The Blog Digest 2007: We’ve Had A Bit Of A Falling Out – War

From the smallest playground spat to intercontinental nuclear exchanges, fighting in all its ugly forms is regarded by all right-thinking people as A Very Bad Thing. Unfortunately, these days, right-thinking people aren’t allowed within 500 yards of the apparatus of power and this is where it’s got us. The last one to come close was probably Mahatma Ghandi, and look what happened to him. Somebody shot him.

Conflict is a subject with many contradictions. Glass someone in the pub and you’re a common thug; push the button on half a million* Iraqis and you’re a statesman. As the soldier says in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life: ‘I killed 15 of those buggers. Now, at home they’d hang me; here they’ll give me a fucking medal, sir.’

Here, some of Blogland’s foremost thinkers attempt to traverse the moral minefield that is Fighting Each Other, whether it be in Iraq, on the home front of the War Against Terror in London, or raking over the coals of World War II.

* At the last estimate, according to research published in The Lancet.

…

November 2005 – The Jarndyce Blog: Bloody Iraq, for the last time
Iraq may have been on a slow slide down the news agenda this year but it still refused to disappear. Away from the ongoing carnage it remained a highly divisive issue in Blogland with arguments usually degenerating into insults and vitriol pretty quickly. Jarndyce wrote a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece about where we were in Iraq and how we got there.

November 2005 – The Curmudgeon: At Least She Isn’t a Gipsy
It wasn’t just a case of soldiers engaging in battle this year – a certain tabloid editor has been in the wars as well. ‘Gotcha!’ said the soaraway Curmudgeon.

December 2005 – Curious Hamster: What’s Your Problem?
Garry Smith, the Curious Hamster, makes a pre-emptive strike…

January 2006 – Curious Hamster: Iran
With Iran looking to become one of the world’s hottest destinations in the coming months, the Curious Hamster provided this handy and rather good cut-out-and-keep rough guide to the country and its recent history. Lots of links, well worth following.

December 2005 – Rafael Behr: Reassurance GLA-style
The terrorist threat was still ever-present. And we weren’t allowed to forget it.

December 2005 – Mr Eugenides: David Irving and Holocaust denial
The arrest and conviction in Austria of the historian David Irving brought debates about World War II and the Holocaust to the fore once again and managed to divide and unite bloggers simultaneously. While some welcomed with his conviction and some didn’t, nearly all agreed that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer man. Mr Eugenides put it best.

January 2006 – Ministry of Truth: Irreducible Stupidity
Another battle: Evolutionists versus Creationists (or IDers, as they have recently rebranded themselves). The Ministry of Truth takes sides.

February 2006 – Chase me, ladies, I’m in the cavalry: David Irving
Ever the voice of reason, Harry Hutton spotted an even bigger danger than Holocaust deniers such as…

March 2006 – The Quiet Road: The madness of anti-Americanism
One of the more tedious aspects of the debate about The War Against Terror is the accusation levelled at critics of US foreign policy that they are ‘anti-American’. Jim Bliss mounts a defence far more nuanced than that of those doing the name-calling.

March 2006 – Acerbia: Telemachiavelli
Here’s D of Acerbia again, reincarnated this time as a roboticist, fighting in the eternal battle that is Man vs. Machine.

April 2006 – Kitty Killer: No to war, yes to proxy war. Labour hacks support armed Iranian resistance
Iran and its nuclear ambitions were also in the sights of the Western Powers this year. In a nice piece of reportage (still quite rare amongst British blogs, I think) and analysis, Kitty Killer found some Labour MPs willing to support armed Iranian resistance groups.

April 2006 – The Inside Of My Head: The same, but different
Peter Gasston spots a double standard with regard to the treatment of two countries that both have uranium enrichment programmes.

July 2006 – Steve Lovegrove: 07/07/06
July brought the first anniversary of the London suicide bomb attacks. Steve Lovegrove, a survivor of the Piccadilly Line bombing, gives his account of 7/7 one year on.

July 2006 – Smokewriting: The Powerlessness of Israel
It’s a fact of political blogging that if you’re going to make any kind of point about the Israel-Palestine issue, you should be prepared to get flak from both sides of the argument, even if you write an even-handed piece. Comment threads degenerate quickly into insults, hyperbole and expletives. The pro-Israeli camp will call you anti-Semitic. The pro-Palestine camp will call you a supporter of tyranny. Eventually someone will mention the Nazis, at which point you have to invoke Godwin’s Law (‘As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one’) and call the whole thing off.

With the kidnapping of Israeli troops by Hezbollah and the retaliatory bombardment of Lebanon, an already complex situation was complicated exponentially (‘What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,’ was George Bush’s now famous appraisal of the situation). Rochenko at Smokewriting wrote what many thought was one of the best pieces about the unfolding carnage. Thoughtfully and sympathetically argued, it’s written more in sorrow than in anger.

August 2006 – Devil’s Kitchen: Tony and his detractors
On the subject of the Israel vs Hezbollah war, Devil’s Kitchen gave us a thought-provoking and debate-catalysing call to arms after Tony Blair had made a speech in America about the future direction of the War Against Terror. There was, he said, much criticism from bloggers of how the war was being conducted but little suggestion of how to bring it to an end. Why not play along too? Solving the Middle East crisis is a game for all the family.

(This is an unusual post from Devil’s Kitchen, since he is famous across Blogland for his liberal peppering of articles with the kind of inventive swearing that would make Dennis Hopper whistle with admiration. DK’s imaginative use of Anglo-Saxon was even quoted by Environment Minister David Miliband at a recent awards ceremony.)

August 2006 – Europhobia: Oh, come on…
This year heralded the fifth year of the War Against Terror. The announcement that the security services had foiled a terrorist plot which, as the Home Secretary John Reid described it, would have caused death and destruction on ‘unprecedented scale’ was met with a degree of scepticism. Nosemonkey, AKA J. Clive Matthews, spoke for many.

Next, Chapter 4: Confusing Power With Greatness – Politics

Posted on September 19th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

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