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.