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Wikileaks Iraq War Diaries
---------- Post added at 09:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:51 PM ----------
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Edit: Just had a spark of reasoning as I was pissing into the corner of a fly-infested plastic closet under a full moon. How romantic.
I think my problem with this whole topic is scale. You lofty academics are talking about these big numbers that, quite frankly, my cromag brain can't handle. Me dumdum. All I can think about is the faces of the people I've worked with. I guess that's where I get my stupid self-righteous from. It leaves me wondering where you guys get yours from. You talk about the 200,000 you've never seen. I talk about the dozen or so I've shook hands with.
And I get it: You can't make a shit sandwich into anything but a shit sandwich.
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this is interesting. i kinda wondered about it, but wouldn't have known how to ask or say anything about it without feeling--and likely being--presumptuous.
alot of academic understanding is about collections of information---counting things, modelling things, writing stories that connect those models to other models. it's like that in any social science. the same business obtains in the physical sciences too, but there's more numbers and fewer obvious gaps (even as almost everything about the physical sciences, about what knowledge is produced, is based on models which don't seem like models because of all them numbers)....
ideally there's a continuum with the particularities of individual experience. but there isn't always. historians don't have to worry about that so much usually because the people they deal with are all dead.
i don't think this is the same problem that's here exactly. inside/outside, someplace you were the people you know and knew in a fucked up situation vs. people who see in the chain of decisions that resulted in your being there and knowing these people a disastrous political situation. i can see how there'd be problems with talking across that divide, but it doesn't seem to me that it's an academic vs. cromag (your term) or whatever problem.
what is seems like is that one perspective dissolves the other---the same thing's happened with slims. two different registers of claims to "the real" about the war in iraq or afghanistan on the one hand---release of documents that show fragments of the reality in theater that pose significant interpretive problems. code violations. people getting to read codes they don't necessarily understand, which is a screen----i think (even as it could be true) for an intrusion of norms particular to civilian world into this other hectic dangerous space.
that there are problems--ethical, political and hopefully legal---with the rumsfeld dod position on torture---that these documents demonstrate that the reality was much bigger and distributed quite differently than we might have thought by way of by ghraib---that it was widely known about and condoned by "report don't do anything" is not an intrusion into the day-to-day experience of ordinary people in ordinary situations--it's a glimpse of how collusion with war crimes looks.
and the top-down hierarchy is a kind of given.
this is all moving around the question of whether an actual discussion about this sort of thing is possible across different types of experience or if they're inevitably going to be what they seem to be so far---folk with one type of experience excluding the other from talking as if there's only one "reality" to do with a war and that being on a front line is what defines it.
but it's obvious that anything as complex as a non-war, a not war-war, involves any number of levels of reality.
so what to do?
anything?
it may be that wikileaks triggers a type of response that i don't understand at all.
is that the case?