Category: Social justice

My buddy Sean Coon pointed me The War Tapes (trailer) — a documentary I’d run into on his blog before — that was shot entirely by US soldiers in Iraq.

I’ve not seen it yet, but intend to tonight at a free screening at the Castro Theater.

What I’m looking forward to is the narrative offered by the people actually engaged in the battle and who were trained in warfare, as opposed to the embedded journalists we heard from earlier on, who were not trained so much in survival or in the rules of war, but in the telling of stories and of “objective analysis”. Think about it: when you’ve got a semi-automatic weapon, people are out to kill you (and you’re “allowed” to kill them) and you’ve got a video camera, your perspective is going to be vastly different from someone who’s just along for the ride to “report back” to TV viewers back home.

Put another way: you might not be suprised, but I’ve never shot anyone with a deadly weapon. I have been shot and shot at, but only with paintballs and BBs. My life was never at risk. I never put someone else’s life at risk. And it seems odd to me that there are humans, all over the world, with these weapons whose primary purpose is the destruction of other humans. Looking specifically at guns, but also at the lot of weaponry that has been developed over the course of human history, I can’t help but find the whole business of killing other people a tad… perplexing.

Still, it’s rather lucrative and there are even companies that offer people for hire who are exceptionally good at killing other people. And if that doesn’t seem palatable, well, there are always robots and remote killing machines that can do the job instead.

So anyway, this is so curious to me because of how “citizen journalism” enlarges the conversation. I mean, these stories now come from regular people, people who have left their families and their friends, on a mission to protect American interests and “National Security”, who can speak openly, and without the kind of spin, hyberole or censure that you might find elsewhere. Regardless, I don’t know or even care much about whether this is propaganda, because what it is is the telling of stories by people living in the trenches who get up everyday and might kill other humans by the time they go to sleep the same night.

And I just can’t fathom what that’s like.

I do hope — somehow, again, perhaps naively — that this connected medium, someday, will make it increasingly difficult to substantiate the killing of other people. It just strikes me that the coming generation of always-on connected kids will be far too connected to people across the Earth — to allow for their friends to be fired upon, shot at, or bombed. The test may come soon enough, depending on what happens with Iran — given that it seems much more wired than Iraq (even as of a year ago). I mean, what if? Should the Bush administration decide to take military action, will the Iranian blogosphere inspire the sympathies of the liberal digerati and make an act of violence against the Iranian people political suicide? When we can directly connect with the people that our government intends to bomb, how does that change diplomacy and the ability of the government to act?

These are not questions that I have answers to, but that this kind of documentary inspires. Objectively, whether the story is being told by US soldiers, the Taleban, Al Qaeda, Iranians, Canadians or anyone else directly involved, this changes things. And it changes our understanding and the proximity of killing. Will it, I wonder, change behavior?

William Pfaff chimes in with an enlightening piece about the riotous protests going on in France, positing observations about the differences between the modern (American) model of capitalism and the previous model that the French are trying to protect:

The earlier model said that corporations had a duty to ensure the well-being of employees, and an obligation to the community (chiefly but not exclusively fulfilled through corporate tax payments).

That model has been replaced by one in which corporation managers are responsible for creating short-term “value” for owners, as measured by stock valuation and quarterly dividends.

The practical result has been constant pressure to reduce wages and worker benefits (leading in some cases to theft of pensions and other crimes), and political lobbying and public persuasion to lower the corporate tax contribution to government finance and the public interest.

In short, the system in the advanced countries has been rejigged since the 1960s to take wealth from workers, and from the funding of government, and transfer it to stockholders and corporate executives.

The second change Pfaff discusses is the effect of globalization and an internetworked environment, demonstrating the widening segmentation of the employers and the employed. Essentially, and certainly this is true in larger organizations, the “faceless masses” that occupy the millions of cubicles in Western workplaces now cost too much to maintain. What with health care, benefits and the cost of physical space, it simply makes more sense to move the engine of the economy to cheaper, more “accommodating” (and less developed) countries:

We need go no further with what I realize is a very complex matter, other than to note the classical economist David Ricardo’s “iron law of wages,” which says that in conditions of wage competition and unlimited labor supply, wages will fall to just above subsistence.

There never before has been unlimited labor. There is now, thanks to globalization – and the process has only begun.

It seems to me that this European unrest signals a serious gap in political and corporate understanding of the human consequences of a capitalist model that considers labor a commodity and extends price competition for that commodity to the entire world.

Truly the economic theories that have dominated the landscape for the last century are in need of a serious rethinking. And if not, then we must refactor our institutions and indeed, our civilization, to deal with the obsolescence of formerly dependable insulating walls that kept economies independent and serving of the local geographic population. As those walls now no longer exist, the socialist system is in jeopardy of withering away completely and the striation between those who have and will continue to have more and those who never will in capitalist systems means that we’re in for a rough ride ahead (bubble or not).

Surely as the internet diffuses power throughout the world’s connected, those folks lacking economic mobility or the opportunity and privilege that others speak of freely will take to this new medium to make their voices heard and, perhaps, make their struggles felt — offline. It’s happening in France now; though none can say if it’s a short term anomaly, it does seem that a great deal of unrest is pervading the societies of the world as modern capitalism colonizes new markets. I can’t help but consider what this means and what the 21st century will look like as territorial conquest fades from relevance and ideological domination becomes the new tell tale indicator of power and influence.