Mercurial » War

Twittering words

Camilo — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:32:40 +0000

The famous TC50 are already creating a huge reaction; A funny one? twíttere rands, who says

Read the company description — tell me how long until you are forced to punch yourself in the face. My record: 15 words – http://tr.im/1a5

It makes a beautiful poster, though.

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Tiger and Snow

Camilo — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:56:47 +0000

War is a painful subject, so any artist that uses it as backdrop for a comedy is threading on weak ground.

Yet Benigni manages to pull it off in The Tiger and the Snow, which starts with a comedy, but follows with a detour through the love and devotion and an exploration of what is it to be human. Most significantly, he manages to show that Iraq at the beginning of the war as full of humans, full of people.

The reviews were cruel with this movie, accusing it of being a vehicle for Benigni and his wife, Braschi, so after a little googling I found some enthusiast reviewers. Craver talks about the beauty of the film, and another one writes on poetry, as OTM says, and one of their commenters writes back about their marvel at the discovery process when explaining the world. Yes, the film centers on poetry, but it is not the poetry alone what marks so much the love that Attilio feels for this woman.

There is the love, of course, but what shows up at the beginning is a desperate stalker that somehow seems to be funny. The film is much more than funny, so you might be disappointed if you were looking for something comical in nature.

This movie unfolds at its own pace, starting as light romantic comedy, a buffoon that clowns around in his underwear engaged in pretty stereotypical situations.

And then it turns serious.

Bad news reach this comic professor, and off he goes into Iraq, the film weaving the despair and sadness of the war into the desperate love of a man full of words and lacking on deeds. Only that, under the war and the urgency, that professed love becomes real, while the painful backdrop of a civilization slowly collapsing shows the human side of those Iraqi looters, the adroitness of the professor and the words of the charmer disappearing in front of the life or death situation of all of those he loves. The Iraqis are human, and suffer and pray and die; the American soldiers are human as well, and are scared and tense and compassionate. The Iraqis care, and suffer, and feel as well that pain.

It is telling that, in the last scene, he remains calm, mute, silent, the caged birds recalling that impossibility to tell stories that he once had, as a kid, when words were simply unfit to tell that amazing story. And thus, he remains eloquently silent.

This is a gorgeous movie.

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World Refugee Day

Camilo — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 19:57:13 +0000

Today is World Refugee Day, a day instituted to bring awareness to the plight of the millions of people displaced by racism, intolerance, war and persecution.
Go and check MDW, that has a poem by a 14 year old Sudanese refugee, of which the following is an extract:

The actual moment,
Of Exile,
Is like an illness.
You are ill,
With rage.

To each family,
It means closing the door,
On friends, culture, your native country.

I do have mixed feelings about this day. On one hand, yes, by all mean raise awareness about the fact that 40 million people have lost their homes and their culture, and have been forced to flee just to be alive. On the other hand, it is taken too lightly by media and politics. What are those stateless people doing here, seems to be the world motto:

Given the role of the United States in creating this mess, these numbers should cause some hard thinking in Washington. The United States admitted a whopping 202 Iraqis for resettlement during 2006, and though plans are in place to take in 7,000 this year, compare that to the 850,000 Vietnamese who were given asylum in the U.S. during and after that war. It’s pretty weak.

as the FP says. But unlike what they say, the total figure is not 10 million – it is, officially, 33 million people, according to the report on from the UN Refugee Agency: this figure includes the refugees, the asylum seekers, the internally displaced persons, the returnees and the stateless persons. In 2006, the IDP number was driven by Iraq’s war: there are people doing their work to alleviate this:
Oftentimes we have senseless figures, like the three million IDP from Colombia, or the 2.2 million Iraqis that have been displaced thanks to this recent oil war. What does it mean for us? Seriously, how is the world changed to your eyes on that ongoing tragedy? No one is a refugee by choice:

In a world, whose focus has become security, the Refugee Highway has become even more challenging. The rights of refugees to seek protection can be subtly discouraged, disregarded even, by perception and process. Yet, they persevere. Hope lingers as their search for a durable solution, for a life lived in peace and productivity continues.

How to deal with the worst year on record for refugees? Antonio Gutierres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees , said

Let’s be honest, in many cases their governments are part of the problem, and in many cases the international community does not have the capacity to help them.

How true.
Again with the Sudanese poet, I feel anger. Anger at the indifference, at the palliative phrases, at the empty “how sad” commentaries, all the pregnant silences after explaining loss and anger, all the impossible resignation to slowly losing identity, culture and family. The exile of a refugee is a slow, painful death fow which we al are responsible.
You could send a donation to the UN (tip of hat to devious diva).

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Brains after the war

Camilo — Wed, 02 May 2007 12:00:51 +0000

A report from the American Academy of Neurology has found that Gulf War I veterans with several health symptoms have differences in their brain structure from those with less ysmptoms:

Researchers found that two areas of the brain involved in thinking and memory were significantly smaller in the veterans with a high number of symptoms than in the veterans with fewer symptoms. The overall cortex was five percent smaller in those with more symptoms, and the rostral anterior cingulated gyrus was six percent smaller.

PTSD or chemical agents?

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On violent days

Camilo — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:58:35 +0000

On these violent days, where news are flooded with the VT massacre and the countless dead in Iraq and Darfur, it is necessary for us to recount our human nature, and understand and remember what is what distinguish us from mere animals.

We, humans, have the word – we speak, we communicate, and in doing so, create worlds, generate possibilities, and actualize dreams. We defuse conflict through our words with others, and when resolution is not possible, we also reach for agreements, compromises, and statements: it was through a culture of non-violence that Mahatma Ghandi got India away from England. It was through non-violence that MLK got the Civil Rights movement going.

But it is not a coincidence that this concept, non-violence, is foreign to Americans – both literally and figuratively. The USA bases its political preeminence on the power of its military might, its political importance on the size of the contributions and spending, and its economy in a market that rules through baseless consumerism.

There are no words, but the blind acceptance of might. Power becomes the modern idol, and everybody loses themselves to that idol: Control is just an illusion, at the very least a horrible mistake, at most an egregious sin.

We lose the words, and accept death – I remember that, one day at the University where I was studying, in the 7th floor, we heard some shots: outside in the street somebody shot a man over some emeralds. All the professor said was “stop peeking through the window- it is not safe. Everybody, back to class.” And we kept paying attention to class. We became inured to death, to tragedy, to pain. And we lost the ability to talk with the other.

The good news is that we lose the words, but we can regain them; we can generate dialog, solutions, understanding. It takes time to rebuild trust, to gather together, to talk and find common ground – but, specially in these times, it is necessary for us, humans, to recover that marvelous gift, our word.

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Leaving Baghdad

Camilo — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:50:08 +0000

John Perry Barlow has unusual advice on solving the Iraq crisis, directly from one security executive working there

Given all that, what did he suggest? “Well,” he sighed, “no one’s going to take this idea seriously, but here’s what I would do. I would free Saddam and tell him to go form a new government.’

JPB’s idea isn’t any easier either, rescuing the Kurds and establishing a secure foothold there, leaving the country to whatever government results from the elections: in other words, abandon Iraq to its highly likely civil war, defending the only place where there might be some strategic benefit and a modicum of reception to Americans.
The only problem with that strategy is that a fundamentalist Iraq will surely become a center for guerrillas and political unrest, one that is likely to spread and ignite more hatred toward the USA. In other words, there are no exits.
All in all, the mercenary’s suggestion seems the best.

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Raping boys

Camilo — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:00:46 +0000

The President and his minions, score one more for the Human Rights court in Le Hague. According to Seymour Hersh as quoted by Ed Cone, there is evidence of acts involving raping of boys at Abu Ghraib:

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
“The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking,” the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was “a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher.”

Here is the link Seymour Hersh’s speech.

And yes, I say that the President (along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rice) is responsible, because he is the one that arrogated the capacity to use torture, he is the one that pushed this war, he is the one that allowed this abuses and despicable actions to continue.

You are not going to see him at Le Hague any time soon, though it would be interesting.

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Torturing children.

Camilo — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:47:09 +0000

And the atrocities continue, now just torturing children! We have now that children torture does indeed exist:

Norwegian authorities reacted with shock and disgust Tuesday to a documentary on German TV that American soldiers allegedly have been holding children in prisons in Iraq, and abusing them as well. The Norwegians joined the Red Cross and Amnesty International in calling for an immediate end to the abuse, and release of the underage prisoners, some of whom are as young as 12 years.

How low can this go! How deep are Americans going to allow their government to sunk its good name? How much more despicable and disgusting behavior have the president and his cohorts to display to finally make the American voters vomit and break in heaves at his sight? How much more indignity are these Americans willing to suffer in the name of a guy that is trashing values, honor, dignity, and future?
It is not even about being Republican or Democrat. It is beyond that.

via Sadly, No through Long Story Short Pier

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Internally Displaced populations

Camilo — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 15:59:10 +0000

On my informal research about human rights in that corner of the world: Colombia and Population Displacement:

Around the world, the number of internally displaced people � an estimated 20 million to 25 million � is higher than the estimated 14 million refugees who leave their countries, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Only two countries have more displaced nationals than Colombia (2 million): Sudan with 4 million and Angola with 2.3 million. Other countries with large displaced populations include Congo (1.8 million), Eritrea (1.1 million), and Afghanistan (956,600), according to UNHCR.
Like other refugees, internally displaced people leave their homes to avoid the effects of civil war, persecution, human rights abuses, drought, or other disasters. The USCR notes that displacement in Colombia is directly related to conflict, political violence, and human rights abuses. The conflict involves left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and the Colombian armed forces.

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Peace talks

Camilo — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 10:30:12 +0000

There are other wars, other attempts at peace:

1. Define as the objective of this process the establishment of national peace through the strengthening of democratic governance and the re-establishment of the monopoly of force in the hands of the State. The AUC reiterate that its greatest service to the country in this historic moment is to advance its reincorporation into civilian life and to contribute to the strengthening to the rule of law. The parties commit themselves to this process conscious that their actions are an effective step towards the construction of a genuine peace that the Colombian people deserve and desire.

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