by Noisette – (lifted from a comment)
I have just spent two hours or so reading the Iraqi blogs. And have come away more disturbed and puzzled than ever. (Besides fear sadness
outrage at the carnage.)
These bloggers are educated. Several hold down jobs, are
professionals, or were. Others are in school. All of them are smart.
They are all pretty social – get around, talk to people. They read
books. Thought Riot, for example, is 18 and quotes Churchill and Bismark. She is mystified at the amounts spent by the US on defense and the fact that they can’t control thugs. She shows clean hands by stating that ‘she is not into conspiracy theories’ and then goes on to wonder what or whose agenda is served by the ‘Iraqi Swamp.’ She has insight, as well: she calls Chalabi childish and funny, which is apt. She thinks Muqtada is as brainless as the melon she ate an hour ago.
But as a group, they are clueless.
Besides fresh horror stories not reported in the press (e.g. reported by Treasure of Baghdad: Health workers showing up a the door, questioning if any babies in the home, ordering it to be vaccinated against polio; two hours later the baby is dead (not an isolated case it seems…). They don’t know what is going
on in their country. They are mystified. They talk critically and coherently about the Government, mention (or not) that the Gvmt is itself implicated in killings (militias, etc.) and address or describe
some of the problems in their work/expertise area, but in a very local, circumscribed way.
Of course the media is shit. And the newspapers must be terrible or non-existent, none of them mention any newspapers at all.
Some mention incidents like seeing policemen who seemed menacing (or even shot someone right in front of their eyes) and not knowing if they were ‘real policemen’ or not.
How is it possible that these people don’t know who is fighting whom (besides the endless mention of ‘sectarian killings’) and for what? How come they don’t tell us that there is an industry in police uniforms?
How come they are not suspicious of health workers who show up at the door? Well those last two questions are a bit mean, I only intend to suggest that as a group they show little street smarts, and don’t
possess even the beginnings of a general framework that would serve to explain the events around them.
I’m not being critical of them, I’m worried sick.
Could this be a class thing? The bloggers are all middle or upper middle class, and the ones I read write at least partly in English. Are they all just imitating Riverbend, the very successful star blogger,
latest in a long list of ‘girls who write diaries while in a war
situation’? Riverbend is very politically correct and careful – the
genre does not in fact require it, but pushes towards it through its
narrow focus that transmutes to universality through empathy (and thus
guarantees its commercial success.)
My vague comparison standard is WW2 and stories from parents and
relatives, reading, etc. On the ground, that was quite complicated in
occupied countries, not the simple affair of goodies and baddies that
the history books tell us. Yet, people knew which faction was what, who
looked like what, who knew whom, who was going to do what, who wore
fake uniforms or not, what different groups were trying to attain.
From what I have read about, say, Somalia, to take a contemporary
example I believe (?) things there are more like WW2, and that the
carnage on the ground is readily understood, interpreted by
the people who are the victims of it. Were there to be Somalian
bloggers, I think, the narrative would be different, as the various
actors and protagonists would be identified, named, explained.
The murderous chaos of Iraq today has a quality that I can’t grasp.
It does have, at this distance, a definetly American shading, but that
is perhaps natural, as the bloggers, when blogging in English, enter a
US culturally dominated world. The best way I can describe it is that
the ordinary preoccupations, disasters and attendant interpretations of
Americans (or, more generally, people in ‘developed’ nations, but the
Japanese are quite different from the French…) such as dogs that get
run over, a child who has a high fever after a vaccination, a job lost,
an unwelcome election result, a new ruling, a corruption scandal, etc.
etc. and their various rationalisations and interpretations -some of
them conspiratorial- have been transposed to explain the most barbarous
behavior imaginable taking place on a day to day basis on the doorstep,
in the backyard, the home, the traffic crossing, the local hospital…
That is really frightening.
What am I missing? What am I not reading right? Is this kind of chaos really new?