WikiLeaks and the Need to Know

“Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids to a battle.”[1]

Everyone knows that the first victim of war is the truth.  What is less well known is that the last victim of war, any war, is also the truth.  Because the truth—defined as what really happened, independent of the political ‘spin’ attached to the events—continues to be brutalized, in a way that is graphically analogous to the way some military corpses are dragged through the streets by their enemies (an act reminiscent of that celebrated in the Iliad, when Achilles dragged Hector’s corpse—the corpse of the noblest of all heroes—behind his chariot, and for twelve days continued to abuse it).

My allusion to events that occurred some three thousand years ago is highly relevant, since it indicates how little the atrocities committed by men during the wars they have continuously waged since then have changed.  

 But that is not to say that nothing has changed since then.

If we limit our scope to that of living experience, say one hundred years, we can see how much has changed in such a short period of historical time by glancing at a few statistics, and bearing in mind a few technological developments.

It is estimated that for every civilian death during the first World War, nine soldiers died.  Today that ratio has become inverted, with an estimated ten civilian deaths accompanying every single death of a combatant.

The turning point for this ratio was no doubt the second World War, during which anywhere between 50 and 70 million people died, most of whom—perhaps 60%, or two out of every three—were civilians.

But it was prior to the outbreak of WWII, when, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), new technological developments accompanied by pseudo-scientific theories concerning the ‘worth’ of various categories of human lives, ensured that forever after any war would involve more civilian casualties than military causalities.

These technological developments included the Junkers 52s that were used as bombers in raids against a town like Guernica, where there were no real military targets; this was the most infamous, if not the first, example of terror bombings aimed specifically at the civilian population and the morale of the enemy.

By the end of WWII the carpet bombing of the enemy’s cities had become commonplace, with the consequent ‘collateral damage.’

That term, however, did not come into common usage until after the Vietnam War, during which the ratio of civilian to military dead was about two to one.

Simultaneous with these developments in what can only be considered as weapons of considerable destruction were the technological breakthroughs that enabled those who were not actually there to witness the death and destruction, as well as the atrocities.  These included the Leica camera, particularly in the hands of someone like David Seymour and the more widely known and remembered Robert Capa.

Anyone my age is familiar with the social and political impact of the televised images from Vietnam, where Capa died, about a decade before the Americans took over from the French.  And practically everyone today who has access to a television or a computer has seen even some of the more controversial and highly censored images from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the WikiLeaks film titled Collateral Murder (see footnote).  

And it’s a good thing too, particularly for a nation that prides itself on the nature of its democracy—and especially its First Amendment—but it is not enough.

It is a good thing that there are people who are dedicated enough to the ‘truth’ to risk—and sometimes give—their lives for it.  But those of us who benefit from the risks they take, their noble commitment and sacrifice, should take a stronger and more vocal stand in defense of their efforts.

The information that Julian Assange has made available through WikiLeaks is immensely valuable, even if it merely tells us—in far greater detail, and with considerable bureaucratic precision—what we already knew or suspected.

I think it’s fair to take issue with the information that was dumped onto the internet last July, information that hadn’t been scrutinized and filtered to shield the lives of those who were acting as informants in Afghanistan (a dangerous task and, assuming you don’t support the Taliban, perhaps even a noble one as well).  But the Iraq Papers basically provide us with the Field Reports that the military personal kept on all ‘significant incidents.’  Some of this information may be mundane, much of it we already knew—or suspected—but what Assange has provided us with via the publication of this material are the details of those incidents, and these details matter very much.

In some cases these details enable us to judge events for ourselves, and in others they provide vital information for the people most interested in that information, the family members who lost loved ones as a result of ‘accidents’ or ‘mistakes.’  Even these ‘accidents’ or ‘mistakes’ can be judged more fairly when we place them in the context of urban and modern guerilla warfare.  I don’t mean to justify any of the ‘collateral damage’—a euphemism that I regard as loathsome—but the more information we have, and the more honest and accurate it is, the better we can gauge and understand the complex situations that are created by the outbreak of armed hostilities.

In the United States, in particular, there is only one real enemy, and that is ignorance.  I say ‘in particular’ because I get the impression that it is in the best interest of some people, even some political organizations, to keep Americans relatively ignorant.  

Those will be the people and organizations who protest the release of the Iraq Papers the most.  Those people don’t want us to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  They—like certain members of Spanish society today, who oppose the exhumation of the mass graves that date back to the Spanish Civil War, which could provide us with information concerning what really happened then—don’t want us to know.  They will tell us that all of this—the names and dates and places of execution of the Spanish dead; the roughly 400,000 documents that WikiLeaks has just released, containing the dates and locations and even the names of some of the estimated 120,000 civilian dead in Iraq since the war began—is old news, and that going over this old news again will only open old wounds and make them bleed again.  But even this isn’t true.  

The truth about what really happened won’t resurrect the dead, it can’t eliminate the pain of having lost someone you loved, but it can provide the opportunity for those who are still grieving—even seventy years after the event—to come to terms at last with what has happened.  

In addition, the more we know about war—about the very real death and destruction that accompanies every war, and the way innocent civilians, including children, are always caught up in the conflict and made to suffer as a consequence; the closer every war we become involved in is brought to home, the more we are allowed to feel it by being privy to what really happens in war, all the mistakes and accidents and stupidities and blunders, and the more all victims of the war are treated and regarded as human beings—the less likely we will be to wage war, or to use war as anything but the very last resort of all. 

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[1] These words were spoken in the context of the unprovoked shootings of Iraqi civilians—including two children—on July 12, 2007, an incident that resulted in the death of two Reuters journalists (Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen) and an unknown number of others.  WikiLeaks said that “Although some of the men appear to have been armed, the behavior of nearly everyone was relaxed.”  And no weapons were fired at the Apache helicopter.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

How Not to Forget

Last night I read The Long Voyage with greater clarity.  But this reading experience is vastly different from that of—probably almost exactly—a year ago.  In part, my knowledge and understanding has increased.  Last year, when I read Literature or Life, I tended to go over practically every sentence at least twice, as if I might distill its essence in this way.  I wanted, or needed, to squeeze the slightest drop of information out of each line, each thought, every considered reflection.  Now I am better educated with respect to the events Semprún deals with in his novels.  Now the foundation of my understanding has been laid.  Now it is not the whole that is so shocking and bewildering, but the particulars of the separate stories that he recalls.  Like that of the dozen or so Jewish children who survived a winter exodus from camps in Poland.  Most of the adults had died packed and frozen together (200 in a boxcar), and when the doors opened some of them tumbled out like logs, while others had to be pried free of each other.  All of these corpses were stacked on the landing.  Then the group of young survivors were discovered, and something had to be done with them.  So Semprún describes what happened, the clubs and dogs and finally the single bullet in the back of each neck of each child who lay in the snow of that last winter of the war.

Or the disappearance of Hans, without a trace, after the group of maquis to which he belonged was ambushed and slaughtered.  Hans, who was not only German but Jewish, had stayed behind with the automatic rifle, providing cover for the others who fled back into the forest that covered that particular mountainside.  Hans, as Semprún recalls, was determined not to die as a Jew, or merely because he was a Jew, or at least not to allow the SS to treat and kill him like a Jew, the same way they treated and murdered an estimated six million Jews.  So Hans stayed behind with the automatic rifle and did what he could and nothing was ever known of him after that.  When Semprún returns to the farm below the mountainside after the war is over and he has been repatriated to France (despite his not being French), the farmers tell him what they know, but they can’t say precisely what became of Hans because nobody knows.  And when Semprún walks up into the hills, and finds the area where the base camp was established, there is nothing—or hardly anything—to suggest that any of this ever was.

Of course this is the essence of the dilemma Semprún deals with in all his novels, the problem of remembering.  And he isn’t the only author, or survivor, to do so.  Memory is at the heart of any work of fiction, and the endless questions of memory operate in non-fiction as well.  Historical accounts of actual events are meant to be based on some sort of documentary evidence, but practically all of this evidence disintegrates with time.  Sometimes it is destroyed on purpose, so as to leave no trace.  This is what the Nazis tried to do with an extermination camp like Treblinka, simply erase it from the experience of the world, so that nothing would be left to indicate what had happened there.  In our own time there are countless examples of those implicated in wrong, illegal and immoral affairs trying to clean up after themselves so as to leave nothing behind that might incriminate them.  And even in this age of instantaneous digital archiving, especially of images, we might imagine that such deceit—such cheating of memory, or history—would be more difficult.  But at the same time we know how easy it is to delete a file, an image, or anything else, from a hard drive.  Yes, our lives may be more widely (and perhaps more shallowly) documented than any lives before our time, but we would be foolish to imagine that the essential problems and difficulties of memory have been resolved in any way, that it will be any easier for future generations to remember what happened to us.  Because no matter how much hard evidence we may have, there are always gaps in the story line, and these empty spaces can only be filled in with the work of imagination.  Hence the dilemma remains unchanged:  not only how to remember, but how not to forget.