqi army is within reach of the Saudi oil fields. ♪ Bush: We see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors. Summary executions, routine torture, Hitler revisited. ♪ Moreh: How come all of a sudden, your ally Saddam Hussein turns into "Hitler revisited"? Baker: Well, the occupation was extraordinarily brutal, so if we do have informing our foreign policy, which we do, the concept that we're against human rights violations and war crimes and ethnic cleansing and so forth, then when it happens, that's another justification for doing what we did, and so we reversed it, but I'm also here to tell you, one of the reasons we reversed it was because of the threat to our secure access to the energy reserves of the Gulf. That was a fairly serious national interest. People didn't want to talk about it. "Ooh, you're just fighting over filthy oil. That's so because of money, money, money, money." Well, money's-- money's worth fighting over, in my views. Sanctions were tried, and we included the sanctions. Charlie Rose: Samantha Power is here. She is a lecturer in U.S. foreign policy. Her new book, "A Problem from Hell" examines America's response to genocide in the 20th century. Woman, voice-over: In her Pulitzer-winning work, Samantha Power outlines how all administrations throughout the century have shied away from action. Different woman: Her book is a passionate, normative judgment about what U.S. foreign policy should be, in her view. The system is broken, and we all have to put our heads together to try to fix it. Instead, I'm going to try to inspire you to become, shall we say, upstanders in a world that is sadly crowded with bystanders. ♪ Power: When I first met Barack Obama, it was my book "A Problem from Hell," I guess, that had caused him to reach out. I met him at some steakhouse up on Capitol Hill, you know, should have been an hour-long meal, but it was, like, 4 or 5 hours or something, was just a great meeting of the minds. The fact that there was an American politician who had read a 600-page book on genocide, it seemed, who came away from that book wanting to understand how we could do better at integrating human consequences into our decision making, wanting to understand what is it about all these people of good faith who go into public service to try to make the world better and then somehow this conception of national interests-- this stoic, kind of cold and clinical conception of what we are in government to do--takes over and we forget about the people who might have drawn us into this enterprise in the first place. Foreseeable replacement forces coming in. Power, voice-over: By the end of the dinner, I kind of found myself volunteering to go and work with him in a more official capacity, and I moved down very soon thereafter to Washington, and I advised him day to day. ♪ People of the world, will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words "never again" in Darfur? [Cheering and applause] People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time. We needed a new infusion of energy into our politics. We needed somebody with a different message and a different story who can turn over a new page and bring something new and different to American politics. [Cheering and applause] Obama: This moment-- this moment, this election, is our chance to keep in the 21st century the American promise alive. [Cheering and applause] Crowd: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Jake Sullivan, voice-over: Barack Obama and Michelle Obama become the President and First Lady of the United States in my lifetime, it said that our country has a special capacity to redeem its highest values. Even though we screw up, even though we're imperfect, we can also reach very high and very far in service of our highest ideals, and that's what it said to me. [People shouting] Woman, voice-over: December 17 in Tunisia, a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, sets himself on fire in a protest against government policies, becoming the catalyst for a Tunisian revolution and the Arab Spring. Within months, demonstrations arise in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. Man, voice-over: Anger erupted onto the streets, riot police rushing a crowd carrying banners reading, "Yes, we can." Woman: The regional experts say the process will remain a challenge for U.S. presidents. [Shouting continues] Man, voice-over: In Libya, after almost 4 decades of ruthless dictatorship, huge crowds demonstrated in the streets of Benghazi. [Gunfire] It's been a wild 24 hours in Libya. Muammar Gaddafi has made it clear he's not going without a fight. Man: ♪ Man, voice-over: If it's an internal or an external conspiracy, we'll erase it. Sullivan, voice-over: We began to get reports of protests in many different cities in Libya, including Tripoli and Benghazi, and then we began to get reports that those protests were being fired upon. [Gunfire] Sullivan, voice-over: As soon as that happened, it was added to what became the daily agenda of events in the region. "OK. Now we got to talk Libya." [People shouting] ♪ [Gunshot] Gaddafi: [Speaking Arabic] Anderson Cooper, voice-over: What is happening there is a massacre? Alex Crawford, voice-over: There are large-scale deaths. They are women. They are children. They're old people. They're not fighters. Power, voice-over: I remember the feeling we had Gaddafi's own words, just very explicit-- "I'm gonna hunt them down," so it was really more just, "Whoa." This is just one of those moments that you're on the front end of something. You can't predict it. [People shouting] ♪ Very frankly... ♪ Sullivan, voice-over: Secretary Clinton went to the Elysee Palace and sat down one on one with Nicolas Sarkozy, and he was extremely agitated about what might happen in Benghazi and about the absolute, unshakable, undeniable need for France and the United States and the United Kingdom to go do something about it right away. The French and the British viewed Libya as a direct threat to them-- chaos, genocide literally on their doorstep. ♪ Sullivan, voice-over: The time pressure was enormous. We started that process thinking we've got some time, and then town after town fell fast, really fast. Within days, Gaddafi's forces were knocking on the doorstep of Benghazi. [Shouting] Man, voice-over: Colonel Gaddafi's forces are pushing east. They seem unstoppable. Different man, voice-over: The regime claims that within two days, these troops would be in Benghazi. [Gunfire] We are still recovering from our involvement in Iraq. Power, voice-over: On March 15, the president convenes his national security cabinet and a few backbenchers like myself. The president opens up the meeting, and he's not in a good mood. David Petraeus: The fact is that... Rhodes, voice-over: The meeting begins with a briefing from the intelligence community, and there's a map in front of everybody, and there's a dot on the map--Benghazi, a city of several hundred thousand people, and then you can see the progression of Gaddafi's forces, and they're in a town called Ajdabiya, and it is explained to us that this is kind of the last stop on the way to Benghazi, and from this position, they can move in and just-- Gaddafi'd said they were gonna go door to door and kill people like rats, and I remember, you know, going around the table, and Obama is literally asking people, "Should I take action "to save these people in this city "that we all know are going to be killed, or should I not?" Clinton, voice-over: I laid out all of the factors, including the Arab support, not just rhetoric, but commitments for military assets and action, and our major allies in Europe, you know, we historically are always asking them to support us, but now they were asking us to support them. I don't see why that's... Denis McDonough, voice-over: I argued against intervening. The main concern was that it was a set of responsibilities that were beyond what I thought was prudent, given the other demands on the United States at the time. I thought we should avoid another military conflict. Rhodes: Biden says, "No. You'd be crazy to get another war in the Middle East." Bob Gates says no. The military is saying, "We have too much to do "in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we can't afford to move all these resources over here," and I remember I could feel it working its way around to me, and my argument was essentially, "If you don't do this "and these people all get massacred, "how will you explain this? "I mean, how can we tell the world "everybody was ready to act, and what would it say if we don't act in this circumstance?" Antony Blinken: It really went to the fact that we had a unique situation, that there was a responsibility but also an opportunity to demonstrate that the international community could act effectively to stop atrocities, could do it in a way that was grounded in international law, and the failure to take action would contribute potentially to the further unraveling of the international system. Rhodes: Obama described this decision to me as kind of a 51/49 call in his mind. He had to weigh both sets of arguments, and he decided to do it. Woman, voice-over: The question looming over the Security Council today is how Russia or China will vote. In the past, the two superpowers constantly vetoed interventions inside the sovereign state. Man, voice-over: We see China abstaining, Russia abstaining, and here comes the vote total, all necessary measures to protect the civilian population as Gaddafi's forces move in on Benghazi. Obama: The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Arab states agree that a ceasefire must be implemented immediately. If Gaddafi does not comply with the resolution, the international community will impose consequences. ♪ [Beeping] ♪ Woman, voice-over: U.S. F-15 and F-16 fighter jets have flown dozens of sorties alongside British, French, and Danish jets. The Italians and Spanish are providing... Man, voice-over: France and Britain going to be taking the lead on the airstrikes, with the U.S. playing a key role. ♪ [Explosion] [Man shouts] [Siren] Moreh: Basically, you manage in two weeks to stop him marching to Benghazi, so why did it continue afterwards? These things, they have-- they have a momentum and an inertia and a scale of size and weight. It was very clear that was the main mission, stop Gaddafi, and then the evolution of what happens after that wasn't overly clear. So you didn't debate what will be the next steps after the war? You didn't debate that? No. Experienced men-- Gates, you--how? It wasn't like we didn't put it on the table. They weren't interested. [Shouting] ♪ Panetta, voice-over: Underneath it all is a recognition that ultimately, you're not going to change things without regime change and that, while you don't say it, the reality is that you know the only way you're going to achieve some kind of end here is to end the regime. [Shouting] ♪ [Machine gun fire] [Shouting continues] ♪ [Indistinct conversation] [Shouting] Man: [Shouts in Arabic] [Call to prayer on P.A.] Sullivan, voice-over: Libya's only hope was to have some kind of stabilization force that could tamp down violence and engage in some kind of demobilization of the militias. Secretary Clinton posed the question very directly to the Europeans-- "You know, this is on your doorstep. "What are you gonna do about this? What role are you prepared to play?" and European leaders from France and the U.K., from Italy all said, "We intend to have a significant hand in the shaping of the aftermath of any military action." [People chanting] ♪ McDonough, voice-over: President Obama negotiated with Prime Minister Cameron, President Sarkozy his view that steps post action will be as important to the successful outcome in Libya, and he sought their assurance, and they gave it to him, that they would take the lead on post-action efforts in Libya. Unfortunately, they just were not in a position to deliver. [Gunfire] Man, voice-over: Libya has become increasingly unstable, with rival militias engaged in some of the fiercest fights. Woman, voice-over: Some say it's the worst violence in Libya since the revolution in 2011. [Men shouting] [Gunfire] Rhodes: Obama would call me in and, you know, get frustrated because Cameron and Sarkozy just couldn't do that. He expressed increasing frustration that anybody who says that the United States is not gonna have to end up doing all this ourselves is not acknowledging what we're learning from history but also from Libya, which is that everyone will say, "Sure, we'll do all these things," but on the back end, it was like, "OK. "What is the U.S. gonna do to put this place back together again?" [Distant gunfire] Mullen, voice-over: We'd invaded, if you will. We'd intervened, and then we all left, not just the U.S. Everybody left, and--Colin Powell said this, you know-- if you break it, you own it, and we broke it, and we didn't own it. What stunned me is, having learned some version of that lesson in Iraq, we didn't do it in Libya. I mean, it stuns me to this day. Biden: Tell me what happens. He's gone, what happens? Doesn't the country disintegrate? Sullivan, voice-over: The minute that you walk into the White House Situation Room, you immediately recognize that you've got a collection of imperfect people with imperfect information about what's going on facing imperfect choices and in an imperfect process where it's hard to actually draw in all the right people to contribute to the decision, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that you end up getting imperfect results. Biden: 200,000 300,000 or 150,000 troops... Sullivan, voice-over: Every solution you propose or present or pursue almost necessarily creates new problems, so, even when you think you've done the right thing, you have generated a whole set of additional decisions that themselves put you back in this loop of imperfection. Obama: The United States can't get in the middle of somebody else's civil war. [Chanting in Arabic] Man: [Rapping in Arabic] Man, voice-over: Huge demonstrations today throughout Syria calling for more freedom and dignity. Woman, voice-over: The Syrian government made it very clear today that it will tolerate no dissent. [People shouting and whistling] [Machine gun fire] Man: [Shouting in Arabic] [Shouting continues] [Machine gun fire] Power, voice-over: In Syria, it was so clear that Assad was employing a how-to manual of how to basically be the most savage leader in the Arab world, the most savage responder to peaceful protests. You're seeing him use incendiary weapons. Into 2012, he's using napalm. We're already hearing the reports of what snipers are doing and how people are being tortured with acid and electric shock in the prisons. ♪ I got the sense that Syria was going to be a problem from hell in early 2012, when the Russian Perm Rep to the U.N., Vitaly Churkin, told Susan Rice, who was our ambassador to the United Nations, that the Russians would go along with the resolution. They called for a halt to the violence, and then Secretary Clinton had a meeting with Sergey Lavrov to talk about the resolution before the vote, and Lavrov basically told her, "It ain't happening. We're not supporting it. We're backing Assad," and at that moment, it became clear to me that you now had great powers pitted against each other in Syria and with that, the conflict was going to be very difficult to manage and Assad was going to be empowered to slaughter even more of his own people. ♪ [People wailing] ♪ Derek Chollet, voice-over: We saw the situation in Syria unraveling. It looked that either Assad was going to do something to use the chemical weapons or there would be a loss of control of some kind, and so the question would always come back to, "Well, what happens with the chemical weapons? Around one of those moments with the president, he's asked a question-- "Well, what would happen if these chemical weapons were on the loose?" Chuck Todd. Do you envision using U.S. military, if simply for nothing else the safe keeping of the chemical weapons? We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized, that's a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons. Obama violated one of the core tenets of press conferences, which is, you never answer a hypothetical question, so he answered a hypothetical question. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation, all right? Thank you, everybody. At that moment, it became this kind of line in the sand. If chemical weapons were used, the full force and fury of U.S. military power would be used against Assad. ♪ Woman, voice-over: The images you are about to see are so important because they're being held up tonight by Syrian rebels as evidence of what may be the worst chemical weapons attack anywhere since Saddam Hussein gassed the Iraqi Kurds in 1988. The United States government now knows that at least 1,429 Syrians were killed in this attack, including at least 426 children. We know where the rockets were launched from and at what time. Power, voice-over: You have these families who were just sleeping, minding their own business. The gas comes in. It's very clear from where the regime fired it into opposition villages. I mean, the question of who did it is a nonissue. With our own eyes, we have seen the thousands of reports. All of them show and report victims with breathing difficulties, people twitching with spasms, coughing, rapid heartbeats, foaming at the mouth, unconsciousness, and death. ♪ Power, voice-over: Looking at those photographs of those kids lined up, those little kids, you just see the size of them, the size of my own kids at that time, and just lines, just rows of them. You know, I mean-- Man: Oh... [Crying] [Speaking Arabic] So the primary question is really no longer what do we know. The question is, what are we-- we collectively-- what are we in the world gonna do about it? Man: The composition of... Power, voice-over: I went into the first meeting with the president after the strike with my arguments lined up, ready to make the case for how this is an existential threat in the sense that it's a chemical weapon that can kill so many, and I didn't need to make any argument. President Obama knew exactly what he was going to do. 10 days ago, the world watched in horror as men, women, and children were massacred in Syria in the worst chemical weapons attack of the 21st century, and after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. ...ban against the use of chemical weapons and prohibitions against other weapons of mass destruction. Chuck Hagel, voice-over: We wanted to do something that was meaningful, that would hurt him, that would affect his ability to continue what he was doing. The military options were discussed. It was the National Security Council. We gave the president those options. He chose one. We had it all set. It was ready to go. We had all agreed on it. We have options to deal with chemicals, long-range rockets and missiles... We must come together as... Rhodes, voice-over: The first time I saw Obama have second thoughts was the middle of the week, and he's calling Angela Merkel asking her not for troops or planes, just political support, Just a statement in support of bombing Syria. Obama said, "Angela, I need you on this." I mean, you know, he made, like, a forceful plea, how it was a moral case, there's a strategic case, and she said, "Barack"-- she said it with some feeling because they were very close, you know--"Barack, you want to go through this process. "I'm telling you this as a friend. "If you go in now, Putin's going to say, "you know, you made this up. Support's not gonna be there," and I remember him hanging up the phone, and it was the first time I saw some doubt creep in, and he said to me, you know, something along the lines of, like, "People really-- Nobody wants to do this, you know?" Sullivan: The Russians did not want us to attack, and they basically said, "You have no basis or right "to do this because it wasn't the Assad regime. It was the opposition." We asked them for any evidence that they could put forward to justify their claim, and they had nothing. Kerry: ...chemical weapons to the international community. Step by step over the course of that week, events begin to intrude. The British Parliament votes to prevent Cameron from joining this... It is clear to me that the British Parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that, and the government will act accordingly. While we're in a meeting with the leadership of the U.S. Congress that is telling us that they will only support it with congressional authorization... The bloodshed is gonna end. Rhodes, voice-over: and so this question became, "What do we do?" I remember I was in a meeting in Denis' office on Friday afternoon, and Denis gets kind of a tap on the shoulder, you know, "Boss wants to see you," ...and we've wrestled with this issue very... McDonough, voice-over: After several hours of meetings with his National Security Council that day, we took a long walk on the South Lawn. I have a view on these matters, which is that Congress has a responsibility to have a role. The Founding Fathers had a view that Congress declares wars and raises armies. That's my view, that the American people have the confidence that the institutions of the government, including the Congress, are involved in that decision. ♪ Rhodes: Dennis comes back, and then I get a tap on the shoulder saying, "You need to go to the Oval Office." ♪ I get in, and Obama stands up from behind the Oval Office, and there's nobody else there, and he says, "I've got a big idea," and I knew that whatever decision he'd made, he had made that decision just before he even told me what it was by his demeanor, his appearance... Obama: Think that on issues like this, it's important... Rhodes, voice-over: and he said, "I believe I need to seek "congressional authorization "because I don't believe that this will be a one-off. "Like, if we bomb Syria, "this is something we're gonna be doing for a long time, "and I can't sustain this politically without congressional authorization," and then he's getting into the fact that the same dysfunction in the U.S. Congress is present internationally, which is, "All the Europeans say, "We got to do something about this," "but are they gonna be there in a year or two years or 3 years if this thing goes like I think it's going to go?" and then he said, "You know, if it's Syria now, It'll be Iran next, and where does this all end?" and I remember there's a picture of this meeting, and I look like a balloon that has been deflated because I was accepting something I didn't want to accept, which is, I'd operated under the belief that-- for two years that we could do something in Syria, and then I had the President of United States, who happens to be my boss and someone who I know very well, kind of laying out for me why that's not gonna work unless we get congressional authorization. I mean, it was kind of obvious that he was, in some respects, pulling back the throttle. ♪ Kerry: ...because a lot of other countries whose policies challenged these international norms are watching. They are watching. They want to see whether the United States and our friends mean what we say. It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk. It's about choices that will directly affect our role in the world and our interests in the world. It is also profoundly about who we are. We are the United States of America. ♪ Robert Malley: How do you make decisions, and are you thinking about an action today or its consequences in the next year? How much weight do you put on an issue like credibility? If you believe that issuing that red line was a mistake, do you then have to compound that mistake with another mistake in order not to lose credibility? ♪ I think for President Obama, the credibility was the reason the U.S. had made more mistakes in its history than virtually anything else, Vietnam being one of them, and continuing with wrong policy, so human factor, what kind of person are you when you confront those decisions, I think that's what it's all about. Panetta: The one thing you have as president is credibility, and once you give your word, once you say you're gonna do something, then people expect that you will follow through on your word, and if you don't--if you don't, then that will be read as weakness, and people then will think they can take advantage of you because, regardless of what you say, they don't really believe you're going to act on your word, and that, more than anything, can weaken your ability to deal with crisis. This week, when I addressed the nation on Syria, I said that, in part because of the credible threat of U.S. military force, there is the possibility of a diplomatic solution. Russia has indicated a new willingness to join with the international community in pushing Syria to give up its chemical weapons. If there's any chance of achieving that goal without resorting to force, then I believe we have a responsibility to pursue that path. Woman, voice-over: Some say the agreement emboldens Russia. Man, voice-over: This is a Russian plan for Russian interests. Woman, voice-over: President Obama tried to downplay the notion that this is a win for America's historic geopolitical foe. ♪ Power: It was a mistake to go to Congress, and, while we made the best of a bad situation in negotiating the end of Syria's chemical weapons program, it was clear they were always gonna keep some for a rainy day, and it was clear that after that, the threat of the use of force inevitably was gonna mean less than it had meant before. ♪ Man, voice-over: The situation in Syria continued to grow worse by the day. John McCain: Thousands and thousands and thousands, 192,000 dead, 3 million refugees, and we're not gonna do anything about Assad? [People shouting] Power, voice-over: 2014, we were fighting ISIS. We were dealing with U.S. embassies under siege, U.S. journalists being beheaded. The emphasis was on the lives of Americans, but at the same time, to be just reminded again and again of the inadequacy of what we were doing commensurate to our stated objectives, our stated objectives were alleviation of suffering-- not happening; sufferings getting worse-- preventing the rise of terrorist groups, stemming refugee flow, refugee flow getting worse, I mean, on every axis... ♪ but the suffering is one that makes you feel potentially-- certainly, I felt this way at a different level-- but guilty. It makes you feel like you're not-- you know, that you're letting innocents down, and you're the only-- and Obama would be very clear-eyed. He'd have no alibi for himself. He knows that the only hope they have is America. Across the globe, lot of people think something should be done, but nobody wants to do it, and that's not an unusual... Malley, voice-over: Once in the White House, there was a discussion on Syria, and Samantha was pushing back on what we needed to do, and she was getting frustrated, and the president was getting frustrated. After the meeting, he goes up, and he turns around and says, "Samantha, come with me to the Oval. It's not gonna be something that the United States... Malley, voice-over: I don't know what they said, but to me, as I read it, she was always his bad conscience. She was the person who reminded him of the side of him who was idealistic. ...hitting hospitals, hitting refugee... Malley, voice-over: There are very few people that he would have a back-and-forth with in the Situation Room. He would have back-and-forth with her because he respected her views, because he knew she disagreed. We had rules in place dealing with... Power, voice-over: There were a lot of layers in the dynamic between President Obama and myself on Syria. You know, he wouldn't let a Syria meeting end without saying, "Sam, what you got?" you know. Because I'd often be on the screen, he'd say, "I see that look of skepticism," and I could-- You know, sometimes I would speak, and I could just see him getting impatient and not liking the message. You know, one time it was, "We've all read your book, Samantha. "In other words, we don't need to be reminded "of the human consequences "of bystanding in the face of mass atroc--" like, "We get it," like, "Spare us," kind of... ♪ and my view to this day is that he heard moral judgment because that was the voice in his head. No matter how I articulated what I was saying, he heard me saying, "You're a bystander." Geir O. Pedersen: Let me express the gravest concern that the violence is, so far, not abating. No one... Stephanie Ruhle: Realistically, how close are we to any sort of real resolution to stop this? We've got to get a political solution not just for Syria. It's because of a failed policy which has allowed this situation in Syria to deteriorate to the point where people just have to leave. Power, voice-over: I'd had a warm relationship with Senator McCain, so when Tony Blinken, a colleague of mine and friend of mine, was up for being deputy secretary of state and McCain was placing what's called a hold on his nomination, I said, "Tony, I got this," so I called. Senator McCain took the call. I basically got about two sentences into my pitch just to vouch that Tony was very concerned about the Syrians, but McCain, he just cut me off, and he just says, "How can you live with yourself? How?" you know, "You're gonna make the policy better? "This policy is a disaster. "Hundreds of thousands of people are being killed, "and you, the author of "A Problem from Hell," "are part of this administration. You're complicit in this," and he just went on and on. McCain: ...strategy, there is no success. Power, voice-over: You know, I had the phone initially here, and then it was so loud, but I kept trying to kind of reroute it to Tony and saying, "Look. I think if he's in the room, there will be another voice," and he's like, "Please. Another voice. Like yours was a voice?" because he had thought, you know, when I got confirmed, I'd be in the cabinet. I'd be a voice. "You know, this president is not-- "He's feckless," you know, and he would go on, and he said, "Look. You know, not only should Tony Blinken not be confirmed, but you should resign," and then the line went dead. ♪ A number of newspapers were calling on me to resign. Even close friends from Bosnia would say, "Have you thought about--" so I did think about it. ♪ I could have expressed the sort of searing mark that Syria left on me by leaving, but who would that have helped, and-- Who? Tell me one person it would have helped other than me in this interview. I'm in the room with the president. Barack Obama is not cold to what is happening to the Syrian people. What was very challenging was figuring out what is the pathway that is going to do more good than harm, and he made a judgment, not one I agreed with, but a reasonable one. At the same time, he gave me power to try to get more refugees into the country, getting political prisoners out of jail, to ending an Ebola crisis, even though everyone in America wanted nothing to do with West Africa. Those are consequences, and to go back to teaching and writing and hoping somebody reads my op-ed compared to the ability to do something for someone on a given day, it just wasn't a close call. Man, voice-over: Dramatic new drone video tells the tale of destruction. Anti-Assad government rebels held in East Aleppo were hit hard. Security Council resolution calling for a new pause to the fighting was vetoed, and so the Russian-led airstrikes continue. Power, voice-over: Here is what is happening right now in Eastern Aleppo. Syrians trapped by the fighting are sending out their final appeals for help. [Indistinct conversation] ♪ Power, voice-over: This is what is being done by member states of the United Nations who are sitting around this horseshoe table today to the people of Eastern Aleppo. ♪ Aleppo will join the ranks of those events that define modern evil-- [Coughs] Power, voice-over: Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and now Aleppo. [Shouting] Woman: [Shouting in Arabic] ♪ Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you? ♪ This is not leading from behind. This is hiding from behind. I mean, we have Samantha Powers, you know, attacking Iran, Assad, Russia, saying, "Have you no shame?" What about the administration? The thing about Syria and the Obama policy is that this tiny country has caused so much destabilization not only for its neighbors, but for Europe and so forth. ♪ Power: How can something so clear in retrospect become so muddled at the time by rationalizations, institutional constraints, and, above all, a lack of imagination? How can it be that those who fight on behalf of these principles are the ones deemed unreasonable? George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. "The unreasonable one persists "in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ♪ What's happened in Syria is absolutely heartbreaking, and there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about it. ♪ It's natural to want to blame someone for a terrible outcome, and I get that. I think the president gets that. You know, I wish there were an available alternative to us to fix that situation in Syria, but we looked at all the alternatives, and there was not one that worked. ♪ I'll be honest with you sitting here today. Like, I don't know how much of that I had to rationalize the inaction, you know, because I knew after 2013 that I was going to be living with this inaction, and so to this day, I'm torn by-- It's a complicated thing. This gets back to your tugging at your conscience. Do you do you construct arguments to rationalize something that you used to feel passionately differently about, you know? I think there's something like that that's been going on with me. To be a liberal and to deal with these questions, you know, probably inevitably leads to that. Anyone who had any responsibility for Syria and for our policy there has to look themselves in the mirror and see failure staring back at you. On one level, it's as simple as that. We didn't stop the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. We didn't prevent millions of people being forcibly displaced from their homes. We look at that bottom line, and you can't but conclude that we failed. ♪ Mark Lowcock: You in this Security Council have ignored all the previous pleas you have heard. You know what is happening, and you have done nothing. ♪ Malley: Syria is a core example of that inability of the international community to come together to try to stop mass atrocities, and this is one of the worst mass atrocities, but they they existed before Syria. They've existed after, and we haven't been able to answer that question. The whole theory of responsibility to protect, which has never really been implemented, you know, it's not the international consensus today. ♪ Sullivan: I believe that the United States bears responsibility to try to rally action in response to genocide, mass killings, mass atrocities so that the world does not descend into darkness and madness. We have an obligation to play a central role, but not a singular role. Murray McCully: The draft resolution has not been adopted owing to the negative vote of a permanent member of... Power, voice-over: Great power politics don't go away just because of the responsibility to protect. The Security Council gave 5 permanent members a veto, and for any of the permanent 5 to be a sole arbiter of whether you can kill your people or not, that's not what the founders, you know, had in mind. ♪ Man: Mr. President, the General Assembly by unanimous vote affirmed that genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns and for the commission of which principals and accomplices are punishable. [Applause] ♪ Lake, voice-over: There will always be genocides or war crimes because human nature hasn't changed. If you look around the world, you can see how the forces of selfishness and of barriers and of denial of rights are growing, and they are growing, I believe, because the democratic institutions that were put in place 70 years ago are all under assault and in too many countries, they are losing, including the values themselves. Man: World peace, world justice... Lake, voice-over: Every nation in the world agreed that the international community has a responsibility to protect people against genocide and war crimes, et cetera, and then find practical ways not to implement it, and so the lesson that wasn't implemented is a lesson not taken. George Clooney: We were brought up to believe that the U.N. was formed to ensure that the Holocaust could never happen again. This genocide will be on your watch. How you deal with it will be your legacy-- your Rwanda, your Cambodia, your Auschwitz. ♪ ♪ ♪
COVER IMAGE REFERRAL
https://www.pbs.org/video/obamas-cabinet-and-libya-pldhu2/
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25 April 2026
This event began 04/25/2025 and repeats every year forever
Mandala Tutorial 04/25/2025
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IN AMENDMENT
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