Fiction and Nonfiction Strikes on Drones

Looking forward to our April discussion book, Alex Gilvarry's From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, which makes use of satire to expose the post-9/11 security state, I was excited to see Teju Cole's experiment in Twitter fiction which exposes our 'empathy gap' with drone victims by deploying strikes on famous literary characters:

1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist's.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013

2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013

6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013

I highly recommend this interview with Cole from CBC Radio about what he is trying to accomplish here. Does the graft of fiction on news headline work for you? (From Think Progress, here's an interesting critique). You many also want to learn more from Teju Cole (tejucole) on Twitter and his personal website. Cole's novel Open City has been on my to-read list for quite awhile and this is going to bump it up to the top. Maybe we will get him onto the Rights Readers list soon, too.

By the way, it occurred to me that we had previously discussed the empathy gap brought about by advances in military technology when we read  Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond by Michael Ignatieff more than a decade ago. Sure enough, he has something to say about drones (Financial Times June 2012), noting that they fulfill our wish for harm without consequence, thereby becoming the 'mercenaries of the 21st century,' but it's not at all clear they are effective in achieving political goals,

Before succumbing to these technologies, leaders should remember how little virtual war has actually accomplished. Kosovo is still a corrupt ethnic tyranny; Libya will take years to put itself back together; and no one can see a stable state in sight in Afghanistan. Virtual war turned out to be the easy part. Democracies have little staying power for the hard part.

Urge the President and Congress to bring US use of armed drones and other lethal force in line with our obligations to respect human rights here.

Spring Cleaning

Lately I've accumulated a backlog of links which I should have blogged in a timely fashion so that you would have learned that Michael Ignatieff (Rights Readers selection Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond) is now the leader of Canada's Liberal Party -- and just now has taken the opportunity of his meeting with President Obama to discuss the case of Guantanamo juvenile detainee Omar Khadr.

Or you would know that Samantha Power (A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide) has taken a position with the NSC, but before she stepped up to serve she wrote yet another profile of a human rights defender for the New Yorker (and oh yeah here's a short version of the one she wrote a whole book about.)

And then there's Arundhati Roy's (The Cost of Living) response to the Mumbai attacks, the fact that Jon Burge (a central figure in John Conroy's Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture) was arrested last fall, and Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) had a New Yorker short story with a provocative title published in October.

Fortunately, this American Scholar article about Chinese censorship by Ha Jin (Ocean of Words Army Stories and The Crazed) is the sort of thing that doesn't date that fast and a little item in my local paper-- "Last month a bipartisan group of six members of Congress nominated Greg Mortenson [Three Cups of Tea] for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize"-- might still make a you-heard-it-here-first list.

Phew! That felt good! Perhaps we'll do that again sometime, sooner rather than later.

Ignatieff wins

It seems Michael Ignatieff, author of the Rights Readers selection, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, stood for a seat in the Canadian parliament. The Guardian has a profile and the Globe and Mail confirms he won.