BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

May 29, 2004

Memorial

: David Weinberger just sent me to the most amazing story of Cpl. Jason Dunham, a Marine who saved the lives of his fellow soldiers by throwing his helmet and body on a grenade.

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Self-defense

: Chris Albritton, the journalist/blogger who just returned to Iraq, unleashes a long diatribe about how difficult it is to report in Iraq: the traffic, the security, the rules, the mistrust. He defends his journalist colleagues against accusations that they either aren't sticking it to the man or aren't reporting good news ("There isn't much good news to report").

OK, he's there and we're not. Better reporter than I, Gunga Din. But I think the diatribe misses two points:

First, because of all the limits he lists, don't we need to acknowledge that we are not getting good reporting from Iraq? I don't care about the reasons and excuses of which there are plenty. Let's just take a cold, hard look at the quality of the reporting and see whether we're getting the whole story.

Second, Chris, if I may suggest: Go talk to some of your fellow bloggers, Iraqi bloggers. You, of all journalists, should understand the benefit of their perspective -- and reporting. Partner with them; show them some tricks of the reporting trade; quote them; introduce their story to mainstream Western media because no one else is. It's the perfect bloggers' scoop.

See my earlier post suggesting this to other reporters here and here. See Jay Rosen on this topic here and here. See also Thomas P.M. Barnett's description, below, of Iraqi blogs as "serious ground truth."

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Harry Potter, R.I.P.

: The actor who plays Harry Potter predicts that his character will be killed off.

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Images of sin

: Thomas Kielinger argues in The Observer that Germans can't escape their history and shame all the more because there are so many images of their sin. Well, perhaps. There were fewer images of, say, the Soviet gulags and so there is less chronic memory of them. Still, the Germans' relationship with history has more to do with the enormity of their crimes than their documentation, I'd say.

: See also this image from Normandy.

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Bike nuts
: Some amazing video of bikers holding a frightening drag race through traffic (and pedestrians) in New York. [via MediaDigest]

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Busting out with pride

: Living in Europe (third post in a row) reports that Danish breasts are growing.

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Yawn or vote

: The Party of European Socialists starts a European Parliamentary election blog "to counter voter apathy." Oh, yup, with headlines like these, they'll rush to the polls:

: "SAVING THE PLANET THE EUROPEAN WAY"
: THE SPIRIT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE GAINS GROUND
: THE WORLD NEEDS PRE-EMPTIVE POLICIES AND NOT PRE-EMPTIVE WARS
: FAIR DEAL FOR INTERNATIONAL WORK-SHARING
: MAKING EUROPE GOOD FOR YOU
: MAKING EUROPE AN EXCITING DEMOCRATIC ARENA
: RUMSFELD IS WRONG ON "OLD" AND "NEW" EUROPE

They need to read Wonkette. If they want to stir up excitement about politics, a little sex always helps.

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Backlash

: Living in Europe celebrates a German mea culpa for anti-Americanism:

Well, now, what have we got here? Why, it's Andreas Rinke writing in today's issue of Germany's leading financial newspaper, Handelsblatt, and regretting the repulsive anti-Americanism that's become the leitmotif of German discourse this past while.

His op-ed is entitled "Der gute Deutsche" ("The good German"), and in it Rinke takes his fellow citizens to task for their arrogance and their ignorance....

"It is with astonishing nonchalance that the ordinary German judges the moral deficits of the superpower," Rinke writes. "Responsible for this, is a mixture of schadenfreude, political rejection and cultural arrogance." The key graf:
"And that, by the way, is why it is so presumptuous to boast about the apparently better ability of the Germans at "nation building". Here the torturing US soldier, there the school-building German army — this contrast is consciously cultivated. But, on the one hand, what is being suppressed here is that Germany itself is a successful example of the American ability to build democracies. One the other hand, people are being brazenly diverted from the fact that the German army cannot and will not do anything else: it is only because the Americans and the British did the "dirty" work in the war on terror that the schools can be built in Afghanistan."

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Worldwide yellow alerts

: Get Aon's political risk email updates, free.

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The ground truth

: Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map and a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, has a weblog [via Die Zeit] filled with lots of blunt and interesting commentary, including this, which leads to a compliment for Iraqi blogs:

I understand the deal with the devil in Najaf, and I know that temporizing situations can work in our strategic favor. But such deals only work if we spend the meantime creating the connectivity that generates strategic despair on their side, not ours.

Strategic despair is when your side surveys the environment and says to itself: “No matter how hard we try, this thing is going south—there’s just too many of them and too few of us.” I worry about strategic despair a lot right now with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and even more so back here at home, where media coverage highlights only failure and never success. Why? The media’s definition of war is almost as narrow as the Pentagon’s: show us the smoking holes and dead bodies! The “everything else” is completely ignored, which is why onsite blogs like IRAQ THE MODEL are so important—they define serious ground truth.

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All the nonnews that's fit to print

: Don't you just love stories that report what did not happen?

The Times today reported that the antiwar left is not yelling at John Kerry. "Despite doubts on Iraq, left-wing Democrats have not attacked him," said the Page 1 caption.

This is such a nonstory that it stinks of agenda. Does The Times think the left should attack Kerry?

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What we fight against

: The war in Iraq is not like Vietnam. It is like World War II. It is a war against fascism.

It's hard to find something more politically incorrect to say these days. One side will yelp because it gives the war in Iraq an air of legitimacy. The other side might object because it borrows the tragically ironic rhetoric of Soviets.

But as I watch the lead-ups to today's dedication (at long last) of the World War II memorial in Washington, I am struck by the need to remember the single cause that led us to sacrifice so many lives: eliminating fascist dictators. I wonder how many lives could have been saved if we had wiped them out sooner. And I wonder how many Iraqis might have been saved if we had taken out their fascist dictator sooner.

Yesterday, I picked up P.J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills, which is sometimes written like a gravel road. But when O'Rourke hits a truism he hits it dead center. I hope he won't mind me quoting a segment on fascism and war:

Americans have been surprised by Iraqi fascism, although we are familiar enough with other evil ideologies. Communism still persists in Cuba, North Korea, and the minds of a million university-type intellectuals. Religious extremism waxes worldwide. But communists do bad things for a purpose. They have a vision of utopia where everyone shares everything and you give your Lawn Boy to a family in Chad. And religious extremists do bad things for a purpose. They have a vision of a utopia where everyone goes to heaven together. So what if you have to die to get there? You have to die to get to heaven anyway. Fascism, however, is a pointless ideology -- the graps of power for power's sake. The fight against fascism seems like Dad's war, Granddad's war. Fascism should be out of date in the purposeful, task-oriented world of today. Never mind Slobodan Milosevic, Vladimir Putin, Yasir Arafat, Somali warlords, Charles Taylor, China's politburo, the Saudi royal family, murderous Hutu rabble, and New Gringrich's career arc.

Fascists do bad things just to be bad. "I'm the baddest dude in Baghdad," Saddam Hussein was saying, "the baddest cat in the Middle East. I'm way bad." This was way stupid. But fascists are stupid. Consider Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He didn't have any. How stupid does that make Saddam? All he had to do was say to UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, "Look under my bed. Look in the special spider hole I'm keeping for emergencies." And Saddam Hussein could have gone on dictatoring away until Donald Rumsfeld is elected head of the World Council of Churches.

Instead, we blew the place to bits. And a mess was left behind. But it's a mess without a military to fight aggressive wars; a mess without the facilities to develop dangerous weapons; a mess that cannot systematically kill, torture, and oppress millions of citizens. It's a mess with a message -- don't mess with us.

Yes, and once the mess is made, we need to continue to follow the lessons of World War II -- and not World War I. We must not cut and run desert the Iraqi people and the region to future fascists. We must help the Iraqis, who are not our enemy, as we helped those who were our enemies in Germany and Japan to build better futures. And that doesn't just mean waiting for the government to do it. We, the American people, should remember the righteous cause of both eliminating and preventing fascism and we should be helping the Iraqis -- and thus the Middle East -- to do that, people to people. (More on how to do that in a few days.) Eliminating fascism and tyranny from the world is the truest memorial to the millions who fought and lost their lives in this cause in World War II.

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