Canadian Mining Companies

Canadian Author Alain Deneault discusses the little-known fact about Canadian mining companies.

Alain Deneault is a sociologist at the University of Quebec in Montreal. He is co-author of “Black Canada: Pillage, Corruption, and Criminality in Africa,” a book that details well-sourced human rights abuses by the multinational resource companies Barrick Gold and Banro Corporation. The companies have responded with $11 million in lawsuits, aimed at bankrupting their critics with court fees. and the publisher for a total of $11 million.

Deneault’s main areas of research are George Simmel’s economic work and the phenomenon of economic criminality in the context of globalization. His numerous publications on Simmel and economic criminality include “L’Argent dans la culture moderne” (Presses de L’Université Laval, 2006). His recent book is “Offshore: Tax Havens and the Rule of Global Crime.” In this new book, he makes a compeling paradigm-shifting new argument that views offshore tax havens as the platform for the criminal control of a large part of the global economy.

Conflict Minerals

Adam Hochschild, author of “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa,” discusses the weakness of the conflict minerals approach in addressing the realities in the Congo.

Born the son of a mining company executive, Adam Hochschild visited apartheid-era South Africa during his teens and observed the injustices of racism. He subsequently became active politically, joining the civil rights movement, demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and co-founding the activist magazine Mother Jones. His National Book Award-nominated Bury the Chains is a fascinating look at the British abolitionist movement of the late 1700s.

Rape

Professor Howard French explains the prism in which people look at the rape in the Congo. Vast numbers of Western observers have descended on the Congo, not to analyze or understand, but to search for the germ of human wickedness: to uncover African barbarism, and the essentially evil nature of humanity itself. In place of any analysis of the immense political complexities and the international dimension to the conflict in a country the size of Western Europe, we have borderline pornographic descriptions of instances of brutality and hysterical comparisons with the Holocaust.

Storyline: Congo vs. Rwanda

In this clip, Professor French deals with why the Rwandan story has been easy to understand for an American audience, rather than the “complex” Congo story.

Howard Waring French is an associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism as well as a journalist, author and photographer. He was most recently a senior foreign correspondent with The New York Times.