Data, context, knowledge: mapping conflicts in the Middle East

"Global Protests & Uprisings Maps Time-Lapse video" is a series of maps showing where protests and uprisings have occurred in the last few months, as documented in open source media. It was posted by the international blog portal Global Voices, but it was created by musician activist John Caelan at his website The Swamp Post. He explains that he documents each report on an excel spreadsheet, creates the images of maps and then puts them together in a video to give the effect of time-lapse. A very labor intensive effort, but with a mesmerizing, thought-provoking result.

It's important to also look at the key to the map where you can click on each flag to pull up the stories, and see the color key (red: violence resulting in death) and number of flags key (Five: Over 100,000) to understand where protests have been peaceful (green) or have been sites of conflict.

Having just spent five days of involuntary exposure to CNN, I can say that the effect is frightening, mind-numbing and singularly uninformative when not outright distorted. I don't know how people endure it.

Reliable, trustworthy historical context for me comes from Juan Cole: Top Ten Ways that Libya 2011 is not like Iraq 2003

Mason Jennings, "The Field"

Local musician Mason Jennings has been on the verge of super-stardom for years, but maybe it's just as well that he's been more of a cult favorite because it has let him live a normal life and make great music for appreciative fans. His latest album, "Blood of Man" has been getting heavy play on The Current, our local public radio music station, and we happened to hear it a few days ago on the drive to school. I was familiar with the music, but this time I really listened to the lyrics. By the time we got to school, I was sobbing. I couldn't help but remember the time last year when one of my students told me her only child had been killed in Iraq. Eight years of horror and wasted lives.
"I don't want no victory, I just want you back."

Remember the dead in the name of truth, not militaristic violence

Some reading for today's Memorial Day, a national holiday whose almost-forgotten roots lie in the Civil War. I choose to reflect on the profound difference between the way the state deploys the military and the fate of the troops and civilians affected by violence in the name of the state. I spent the first fifteen years of my life as a "military dependent" (aka Army brat) while my father, a surgeon, was putting back together the bodies of the most seriously wounded in Viet Nam. I know what it is like to grow up within the military mindset, and also to investigate the truth of what was hidden from me during those years.

Here is a list of U.S. military actions during its history, including wars against indigenous peoples during colonial expansion, slave revolts, and internal labor disputes. (Note that the language often presents external troop deployments as actions "to protect U.S. interests".)

Iraq Veterans Against the War has gathered the testimony it presented during four days, of eye-witness accounts by veterans of their time in Iraq and Afghanistan in its Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan site. The truth is hard to stomach, so at the same time that we are exhorted to honor the sacrifice of "our troops", the facts about that sacrifice are often ignored, and the needs of those who return are not being met.

In the NYTimes, a column by Helen Benedict:

THIS Memorial Day, as an ever-increasing number of mentally and physically wounded soldiers return from Iraq, the Department of Veterans Affairs faces a pressing crisis: women traumatized not only by combat but also by sexual assault and harassment from their fellow service members. Sadly, the department is failing to fully deal with this problem.

read the rest. And PBS provides more coverage of rape in the military in this episode of NOW.

David Carr, NYTimes media critic, writes about how little coverage there is of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now in The Media Equation: The Wars We Choose to Ignore

...And although the Pentagon and the current administration will go to great lengths today to talk about the pride we should all feel in the fighting women and men of this country, increasingly onerous rules of engagement for the news media and the military make it difficult for the few remaining reporters and photographers to do their job: showing soldiers doing theirs.

Yes, the message seems to be, we honor the dead, but do not show them in your pictures. Of course, we care deeply about the wounded, but you now need their signed permission to depict their sacrifice. As the number of reporters and photographers has gone down, the efforts to control those who remain have gone up....

So we turn to Juan Cole to give us some information about the U.S. military casualties of this war, in Informed Comment. Not only the number that the Pentagon counts, but the number who have died after receiving care, or after returning home, the wounded, the suicides, attempted suicides, those with PTSD, their shattered bodies and their shattered families.

But the U.S. does not count the number of Iraqis it kills, so we have to got to Iraq Body Count, a database set up to try to name the dead in this war, with the bitter understanding that their numbers are probably too low, because they do not estimate; they record only the number of reported deaths of civilians by military and paramilitary violence:

Iraq Body Count (IBC) records the violent civilian deaths that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention in Iraq. Its public database includes deaths caused by US-led coalition forces and paramilitary or criminal attacks by others.

IBC’s documentary evidence is drawn from crosschecked media reports of violent events leading to the death of civilians, or of bodies being found, and is supplemented by the careful review and integration of hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures.

So, after all this dismal reading, what can one do that is positive? I highly recommend this initiative by Minnesota's Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie: Honor a Veteran by Voting.