seeing

by tobybee

Channel 4 in England recently made and screened a doco detailing what was done by the Sri Lankan army to the Tamil people in the final weeks of the civil war between the government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers. As they describe it:

Jon Snow presents a forensic investigation into the final weeks of the quarter-century-long civil war between the government of Sri Lanka and the secessionist rebels, the Tamil Tigers.

With disturbing and distressing descriptions and film of executions, atrocities and the shelling of civilians the programme features devastating new video evidence of war crimes – some of the most horrific footage Channel 4 has ever broadcast.

Captured on mobile phones, both by Tamils under attack and government soldiers as war trophies, the disturbing footage shows: the extra-judicial executions of prisoners; the aftermath of targeted shelling of civilian camps; and dead female Tamil fighters who appear to have been raped or sexually assaulted, abused and murdered.

The film is made and broadcast as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon faces growing criticism for refusing to launch an investigation into ‘credible allegations’ that Sri Lankan forces committed war crimes during the closing weeks of the bloody conflict with the Tamil Tigers.

In April 2011, Ban Ki-moon published a report by a UN-appointed panel of experts, which concluded that as many as 40,000 people were killed in the final weeks of the war between the Tamil Tigers and government forces.

It called for the creation of an international mechanism to investigate alleged violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law committed by government forces and the Tamil Tigers during that time.

This film provides powerful evidence that will lend new urgency to the panel’s call for an international inquiry to be mounted, including harrowing interviews with eye-witnesses, new photographic stills, official Sri Lankan army video footage, and satellite imagery.

Also examined in the film are some of the horrific atrocities carried out by the Tamil Tigers, who used civilians as human shields.

Channel 4 News has consistently reported on the bloody denouement of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields presents a further damning account of the actions of Sri Lankan forces, in a war that the government still insists was conducted with a policy of Zero Civilian Casualties.

The film raises serious questions about the consequences if the UN fails to act, not only with respect to Sri Lanka but also to future violations of international law.

For more coverage from Channel 4, you can go here.

And here’s the doco. It’s quite horrific viewing – I recommend making sure that you’re in safe space when you watch it. Take the time to watch and think – this is not something to be watched in a rushed hour.

And as I write that, I feel so bourgeois and comfortable in my life. Because yes, I could watch it and then close my computer and lie in bed and think about it and then have a nap. And I could be shocked that such things exist in the same world as the one where I live, where I can nap on a Sunday afternoon in my cosy bed. But truly, for me, the feelings when watching the film were of shock. It was, quite literally, shocking. As well as terrible, saddening, maddening.

There were so many horrific moments that it feels strange to pull the ones that affected me the most out. I don’t think I want to. But the images and the sounds remain imprinted on my brain.

The point of the film (as in, why channel 4 made it) I gather, was to push the UN to properly investigate the war crimes and hold war crimes trials. That’s not the reason why I’ve posted the film. I think it’s important that people watch it because it’s important that we know what’s happening in our world. I’ve recently become more convinced of the importance, the utility, of empirical research: that we can make all the analytical claims we want – we can enjoy the mind gymnastics that comes with a good critique (and I certainly think that it’s important that we make analytical investigations and claims, because that’s the only way we can actually understand our worlds) – but at a certain point it’s important to also see, hear and know. Not that we can ever know without a critique and analysis, but… hopefully you can follow what I mean.

Maybe what I mean is that it’s all well and good for me to present a critique and analysis of violence, but if I haven’t witnessed the violence that I analyse, then my analysis counts for nought.

So watch the doco.

(and yes, I would also question the utility of war crimes trials – partly because I hold little faith in the UN and its possibilities for creating conditions of justice in the world (which was reinforced by the actions of the UN in this case), partly because I have little faith in systems of law and criminality for creating a better world, and partly because I’m not sure that war crimes trials ever ‘deal with’ the problem(s) that we face when considering such mass breaches of human rights. So many smarter people than I have written of this problem, but I’ll quote from three, all of whom are dealing with the question of the Nuremberg Trials (but whose analysis seems to me to be fitting more generally), here.

Giorgio Agamben: “Despite the necessity of the trials and despite their evident insufficiency (they involved only a few hundred people), they helped to spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome. The judgments had been passed, the proofs of guilt definitively established. With the exception of occasional moments of lucidity, it has taken almost half a century to understand that law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself, dragging it to its own ruin.” (Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 1999, 19-20)

Hannah Arendt: “The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law, and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. It may be essential to hang Goering, but it is totally inadequate. That is, the guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems. That is the reason why the Nazis in Nuremberg are so smug.” (in a letter to Karl Jaspers, cited in Hans Kellner,””Never Again” Is Now,” in History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, edited by Brian Fay, Philip Pomper and Richard T. Vann, (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 228)

Froma Zeitlin: the trial of the SS officers “only emphasizes… the incommensurable gap between any legal procedure altogether, with its witnesses, evidence, and courtroom protocols, and the nature and extent of the horrific crimes committed.” (Froma Zeitlin, “New Soundings in Holocaust Literature: A Surplus of Memory,” in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, ed. Moishe Postone and Eric Santner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 198)

so the importance, i think, is in seeing and knowing something. or maybe seeing and feeling like we know even less.

Marek Edelman, the diasporist

by tobybee

Marek Edelman, a Bund member who was one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has died in Warsaw.

The New York Times has an obituary about him, which tells us that…

Marek Edelman was born on Sept. 19, 1919, the only son of a family that spoke Yiddish at home and Polish at work. His father died when he was very young; his mother, who worked as a secretary at a hospital, died when he was 14. While going to high school he was looked after by his mother’s friends from the hospital.

Dr. Edelman was an early member of the Solidarity free labor union and was among those interned when Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in 1981.

Two years later he was asked to serve on the organizing committee for an observance of the 40th anniversary of the ghetto uprising. He declined, saying that to do so “would be an act of cynicism and contempt” in a country “where social life is dominated throughout by humiliation and coercion.”

Eight years later he served as Solidarity’s consultant on health policy in the round-table talks that led to democratic rule for Poland. In the first free elections, he ran for the Polish Senate, losing narrowly. He kept working at the hospital in Lodz, dodging any suggestion that he retire.

Edelman was twenty in 1939, and worked at the Ghetto hospital, as well as organising resistance with other young Jews in the ghetto. The NYTimes explains that “He spent every day at the Umschlagplatz watching as trains were loaded and sent off. He was there ostensibly in his official capacity as a messenger for the ghetto hospital, carrying documents in his pocket that enabled him to pull people off the trains by designating them too ill to travel. Since the Germans held to the fiction that the passengers were being sent to better surroundings, they made a show of holding back the sick. In fact, young Marek used the passes to save people who would be useful to the Jewish Combat Organization, then being formed.
‘I was merciless,’ he recalled many years later. ‘One woman begged me to pull out her 14-year-old daughter, but I was only able to take one more person, and I took Zosia, who was our best courier.'”

He made it out of the ghetto at the end of the Uprising, living until today in Poland. Interestingly, the NYTimes obituary makes very little explicit mention of Edelman’s diasporist Jewishness.

Edelman is also the author of, for me at least, one of the most profound commentaries on Jewish violence. As Daniel Boyarin noted in his essay “The Colonial Drag”,

“it is also true that the seemingly most forceful resistance can turn into the most efficient complicity with the cultural project of the colonizer, by becoming just like him, sometimes even more than he is himself, and that this is what we need to understand about Zionism. The socialist cocommander of the Warsaw revolt, the anti-Zionist Marek Edelman, who remains in Poland as a Diasporic Jewish (Yiddish) nationalist and member of Solidarity, saw this very clearly: ‘This was a revolt!? The whole point was not to let them slaughter you when your turn came. The whole point was to choose your method of dying. All of humanity had already agreed that dying with a weapon in the hand is more beautiful than without a weapon. So we surrendered to that consensus.’”

In the NYTimes obituary he is quoting as saying that “‘These people went quietly and with dignity,’… speaking of the millions killed in the Nazi gas chambers. ‘It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one’s death. It is definitely more difficult than to go out shooting.'”

I start to write that it’s sad that such a man should die, but, of course, it’s inevitable. And he was ninety. That’s quite amazing. I suppose what’s sad is that this man, who seems to be so skillful at drawing out the complexities of life and of death, of not accepting simple answers, who is so capable of seeing the problematics of the events he has participated in, of rebelling against accepted narratives and discourses, and who thereby has provided space for us all to think a bit differently – actually, demanded of us that we think differently – has died. It’s a demand worth following.

violent basterds…

by tobybee

Anzya and I just went and saw ‘Inglourious Basterds’.

I really wanted to see the film – I was speaking last week with an academic who was raving about it, saying that it acted out revenge fantasies that he never knew he had. I also have never particularly longed to kill Nazis (although of course I’ve obviously never wished them well), so I was somewhat intrigued to see how I’d respond to the film. In particular, would I love it as much as he had.

Well, I did quite like it. I laughed at many of the violent acts, particularly the very last moment (I won’t explain what it was – don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t seen it). But as I write these words, I remember that the Nazis in the film screening scenes, when they were watching Italian soldiers being killed, were laughing at those deaths. And I found their laughter grotesque. And at another moment, again towards the end of the film, when so many of the Nazis were burning (sorry, bit of a spoiler, but not a total spoiler…) I re-realised how much I despise violence. And that watching those Nazis die made me recognise not the fun in their death, but the way in which fascism breeds fascism, violence breeds violence, potentially implicating us all in a world and a system which I fear and detest. And I thought, Can our history really be redeemed by perpetrating violence against those who violate us? But then, two minutes later, I was laughing at an act of violence which I felt was warranted. Maybe it was something about the symbolic level of the violence. Watching Nazis burn alive was, for me, horrifying. Watching a Nazi get a swastika carved into his head was funny.

Because the carving of the swastika represents the permanency of the Nazi identity. It isn’t something one can shed by taking off their clothes. To participate in such a regime is to be permanently marked. And the carving marked them once and for all.

I know, of course, that violence is Quentin Tarantino’s stock trade. But there was something particular about the violence that he showed in this film. Something which pointed, for me, to the inadequacy of the available responses we have to deal with the traumas that we, in our western societies, experience.

There’s lots of other ways in which this film could be thought through. What do those of you out there in blogland think?