encountering conflict em notes sh 2015 - st leonard's … · · 2016-06-06"...

Encountering Conflict

Every Man in this Village is a Liar by Megan Stack

Prepared by Susanne Haake 2016 1

Prologue

& “Everything I knew about war,, you could survive and not survive.” P2

& “America “crashed zealously into war and occupation”. P2 & 9/11 – “the last train station before a vast unknown prairie”. P2 & “And then September 11 came and infected us with the idea that

we could tame all the wilderness of the world.” P3 Tools:

! 9/11 ! Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’

Chapter 1 – Every Man in this Village is a Liar

" Afghan warlords were allies of the US, fighting against the Taliban who had once been allies of the US fighting the USSR.

& “If he’s lying, he’s telling the truth.” P9 & “Catching Bin Laden was the first important thing the United

States set out to do after September 11.” P10 & “The job was bungled so thoroughly that the war never really found its

compass again.” P10 & Pentagon Official – “This is a false story.” P12 & “War cannot be innocent but sometimes it is naïve.” P13

✐ What is the difference between innocence and naivety? ✐ Where does the truth lie in conflict?

Tools:

! Osama Bin Laden ! United Flight 93 ! Salman Hamdani ! Samuel Huntington

Chapter 2 – Chasing Ghosts

& “News writers depend upon the world to organize itself into some kind of tale, a story that can be told in short, recognizable form.” P27




Chapter 3 – As long as you can pay for it

& “So that was the worst thing to happen to America in 150 years.” P36 Chapter 4 – Terrorism and Other Stories

& “Things had gotten out of control. Violence fed violence. Blood washed blood.” P39

& “You humanized them.” P44 & “The maps around here didn’t mean a thing.” P48 & “But in Jerusalem I leaned that good intentions and lofty ideals are among

the most dangerous tools of all in war, because they blind people to what they are doing.” P50

& “We do not want to interrupt a noble national narrative.” P51

✐ What is our “national narrative” towards this conflict? Chapter 5 – Forgive us our Trespasses

& “And then the war came that would tangle America in time and blood, and make us forget for a time the other wars, Afghanistan and Israel…” p52

✐ Was the US “trespassing” in Iraq?

Tools:

! Saddam Hussein/ Iraq Chapter 6 – The Living Martyr

& “The notion of Iraq was yesterday’s invention, a place cared out by European meddlers in the twentieth century. Now it had been dropped and smashed, and each shard was an island.” P66

& “We are thankful to the American government because they got rid of Saddam. But American have left those who tortured and those who wrote accusations.” P77.

" During the early days of the Iranian Revolution, the US backed Saddam

Hussein in the Iran-‐Iraq war. When US forces landed in Iraq they were facing an army that had been supplied decades earlier by the US.

Chapter 7 – The Leader

& “Meanwhile there was a bigger demand. The war had been sold to the




American public as a bold response to the threat of unimaginable attack, and now a costly occupation had to be justified anew.” P78

" On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress approved a resolution authorizing the

President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

" By October 2001, U.S. forces were engaged in Afghanistan, seeking to remove al Qaeda from the sanctuary it had used there to launch the Sept. 11, 2001 attack.

" Since then, most of the leaders and participants in the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been killed or captured. But the United States not only remains at war in Afghanistan, it continues to suffer significant casualties there.

" In the 12 years since September 11, 2,144 U.S. military personnel have given their lives fighting in and around Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Tools:

! Casualties of Conflict Chapter 8 – Sacrifices

& “Violence is a reprint of itself, and endless copy.” P96 & “The trouble is that centuries later, the Middle East is still packed with

murderers who believe they are doing God’s will, privately attuned to the ring of God’s voice. This is still how Middle Eastern battles are fought, by Arabs, Israelis, and now by Americans too. Blind faith is the footbridge that takes us from virtuous religion to self-‐righteous violence.” P103

✐ Is there such a thing as a righteous conflict?

Chapter 9 – We expected something better

& “It’s war. These soldiers are kids. What do you think happens?” p120

& “We expect something better from the Americans. That is the idea of America.” P122

Tools:

! Abu Ghraib Prison




Chapter 10 – The Question of Cost

& “I reported often in Saudi Arabia, and the only thing I believed with conviction was that I knew very little. Truth was buried like oil under blank sands.” P126

& ““I believe in the human capacity for making good things and making bad things,” he said. “At the end of the day it is a question of cost. It’s an economic issue.”” P131

✐ To what extent is the conflict in a Middle East driven by concerns over oil

and therefore “a question of cost”? Chapter 11 – Loddi, Doddi, We like to Party

& “”This is totally different from what was going on before September 11,” he said. “The United States used to put a lot of pressure on governments to improve human rights. It was believed to be the country that protected human rights.”” P148

✐ What might have driven this change in focus of the US away from human

rights? Chapter 12-‐ A City Built on Garbage

& “The clash wasn’t country against city; poor versus rich, Shiites squaring off against the rest. It was all of that, a little bit, and none of that. It was deeper and darker, harder to say, and impossible to fix.” P170

& “Lebanon was pushing blindly toward change, and it had to decide what kind of country it was going to be: a protectorate of Syria, tied to Iran through Hezbollah, verging on pariah status, battling endlessly with Israel, or this new country that Hariri an the others were trying to forge – free from Syrian influence, oriented towards France and America, liberal and warless, luring tourists and making nice with the neighbours. Each side saw it own extinction in the alternate vision.” P170

Chapter 13 – The Earthquake Nobody Felt

& “”Look at this!” another man shouted. He handed over one of the spent tear gas canisters. He pointed to the block lettering. MADE IN THE USA, it said. He looked at me, waiting for an answer. I had none to give.” P186

& “The Bush administration saw that, too. They saw the Brotherhood, and Hamas, and Hezbollah all cashing in on elections. After




that, we stopped hearing so much about democracy for Arabs. As it turned out, it didn’t look the way they had expected.” P190

✐ What did the US expect would happen when elections took place in the

Middle East? What did the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah suggest about attitudes in the Middle East?

" The Arab Spring was a wave of pro-‐democracy protests and uprisings that

took place in the Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2010 and 2011, challenging some of the region’s entrenched authoritarian regimes. Demonstrators expressing political and economic grievances faced violent crackdowns by their countries’ security forces.

" Neda Agha Soltan was a young Iranian woman whose death was captured on amateur camera and circulated around the world in 2009, encapsulating a nation's struggle for freedom in the aftermath of the last election, which many believe was rigged.

Tools

! Arab Spring Chapter 14 – All things light, and all things dark

& “My generation has been in war ever since we were born.” P193

& “This is not only the story of Atwar, but the story of Iraq. Her aspirations were the finest hopes of a broken country; her murder reeked of the hopelessness of a lost cause.” P195

& “Atwar looked sick and so did Iraq. Atwar died, but Iraq jut kept bleeding.” P198

✐ Is the Middle East “a lost cause”? ✐ What might be the consequence of a generation born into conflict?

Tools

! Atwar Bahjat Chapter 15 – There Would be Consequences

& “Baghdad Shifted like a kaleidoscope, the tortured fragments of the streets rearranging themselves into bloody walls, panicked faces, rubble piles, then scattering again.” P211

& “Either way I know that I am guilty. I took a chance with their lives, walked up to the table and gambled. I came to Iraq in a cloud of violence, part of an American plaque. I lured him in with the seductive promise that he was interesting to American readers, that his life had meaning beyond




his daily world and that his experiences mattered enough to document. For a young man like Ahmed, shunted aside and mocked, it must have been like a drug. All of that for a story I never wrote.” P216

✐ To what extent is it possible for journalists to remain objective

and detached in reporting conflict? Tools

! Megan Stack Chapter 16 – Killing the Dead

& “The truth is, you don’t know whether any of that is true. Once you arrive you can’t remember anything you learned you prepare yourself for war.” P 224

& “This is funeral as indoctrination, and rage is fiercer than grief. The sadness is jut a pale shadow on a burning day. The cheap spectacle of rotting bodies and a purple baby is more than a society can tolerate without hardening into hatred. You could stare into the enormous eyes of little boys and watch then turning to rock. You could feel it all taking hold, driving forward, another generation crushed, another generation rising. One war breeds another war. We create what we try to kill.” P226

& “Gaze too long into an abyss and the abyss also gazes into you, Nietzsche said.” P226

& “I hate all of us for participating in this great fiction of the war on terror, for pretending there is a framework, a purpose, for this torment.” P 236

" Perspectivism is the philosophical position that one's

access to the world through perception, experience, and reason is possible only through one's own perspective and interpretation. It rejects both the idea of a perspective-‐free or an interpretation-‐free objective reality.

✐ How might Nietzsche’s theory of Perspectivism be used

to explain the conflict in the Middle East? Tools

! Friedrich Nietzsche – Perspectivism. Chapter 17 – I thought I was a Salamander

& “The war no longer feels temporary. Now there is a hardening, an acceptance of this condition.” P237




& “We have all tried to be salamanders, but nobody really survives the fire. The mystery is that some get burned worse than others; some get burned in ways that are livable, and some do not.” P241

Epilogue

& “War is a total change, unleashing all things light and all things dark; we are pushed forward and our lives are invented by the history we live through.” P250




Central Concerns

#1 – Lies, Truth and Trust: ”Every man in this village is a liar.” It was a punch line to a parable, the tale of an ancient Greek traveler who plods into a foreign village and is greeted with those words… It’s one of the world’s oldest logic problems, folding in on itself like an Escher sketch. If he’s telling the truth, he’s lying. If he’s lying, he’s telling the truth. How is this show in the text? Connect this idea with a supplementary example. #2 – Compromising principles in order to achieve our own agendas Stack shows us time and time again that the primary internal conflict is one of compromise, and the consequences it brings. How is this show in the text? Connect this idea with a supplementary example. #3: – The war on terror “never really existed. Stack proposes that it creates a liminal space between “surviving and not surviving.” Stack forces us to think about the Middle East as a whole, rather than as separate countries with separate conflicts. #4 – War is elemental – it is kill or die When in the middle of combat, there is no humanity. There is no room for compassion, only survival. Central Concern #5 – Circles of suffering and brokenness radiate out from one another. It’s all connected. #6 – War transforms human experience. Stack does not claim that the U.S. mishandled the war on terror, but rather that the war was an illusion from the start, “a way for Americans,” she writes, “to convince ourselves that we were still strong and correct.”

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