In reply to northern yob:
> Is everyone also bitching about climbing trips to Pakistan or China or any other of the numerous terrible countries throughout the world? I don’t really see a lot of that. Whilst I can see the points people are making I think it’s often better to engage with them. The more exposure normal people have in those countries to normal people from our country the better in my view. They went on a climbing trip and made a film. It’s not a party political broadcast for the regime and it wasn’t funded by the regime. They climbed some rocks. If it really means that much to people they should start with the bmc who as I highlighted have legitimised plenty of expeditions to terrible countries( for the record I don’t think anyone should do that, I was just pointing out the hypocrisy). As I said above where is the line?? Lots of countries stone homosexuals, are police states,treat people of colour or a different religion as second class citizens, is China ok? Is America ok? Is Hungary ok? I understand people all have different views all of which are legitimate I just think it’s not a simple as just piling on them because they went to a country with a terrible regime. Obviously lots of people will disagree with my view, does that mean I shouldn’t hold it or express it? It feels like everyone can’t wait to be holier than thou these days. If you wanna boycott somewhere feel free to just don’t tell other people what they should or shouldn’t be doing.
I have visited a lot of really dodgy countries, for both work and pleasure: Pakistan, Afghanistan (under the Taliban), Russia, Syria (back when it was just a bog standard police state not a post-apocalyptic wasteland), Iran, South Sudan, etc, and I've thought about this issue quite a bit.
For a start, I hate that people call it "virtue signalling". It's cheap and lazy; whether to travel to somewhere nasty and how to talk about it afterwards deserves serious consideration. "Nasty" is really a continuum. Surprised that Pakistan gets a mention, yes lots of bad stuff goes on there but the state is quite useless and there are places a whole lot worse. And a lot of the bad stuff is done by Pakistani citizens themselves - the very people who we should be "engaging with" on our trips. Good luck with that! But states like Iran, China and Saudi really are bad and quite effective too, which is a whole other order of unpleasantness.
The next factor is what you're actually doing there and how much interaction you're having with the state and/or other bad actors. Is your climbing trip/expedition a quiet, no-frills affair that involves nothing more than paying some dubious tourist tax? Probably fine. Or are you engaging in a serious way with the government and helping them present themselves - either domestically or internationally - in a good light? Considerably more dubious, though it depends: I have sat through a few meetings with South Sudanese politicians, who at the time were engaged in a civil war which invovled half-starving their own citizens, but since my employer was involved in actually feeding those very people, probably okay. However the proper role of humanitarian organisations in conflicts is certainly debatable.
I don't really buy the "normal people meeting normal people" argument. Nowadays you could easily contact people from a lot of states online, given that the people you might be chatting too will probably be English speakers anyhow. This line might hold true if you were spending a bunch of time hanging out in big cities and meeting university students, but it's kind of hard to have long chats with Himalayan subsistence farmers, what are you going to talk about, the intricacies of growing wheat in Baltistan? Almost inevitably the friends you might make on trips are going to be educated, middle or upper class people, usually urban dwellers, unless you speak cracking Urdu/Swahili/Arabic etc.
So... in my view, although countries like Jordan or Iran are pretty terrible in terms of human rights abuses, I can imagine doing a trip there that has minimal interaction with the state and some positive interaction with locals (definitely my experience with Iran), and the government are not encouraging tourism to burnish their image abroad. Acceptable, but maybe bung the campaign to free Nazanin a tenner whilst you're at it. But if you were to argue the other way I wouldn't find that remarkable.
Saudi I reckon is a different case - it's definitely trying to use tourism to clean its image and it really is a nasty and effective state and a country with a strong streak of racism (talk to South Asian Muslims who've spent any time there). I've asked Alastair Lee on Facebook if there was any government involvement in the trip and he said there wasn't, but still, making a film about how great Saudi Arabia is right now strikes me as naive at best. That's a pass from me.
As for China, yes, I think there's a solid argument for not going there right now either. Strong state involvement in many areas of life, and it's a state that's carrying out a genocide against a religious minority. Perhaps it's time to have that discussion when we read about climbing expeditions to China?
Post edited at 16:43