Reporting War
Stuart Allan & Barbie Zelizer (editors)
374 pages including index
published in 2004
Having kept a politically orientated weblog the past half decade or so I've become acutely aware of the limitations
of journalism, particularly during wartime. The current war for South Ossetia provides a good example of these limitations, were we're seeing
live how difficult it is for journalists to even get to the combat zone, not to mention how dangerous, as the death of a Dutch camera man proved.
Perhaps more worrying, as the conflict continued the reporting on it which started off fairly neutral has become more and more partisan, especially
once the United States and the European Union got involved in its resolution, with Russia pictured as the agressor when in fact it was Georgia who
started the war. Russian statements are treated with skepticism while quotes from approved official sources, like the Pentagon or NATO are quoted
verbatim. In general the war is treated through an American or European lens, rarely from the point of view of the Russians or Georgians, let alone
the Ossetians...
All these problems are described in Reporting War, a collection of essays on the role of journalism in wartime, its difficulties and
dillemas. Published a year after the American invasion of Iraq, a lot of attention is of course paid to the problems of that particular war. The
book doesn't just look at the role of the journalists themselves, but also how they are dealt with by armies and governments involved in war, with
a specific focus on the US army's management of journalist during the first and second Gulf War. What's more, several essays look beyond the physical
reaity of reporting wars to the role the media plays in general in covering wars. Not every conflict is covered equally after all.
Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side -- Clive Stafford Smith
Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side
Clive Stafford Smith
307 pages including index
published in 2007
Lord knowns there have been a lot of depressing books published about America's war on terror; not to mention a metric shitload of blogs
writing about it, including my own. So what good is yet another book decrying the injustices committed at
Guantanamo Bay? After all, if you don't know about them by now, you'll never know. But when the author is one of the lawyer volunteers defending
the victims of the war on terror, who has been coming to Guantanamo for years and who also manages to inject some humour in what's otherwise
a bloody dreary subject.
Clive Stafford Smith is somebody who has a lot of experience with worthwhile but hopeless causes, as he spent years working on death penalty cases in
the American Deep South. When the news about the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp became known he didn't hesitate, but immediately
got involved. Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is based on his personal experiences at Guantanamo. The title is a reference to
the fact that all the lawyers have to stay on the leeward side of the bay and therefore have to take the morning ferry to get to their clients each
day. Surprisingly for a book on such a dark subject matter, Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is quite funny in places, due to
the absurdity of some of the situations Clive Stafford Smith and his clients find themselves in.
New Skies
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
275 pages
published in 2003
I didn't know this was meant to be an "anthology of today's science fiction" for a "new, younger generation of science fiction fans" until I got
this home from the library, as I only got it because Patrick Nielsen Hayden was the editor and I was curious to
see what his tastes were like. I thought New Skies was an anthology of new science fiction, but instead it's a showcase of science fiction
stories from the last twenty years, aimed at an audience new to the genre. Still, it's as good a test of Patrick's tastes as any, as not only did he
have to select his entries from over two decades of stories, but he also had to select them to show off the width and breadth of the genre, be not
too long and accessible to younger reader. A huge task indeed.
Since I've been reading science fiction for quite some time now, I'm not exactly the target audience for New Skies; I don't know how some
thirteen year old kid would like this book, but I enjoyed it. New Skies does a good job of representing how much different kinds of science
fiction stories there are and how much fun they can be. None of the stories were the kind that makes your hair stand on edge, but they're good representations
of what you can expect in science fiction and they're accesible.
Britain's Gulag - The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
Caroline Elkins
475 pages including index
published in 2005
Before Tom Wolfe used "Mau Mauing" to describe the ways in which well meaning, white government officials where cheated out of welfare money through
racial intimidation, Mau Mau was synonymous with a much greater terror. Mau Mau was the stuff of white colonialist nightmares: a freakish native cult
of criminals and gangsters that savagely attacked innocent white settlers in their very homes, killing them and their families, mutilating their bodies.
Sure, these people said they were freedom fighters, but you couldn't take this claim seriously. Everybody who mattered knew Kenya wasn't ripe at all for
independence, that only the poison the Mau Mau spread through their pagan rites would cause the natives to question the benevolence of the British
civilising mission in the country. Britain was therefore justified to use harsh measures to suppress this savagery and fortunately managed to do so,
protecting the white settlers and loyal natives and crush the rebels, though it took them eight years, from 1952 to 1960 to do so.
That's the myth of Mau Mau. The reality as Caroline Ekins describes in Britain's Gulag - The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya is far different.
There were incidents of Mau Mau savagery, but the British and settler response to it was much greater and was systematic, not incidental. It was under the
Kikuyu of central Kenya, the most populous of the ethnic groups in Kenya and the group with the greatest grievances against British rule, as much of their
land had been appropriated for white settlers that the Mau Mau rebellion was the most widespread, therefore the British did to the Kikuyu roughly what
the Germans did to the Polish during World War II. The nazi plan for Poland had been to destroy its population as a people by murdering its intellectual
elite, remove it from all the best parts of the country and herd the rest into the wastelands to serve as uneducated slave labour, with any resistance
brutally put down. What the British did to the Kikuyu in Kenya was not quite as bad, but it came awfully close. It was motivated by security concerns
rather than deliberate planning, but the endresult was still that less than fifteen years after World War II the British in Kenya had recreated much of
the nazi system in dealing with the Kikuyu's struggle for freedom.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City -- Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
365 pages including index
published in 2006
The Emerald City was what its inhabitants called the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2003-2004: a pleasant bubble of transplanted America, cut off
from the everyday reality of Iraq, the ultimate ivory tower where the Coalition Provisional Authority that was in power in that year made its plans for
the future of Iraq, unhindered by much knowledge of the world outside their bubble. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an eyewitness account
of that first year of the American occupation of Iraq, as seen from inside the bubble. It's a story of how wide eyed innocents and well intentioned ideologues
came to Iraq to remake the country into a model of Jeffersonian freemarket democracy, with little more to recommend them for the job than their personal
loyalty to Bush and the Republican party and how they were cruelly disappointed by the reality of post-war Iraq and its missed opportunities.
In short, this is a whitewash, though perhaps not a conscious whitewash. It's true the New York Times quote on the back calls this a
"A visceral --sometimes sickening-- picture of how the administration and the handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq"
and that every other page or so has you slapping your face at yet another incredibly obvious stupidity, but in the end it's still a whitewash. The
clue is in that word bungled. As if the Bush administration and their lackeys in Iraq started the war and subsequent occupation with
the best of intentions, but lacked the competence to fulfill them, or took the wrong decisions for Iraq not to further their own ends, but because
they were a bit naive about the realities of the country. The book is steeped in the assumption that, while the people in charge may have made the
wrong decisions, they had every right to attempt to make those decisions. It's like reading a book on British rule in India that only tells of
the problems the British had in establishing their rule and in the day to day running of their empire, without ever questioning the presence of
the British there.
