The right number is not enough.

From Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

To join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity... It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible. With all of its complexity, history is what we all have, and can all share. So even when we have the numbers right, we have to take care. The right number is not enough.

Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon with the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual. The one very large number that withstands scrutiny is that of the Holocaust, with its 5.7 million Jewish dead... but this number, like all of the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one.

Is this the sort of society we want?

Tony Judt, one of my favorite historians and liberal thinkers, passed away. I posted one of my favorite recent quotes from him on my Facebook, but it's worth reposting here:

When I write that we are trapped in “an economic language,” I mean that we have become accustomed to answering (and asking) only economic questions, and only in economic terms. The great economists of the past, from Adam Smith to Keynes, would have thought this bizarre. For them (as for me), a well-ordered society needs to address ethical questions, questions of justice and fairness and goodness and morality and right and wrong. We can’t live just by asking, “Is this efficient?”, “Is this good for GDP?”, and so on. We have to relearn to ask, “Is this the sort of society we want?”, a question to which there will be economic answers but there cannot be only economic answers.

Lazy day.

No babysitting today. One of the kids caught some nasty bug, and Mom wanted to stay home with her, so I wound up with oodles of free time on one of the most perfect summer days Wisconsin can produce. I visited the library to pick up an armload of books about, you know, genocide, war, human rights violations, man’s inhumanity to man; and dropped by the grocery for plums at 99 cents a pound. So far, I’ve spent the day bicycling, gardening (mostly watering our poor parched plants), harvesting raspberries (some were so dangerously overripe that they never would have survived the arduous journey back to the house…), gorging myself on raspberries (hello, Tummyache), sunbathing, listening to NPR and Franz Ferdinand, catching up on correspondence, and reading Niall Ferguson's The War of the World. I am not crazy about Ferguson. He writes about history engagingly enough, but his penchant for speculation. He's much too fond of asking, "What if this had not happened, and this had happened, and this had happened differently, and Chamberlain had grown a pair, and Hitler's Sudeten gambit had folded... then what?" for my tastes. I'll take Mazower over Ferguson any day, but I've already re-read everything of his twice, and Dark Continent and Hitler's Empire at least five times each. Mazower needs to publish a new book! I do admire/appreciate Ferguson's attention to the economic causes (especially the severely limited war-making resources of the Japanese Home Islands and Germany, within its 1919 borders) of World Wars I and II.

People, more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed.

I spent all day yesterday in painful heels and a very sharp suit. The career fair would have been much more promising if I had majored in something sensible like, oh, economics, engineering, accounting, computer science, math, science-science… the few advertising and marketing positions available were flooded with applications.

Most of the day, I caught up with Saad and Marquis.

Last night, I rejoined my history seminar classmates for a debate on the use of unmanned drone strikes in Pakistan. It’s such a tricky subject. The way I see it
- Lack of oversight of the Predator drone program in the US makes me nervous.
- Lack of public debate over the Predator drone program in the US makes me nervous, since it represents a “radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force” (Jane Mayer, The New Yorker).
- Potential to destabilize the unpopular Zardari regime inside a politically fragmented, nuclear-armed country on the border with another nuclear-armed enemy country (India).
- Potential
- Drones destroy human intelligence on the ground.
- Some drone strike targets dictated by Pakistani government, whose interests (political and otherwise) are not always in line with our own.
- Predator drone strikes are a FRIGHTENINGLY sustainable way for the US to continue conflicts (low cost in terms of American blood, low oversight/accountability, low visibility to US population) around the world. I read somewhere that “drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on endless war” and—yes. That scares me. When war has a sufficiently high, sufficiently visible cost, we pick our battles more carefully.

Gibetsky.

1) Courtney and I spent four or five hours at the Rathskeller debating American foreign policy, our national security interests and—most depressingly—the sorry state of the public sphere in the United States. We were under the influence of much too much sugar, caffeine and nicotine, and it was great. But now it’s five hours later and I still need to write this paper.

2) My dismaying rant basically went like this... extended over several hours and backed with (much, much) more evidence and more vitriol:

American global strategy changes
When civilian leadership changes
And civilian leadership changes
When the voting public feels SOME WAY about SOMETHING
AND THAT MATTERS!
It matters if Iraq barely registers when a man casts his only vote out of an overblown aversion to gay marriage
And it matters if his neighbor votes with an eye to rehabilitating our image abroad.
IT MATTERS. A LOT.
IT MATTERS WHAT WE ELECT PEOPLE TO CARE ABOUT—whether that’s restricting abortion or remaking Afghanistan!
It matters to troops when their home communities act and think like they’re not at war and it matters to policymakers whether or not the American people demand accountability or write a blank check for endless wars.
And it matters how we discuss foreign policy as a people—how often and how honestly!

IF we are not dying and killing and being bombed out of our homes, IF the electricity cooperates and the water runs clear and cool and drinkable, IF we know we will not pay the billions sunk in faraway wars, IF our interests stop at the end of our driveways or the limits of our school districts as long as our children are K-12, IF our compassion is critically limited by incuriosity, indifference and inattention, IF we have never met an Iraqi or wondered about him, we have denied him a share in our common humanity by not striving to understand and relate, IF we can’t locate Afghanistan on a map, IF the procession of distractions is endless, IF Nicole Richie has a new haircut—why should we care who kills and dies in our names on the other side of the world?

Sometimes I really hate us, honestly.



3) Honestly, sometimes I still date checks “2007.” This may have happened to me today.

4) Did you know if you type “honestly” with your fingers just slightly misplaced on the keyboard, you get “gibestky”? I like it.

Evil.

How should the United States military think about counterinsurgency operations as it moves forward in Afghanistan and the wider GWOT [Global War on Terror]?

Professor Suri! I can’t wrap my head around the immensity of this subject! I want to devote weeks and months and years to digging into it. The answers (if there are any) are always shifting, always evolving. My bedroom is littered with scraps of paper where I’ve recorded miscellaneous thoughts. I have twenty-six journal articles open in Adobe Acrobat, which makes my poor overloaded laptop decidedly unhappy. I have forty books scattered around me, some in my bed and—let me tell you—it was not comfortable trying to sleep on that many books. One or two - no big deal. I rolled over on three or four books as I tried to sleep last night.

I could talk about this subject for hours. But I can’t write about it. Just the act of writing something down assumes a degree of certainty, and the more I read, the more I discuss this, the more I know I don’t know and the more I’m tempted to keep reading and learning more forever. My big problem with academic essays (especially this one) is that I never know when to stop researching, pull my nose out of my books, press ‘pause’ on great discussions, and say, “Okay, I don’t/can’t know everything, but I know enough to write this paper!”


I am all about learning and digging. I'm all about that part of the process. I'm not sure I can produce any kind of polished, finished document on this subject that I won't want to tear to pieces immediately for its ignorance and shallowness and necessary incompleteness!

Tonight the sun goes down.

Not only did we fail to learn very much from the past--this would hardly have been remarkable. But we have become stidently insistent--in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities--that the past has nothing of interest to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent. Writing in the nineties and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by this perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking to actively forget rather than to remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion.

[...]

Americans have forgotten the meaning of war. In part this is, perhaps, because the impact of war in the twentieth century, though global in reach, was not everywhere the same. For most of continental Europe and much of Asia, the twentieth century, at least until the 1970s, was a time of virtually unbroken war: continental war, colonial war, civil war. War in the last century signified occupation, displacement, deprivation, destruction, and mass murder. Countries that lost wars often lost population, territory, security and independence. But even those countries that emerged formally victorious had similar experiences and usually remembered war much as the losers did. [...] Compared with the other major twentieth-century combatants, the U.S. lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties. As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced country that still glorifies and exalts the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. America's politicians and statesmen surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; its commentators mock and scorn countries that hesitate to engage themselves in armed conflict. It is this differential recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the U.S. and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their contrasting responses to international affairs today.

/ / / / /

"I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of the world been so great and widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world."



REAPPRAISALS. TONY JUDT.