Nov 28 : "The Swimmer" - Joakim Zander

LOSING A MORAL COMPASS TO FOREVER WARS

Sometimes it can be effective to visualize a scenario through a piece of fiction. While my previous posts, "Jesus Loves Fighter Jets" and "Disaster Capitalism" talked in broad brushstrokes about the justifications that are used to fight and maintain our "forever wars", Swedish writer Joakim Zander puts some of these themes into stories where the reader is emotionally invested in who the characters are and what they're doing.

"The Swimmer" is the first book of his Klara Walldeen trilogy. Each book has some motif that deals with Afghanistan or wars in the Middle East. In each book one or two of the main characters somehow gets drawn into drama, espionage, or even jihad going on at the time (either willingly or unwillingly). And the characters in question always somehow seem to cross paths with Klara, the unifying personality, who has held various positions in the books including an affiliation with some non-profits and the European Union government.

Zander's story itself says that he "has lived in Syria and Israel and graduated from high school in the United States. He earned a PhD in law from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and has worked as a lawyer for the European Union"

I'm mentioning Zander's work as a followup to my previous posts because there are some similar themes. In Zander's second book, "The Believer", private security companies are themselves causing civil disturbances and civil unrest in the attempt to make the police forces look weak, so citizens will think the police are ineffective and then will be more receptive to calls for privatization of the police. The war profiteers we hear about in "Disaster Capitalism" are definitely present in "The Swimmer". How often is any unrest that we see today initially caused by disaster profiteers as a means towards their own financial ends?

And the incongruous religious zealotry that supports murder and mayhem in "Jesus Loves Fighter Jets" is mirrored on the other side by that of the Afghan fighters in "The Swimmer" who try to keep a rigid oppressive society based on their distorted religious views.

The books have very believable and engaging, multi-dimensional characters, many likable, others not. In "The Swimmer" itself, one of the main characters, Mahmoud Shammosh, is in the process of writing and developing a book based on his dissertation, "The Privatization Of War". Will he himself become a target?

I highly recommend "The Swimmer" as well as the trilogy's two that follow ("The Believer" and "The Friend"), so I don't want to give too much away, but I would just say that corporate entities running amock with no credible supervision from the government are frequent players in Zander's books. But, much to the relief of the reader, Klara Walldeen in the end is successful in helping to extricate several characters from their bad situations. But, while we say whew for the characters we have come to love, we all know that the overall threats in real life still remain.

Nov 02 : "Disaster Capitalism" - Antony Loewenstein

LOSING A MORAL COMPASS TO FOREVER WARS

"Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe" is the subtitle of Antony Loewenstein's book "Disaster Capitalism", which I read about the same time I saw the Trash Boy show a few weeks ago. Continuing on the subject of war and fighter jets. In my previous post the artists brought us to look at the intersection of religion as the justification of wars. And in the book "Disaster Capitalism" privatization with little or no oversight turns out to be a major villain.

The book starts right off talking about war profiteers and especially how it related to our presence in Afghanistan, which seems not to have been much different from the point when the book was written in 2015 up through the point where we exited only a few months ago.

And while we did leave Afgahnistan, the USofA is still involved in a number of other wars, so our killing people in other countries is far from over. From the New York Times a few weeks ago: Mr. Biden came to office vowing an end to the “forever wars” — and has firmly defended his decision to pull American troops from Afghanistan in the face of withering criticism from lawmakers of both parties. But administration officials have been clear that combat missions in other countries will continue, namely those that do not involve large deployments of American troops or draw intense news media scrutiny. Here's a link to the full article: Biden Declared the War Over. But Wars Go On

The book talks about the outsourcing of the "war" to private contractors. The writer goes to Afghanistan and Pakistan and interviews officials of the contractor companies, the contractor foot-soldiers on the ground, as well as Afghans on the ground who were simultaneously the victims and beneficiaries of our presence. We had a very complex relationship with the Afghan people. While some who were interviewed liked some of the benefits of our presence in terms of support jobs and opportunities that the contractors brought, they were dead set against the methods employed by the contractors, including the way the contractors could kill people or make them "disappear" with complete impunity, never being held accountable.

The book goes on to talk about Haiti and other countries that are recipients of large amounts of aid that winds up being administered by corporate contractors. After talking about Afghanistan, Haiti, and other foreign locales, the book discusses what's going on in the major industrialized countries, such as the USofA, Great Britain, and Australia, with much attention being paid to the privatization of prisons.

In the post 9/11 world, we're in the middle of outsourcing gone wild, where private companies repeat the mantra that they can get the job done better than the government. The government then outsources to them, gives them lots of money, and follows up too little about what's going on with the money. Out of sight, out of mind. And maybe the plans were not thought out well enough to begin with. Maybe the outsourcing was more for the benefit of the companies involved than for the people on the ground that they were allegedly there to help. The book has a long list of documentation, references, and links.

In all these cases, whether it's the unaccountable war contractors killing people with complete impunity, or the prison contractors, who, for the sake of profit, deny medical care or food to those incarcerated, a recurring theme seems to be that there's no responsible oversight of these operations, some of which are questionable to begin with. Human life is placed as being less important than corporate profits. Losing a moral compass.

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NOV 28 2021 UPDATE Next look at how a work of fiction touches on religious zealotry and war profiteers in my next post are involved in the war machine.

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