In conflict after conflict, women were being targeted. Rape was used as a weapon of war. Women were excluded from peace talks. And when the fighting stopped and countries tried to rebuild, women were left out of the decisions that shaped their futures. Noeleen Heyzer decided to change that. And she actually did.
What happens when you take someone from Singapore’s private tech sector and put them in charge of technology for one of the UN’s biggest development organizations? You get cloud computing in disaster zones, facial recognition for police in Guatemala, and SMS voting guides for 120 million Pakistanis.
The chapter title says it all. “Their Brothers’ Keepers.” It sounds noble. It sounds compassionate. And in this chapter, it becomes the exact mechanism by which everyone devours everyone else.
This second half of “Anti-Life” is one of the darkest stretches of the entire novel. But it starts with light. Rearden finally gets it. And that makes everything else in this chapter hit even harder.
You hear about what the UN does. Peacekeeping. Humanitarian aid. Climate conferences. But you almost never hear about how the UN pays for all of it. Who manages the money? Who sets the salaries? Who makes sure that when 2.7 million compensation claims come in, the right people get paid the right amounts?
This chapter starts with James Taggart giving a hundred-dollar bill to a beggar on the street. No compassion. No thought. Just a mechanical motion, the way you’d flick a crumb off a table. The beggar takes it with the same indifference. “Thanks, bud.” And walks away. Neither of them cares. And the thing that disturbs Jim isn’t the beggar’s contempt. It’s the realization that they share the same emptiness.
The title of Chapter 38 comes from a quote by Dag Hammarskjold, the legendary UN Secretary-General: the UN exists “to save humanity from hell.” Chew Beng Yong spent 26 years inside the UN Secretariat trying to do exactly that.
Statistics might sound boring. But Chapter 37 argues they are one of the most important things the UN does. And a Singaporean ended up running the whole operation.
If Part 1 of this chapter was about watching the looters tighten the noose around the country’s neck, Part 2 is about watching the noose tighten around the people who still care. Dagny is back at the railroad, and within hours she’s getting crushed from every direction. But she doesn’t break. She does something that changes everything.
The chapter title is “Anti-Greed,” which is already a joke. The people in charge have spent the entire book fighting greed. They’ve punished every producer, taxed every profit, nationalized every breakthrough. And the country is falling apart faster than ever. So naturally, their answer is to do more of the same, but harder.