#but it should NEVER be intentionally perpetuated in a formal setting

[felidaefatigue]

Hey just a reminder for any young artists who might see this

do not do unpaid art labour for corporations or any formal body do not apply to competitions where the winner will get the art job and win prize money but the company gets to have rights to advertise with any and all submissions

do not.

ask to be paid by companies. always. no matter how good the cause.

[summoner-kentauris]

What does your interpretation of Zacharias think about Líf and Thrasir? (You can either just answer or write a lil story if you feel like it)

OOOO now i have thought in my free time a fair amount about what líf thinks of zasha but, and i cannot believe this, i have not thought about what zacharias thinks about líf and thrasir. full disclosure, book III happened to be going on when i formally stopped playing feh. i kept up with the story after that but, theres my obligatory knowledge base disclaimer.

also minor cws through this whole thing because i talk here and there about zacharias and his... mm, canonical relationship to death/selfharm

-

so, i spent a lot of time thinking about this one, and i keep coming back to my gut reaction, which is that i don't think zacharias would like them very much. i dont know why i think that, though.

PART ONE

i think a lot of it would depend on how they approach him, which is maybe why i've spent more time thinking about the reverse of this ask, come to think of it. see, i think zacharias could go any which way in terms of what he thinks of them. i think he could hate them, as two people who killed versions of everyone he ever loved, including metaphorically killing off the two people closest to him.

i think he could love him, having seen the hell (ha ha literally) that they went through. understanding what that feels like. given the way he talks about his suicide attempts, and honestly that he spent most of book I trying to get people to kill him, really his whole relationship to death. i mean the man talks a lot about death and killing. he might not be the feh OC who best understands how manipulative and... whats a good word. alluring? what im trying to say is that besides eir, he might be the one most likely to understand why Hel and hel's offer appealed to líf and thrasir. i feel like this bit has a place here: "With his dying breath...he begged for his life. He called out your names! "I'll do anything you ask! Just let me live!" excepting of course that i still am not sure if i think he said/thought that or not. ive never been sure who really is in control of speaking right then and there. Anyway. Probably he could come to understand Líf and Thrasir's stance, enough that he could care about them the same ways he cares about his versions of Alfonse ann Veronica

on the other hand, i can see him being fully horrified by the choices those two made in response. this bit: Not anyone... This dark god...seeks death. And it cries for the destruction of Askr. Like. Líf and Thrasir are intentionally enacting the same thing as the dark god's desires, in order to correct a mistake they made that, uh, also enacted the same thing as dark god's desires. talk about awkward. and i think Zasha, who has lived with this nightmare in his head for so long, might recoil from people who are so directly aligned with it. who wants to be around someone who has become, who has chosen to become, everything you ever feared you'd be? especially when you're nearly drowning from the effort of fighting to stop yourself.

i could also see him meeting them and it being incredibly, incredibly bad for him. i feel like, he puts a whole lot of... mm. what am i trying to say.here:

Yet it is you that says this, dear friend, and so I must consider it. I see the faith reflected in your eyes. Perhaps it is possible...

SPEAKING OF BUNNY ZACHARIAS I ALSO THINK YOU COULD TAKE THE FOLLOWING:

You never change. All you see is a lofty goal, even if you lack the means to achieve it... The idea that gods would fall by the hand of man is a fantasy... and a preposterous one. This is a goal that even our ancestors Líf and Thrasir could not achieve.

setting aside the obligatory wtf zash i know you know your lore (fuck, maybe there is no killing the gods, maybe all Fire Emblem victories are temporary at best and Zenith is the only one who knows it. but i think, probably not), i think you could spin a very believable scenario where zacharias takes one look at these two ambitious, arrogant posers and absolutely refuses to speak to them any further.

so, part one, i think that zacharias could think any number of things about líf and thrasir. which i suppose means that i think he's fairly neutral on the subject of líf and thrasir. makes sense to me, i suppose. i feel like zacharias | bruno has practice (regardless of whether he's any good at it or not, or whether its any good for him) at holding and maintaining separate personas, so I don't think the fact that líf and thrasir were alfonse and veronica would necessarily be all that important to him.

which brings me to part ii

what happened to dead zenith zacharias

if zacharias is neutral on the subject, I think a lot of their relationship is going to pushed in one direction or another by líf and thrasir themselves.

and, complicating matters (when do I make things simple?), i think their approach to zacharias would of course depend on what happened to their zacharias. correct me if im wrong, but i dont think we have even a hint what happened to him.

there are three ish options I'm seeing. one: as dead world zenith is further along in its timeline and as zacharias claims he's almost out of time with his curse, other zacharias died due to that before the war with hel. i feel like scenario one is the most likely to lead to a good relationship between main zacharias and líf and thrasir.

two: mr. professional "knows plot relevant things out of knowhere" was the one who found out about angrboða's heart in the first place. especially given "As destruction took hold, we joined with Embla to seek the forbidden heart...", which to me sounds a lot like, "hel was kicking our ass then zacharias showed up and said we should go get this mystical plot object from embla". thrasir even says she and líf weren't allies before the world went to shit. anyway. hear me out here:

Yes. The heart is sealed within an Emblian blood temple. If that seal is broken, someone will die each time the heart beats... Those who perform the rite are the first to die.

Now. Líf claims he was the one who broke it open, but he also was present for the war that followed and only after was he killed and inducted into hel's army. so. both of those things can't be true. i propose that the magic mcguffin located in a sealed emblian blood temple was unlocked by our dear zacharias and thats what killed him in other zenith. i think its possible that other veronica was the one who did it, but you know. its all imagination at this point. also, and i forgot this, but thrasir does go off about how she can't lose until she saves her brother, so. something especially tragic happened at least. and oh boy is scenario two a nice fresh tasty tragedy. so that's scenario two. other zacharias directly died as a result of attempts to fight hel

number three thing that could have happened to zach is boring. he's always off doing things, he could have just died off screen. i mean. everyone did, eventually.

frankly he could still be alive for all i know. the heart appears to take the lives of people in the world, not of the world, or else the summoner would have been fine. so, if zacharias was on one of his off world jaunts, he could conceivably be a-okay. well. as okay as someone who's whole world died. i don't think that's what happened, because thrasir is pretty clear about feeling that she failed him, but yknow.

líf and thrasir's reactions to the above

thrasir is i think the most straightforward. i can't really see her approaching main zacharias with anything but positive intent. even if she's only a little bit open, i think thrasir and zacharias will probably have a decently tolerable relationship. if zacharias can come back to a country that exiled him as a kid and let his mother die in a dungeon and then go on to not just befriend but protect and care for a half sister he didnt know before then, then i think he'll find a way to care about thrasir. you know, intsys could have had fun making another perpetual older brother character. as i understand it, xander gets brother'd a lot, he and zach could have talked. could have been fun. a whole, zacharias, a historically traumatized child: *arrives in a world* every currently traumatized kid in a five mile radius: oh shit this one's ours now. you know what im saying? found family except zacharias would very much like it to stop finding him. he's got important brooding to do. but anway, they didn't go that route and its a tragedy.

líf is... more complicated. i think scenario one creates the most positive outlook. i can see him still having guilt over zacharias' loss, but i think any of it would be overshadowed by everything else that happened. in this scenario, líf finally gets back a piece of the world he'd lost. yeah, it's not his zacharias, but still. it is a zacharias, who is living and breathing and frowning and asking why you are staring at me, knight. i think the two of them could get along rather well, although i see them having significant issues with pessimism. inch-restingly enough... the dark curse bades its hosts to kill askrans. and líf is, well. dead. so... perhaps... perhaps líf wouldn't trigger the curse like alfonse does. in that case, not only does líf get someone back he thought he'd never see again, but so does zacharias.

scenario two is just a nightmare. frankly, i initially thought this scenario would lead to líf just ignoring zacharias (out of guilt, pain, etc), but i was rereading the scripts looking for the spelling of angrboða and this came up:

Tell Hel. She'll erase those memories. She'll erase them all...

so, honestly? i think that in scenario two líf just straight up gets hel to remove his memories of zacharias (as an aside maybe this is also why he never ever ever talks about other anna >:{ )

in that case, líf wouldn't really have any reason to talk to this man, who causes this empty deeply sad feeling to well up in him for now discernible reason. and zacharias has no reason (or time) to talk to this standoffish general of the dead. so. that's a real ships in the night moment.

number three i think líf would still hold the same guilt as in number two, but i don't think it would be as horrifically tragic, so i think it's more likely he'd be willing to approach zacharias. he does appear to have even worse of a thing than alfonse about not opening oneself up to people, but i think that even if he's líf, he once was an alfonse, and being that this is me answering this, i don't think any alfonse can really keep away from a zacharias for very long. its a version of the person who once knew him as well as any other person in the world. like líf can't really seem to stop himself from associating with main sharena, i don't think he could stop himself from reaching out in his own way to main zacharias. and god does that man need some more friends. i think zacharias would probably be a little frightened of líf, and of what an alfonse could become. but i think probably... i feel like a lot of book i issues stem from the fact that, justified or not, zacharias thinks alfonse would risk anything, any harm to save him. i don't know that confronting an alfonse who literally risked everything and did all harm to save his world would be a comfort, but i do think zacharias would get a lot out of having someone who's already done the worst they can do. been there, done that, got the tshirt. i think zacharias would be a little afraid of what an alfonse could become, but i think he would no longer have to be afraid of... no, anxious about it. i think there's a kind of calm in having something confirmed that zacharias could appreciate. healthy? unhealthy? fuck if i know. i also think that in líf, zacharias has a friend who he can't physically hurt anymore. lífs already dead. been there done there got the.... glowing gel torso. i think, curse nonewithstanding, zacharias will always have some degree of tension and fear about hurting people he's in a relationship with, be that because of his issues with abandonment, of abandoning, of harm, etc. but you know. líf's kind of a rock. and he's already hit his rock bottom, now that i'm thinking about rocks. i think that kind of steady, placid deathness could really help zacharias. and i think he would find it soothing, whether or not he knew why.

plus he will be able to know that if the curse gets him, if he dies... he'll still have a friend in the realm of the dead. he doesnt have to be so afraid of leaving and getting left

so there we go! lots of musings. i have been thinkin about why my headcanons are less that and more elaborate branching theories, and i think it is because i would change my opinion depending on which story i wanted to tell or hear or see.so yeah. dunno which one of these answers belongs to the question, what does your interpretation of Zacharias think about Líf and Thrasir?, but hopefully at least one of them is interesting to read about!

OH also. i think he would be petty-ly annoyed about them cribing líf and thrasir's name. like full on scholar petty. probably showed up to the order in a nerdy huff excited to meet the actual factual líf and thrasir and turns out its just those two, sitting around glowing and reciting death metal lyrics like they're spoken word ballads. dont think he'd get over that ever.

[zamancollective]

Protected Religious Minorities under Iran’s Islamic Regime: an analysis of ideology and policy

Anonymous submission

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was one of the most significant milestones in the modern history of the Middle East. For the first time, a parliamentary system rooted in the promotion of the core tenants of Shi’a Islam was established, making the nation a theocratic republic. The Islamic regime, which remains in power ever since, is completely juxtaposed to the notion of individual freedom that prevails in Western democracies, as it is based on the strong rapport between religious and civil authorities, and intentionally purged from public life the elements that were opposed to its political principles (Amanat 813). In this essay, I would like to highlight the notion that within this system, there is a distinct tendency to prioritize the rights of the people of Shi’a Islamic faith over all other religious minorities. The Islamic regime tends to link the presence of religious minorities to the possibility that foreign powers might use these minorities as vehicles to undermine the Islamic Republic of Iran: Sunni Muslims via Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and Jews via Israel. Therefore, the system of government that operates in the Islamic Republic of Iran masks its systematic subjugation of religious minorities under the guise of threat to national security.

I will note that this essay focuses in particular on Iran’s “protected” religious minorities, or ahl al-kitab (lit. people of the book). This term refers to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, who were granted this status on the grounds of their pre-Islamic origins and supposed reception of divine revelation. Importantly, Shi’a clerics exclude followers of the Baha’i faith from this paradigm. As such, unlike protected minorities, they face more formalized discrimination and frequent imprisonment on the mere basis of faith. Although the issue of Baha’i oppression in Iran certainly merits attention, the ensuing analysis will center on the conditions of ahl al-kitab.

The prevailing intellectual framework behind the Islamic Revolution of 1979 originated in the eagerness to use Islam as a vehicle for the liberation of the people of Iran from their state of oppression. The regime led by the Shah of Iran, generally accepted as a puppet of the United States, maintained a grip on power through violent means. In response, Islamic scholars of the time emphasized the need to employ a more revolutionary approach to the practice of the Muslim faith to combat the Shah’s radical secularism (Dabashi 113). Three prominent scholars, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Morteza Mutahhari, and Ali Shariati, are recognized as the most influential thinkers in laying the ideological framework of the Iranian Revolution. These three figures were not concretely part of a single intellectual movement, nor were their political, philosophical, or spiritual trajectories wholly aligned; regardless, they ultimately coalesced in the minds of Iranian revolutionaries as catalysts of the Revolution. Together, Khomeini, Mutahhari, and Shariati called upon the redemption of Iran from foreign influence and the establishment of a system of government based on the tenets of Shi’a Islam—depicted as the best framework for promoting well-being among Iranians. It should be added that these writings are notably conspiratorial and consistently highlight the moral and intellectual superiority of revolutionary Shi’ism over other religions and strands of Islam (Dabashi 119).

A meeting of the Council of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The committee was created by Khomeini and chaired by Mutahhari until his assassination.

The intervention of Shi’a clerics in the political debate arose in Iran during the Imperial period. The politicization of Shi’a Islam had the ultimate effect of denouncing the complicity of the Shah in the pillaging of the country’s natural resources and the suffering of the citizenry, and the Shi’a clerics delegitimized the efforts of the Imperial regime to introduce Western democracy and liberalism into Iran. From the beginning, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini singles out the Jews as a social group “who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems.” Khomeini draws upon the Quran in formulating this specific argument, as the Quran frequently depicts the Jews as people who corrupt Muslims, transgress the laws of God, and actively fight Islam (Quran 4:50, 5:13, 5:41, 5:51, 5:59). The Ayatollah observed that “later [the Jews] were joined by other groups, who were in certain respects, more satanic than they. These new groups began their imperialist penetration of the Muslim countries about three hundred years ago” (Khomeini 7).

This doctrine also served to establish a strict demarcation line between Sunni Islam, an ideology that served to perpetuate tyrannical leaders in power (in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States), and Shi’a Islam, an ideology which not only liberates the oppressed people of Iran but also other peoples of the post-colonial Third World (Ahmad 12). The main focus of Khomeini’s writings are the “agents of imperialism,” both in Iran and abroad (Khomeini 17). Khomeini states that these agents of imperialism “are not converting [Muslims] into Jews and Christians; they are corrupting them, making them irreligious and indifferent, which is sufficient for their purpose” (Khomeini 79).

Most importantly, he warns for preparation to fight the Jews and other people he accuses of conspiring to harm Muslim populations. Khomeini states, “if the Muslims had acted in accordance with this command, and after forming a government, made the necessary extensive preparations to be in a state of full readiness for war, a handful of Jews would never have dared to occupy our lands and to burn and destroy the Masjid al-Aqsā” (Khomeini 22). In this context, Khomeini sets the foundation for the future Islamic Republic’s repudiation of Zionism—one of the immutable pillars of the perpetual Revolution (Dabashi 598). Though Khomeini nominally declared protection for ahl al-kitab, this clear conflation of Zionism and Judaism by Khomeini undermines such protection and at the time of the Revolution posed a serious threat to Iranian Jews by legitimizing anti-Semitism as a form of revolutionary progressivism. This is why, almost immediately after the Revolution, leaders of the Iranian Jewish community like Habib Elghanian were labeled Zionist Spies and promptly executed (Haaretz). As a consequence, Chief Rabbi of Iran Hakham Yedidia Shofet was urged by community members to publicly denounce the Shah and announce allegiance to the Revolution, not because he necessarily agreed with it, but in order maintain community security within this rapidly changing political context (Sternfeld, “Iranian Revolution: Unintended Consequences”).

In Mutahhari’s case, it is clear that certain motivations necessitated a level of subjugation and incitement against religious minorities. Mutahhari argues that “not all the People of the Book are the same; some believe in God, Resurrection, and the laws of God. These are the People of the Book whom we are to leave alone. The second category, those of whom we are to fight, is the People of the Book in name only” (Mutahhari 15). The implication of this claim is that it defers power to the jurisprudence of the ulama (clerics) to determine which factions and sub- factions of social groups pose threats, regardless of if they are ahl al-kitab. However, Mutahhari observed that it was not possible to seek the conversion of infidels as a panacea to this problem: “faith and rejection, iman and kufr, must be freely chosen, and cannot be forced onto others. Islam says that whoever wants to believe will believe, and whoever does not want to, will not” (Mutahhari 67). Mutahhari also highlighted that the Iranian people had a prominent role in propagating the most just, and consequently superior, interpretation of Islam: “the Iranians observed that the only group of Muslims that was free of prejudice and very keen to establish justice and equality in society and showed an unlimited sensitivity in regard to these values was [the Shi’a Muslims of] the Household of the Prophet” (Mutaharri, “Islam and Iran” 54-55). Mutahhari’s writings illustrate the need to remain vigilant about the potential ramifications of adopting religious principles based on national or racial allegiance. This also incorporates a clear warning against following the teachings of the strand of Islam espoused by people of Arab descent, explicitly distinguishing the moral superiority of Shi’a Islam over Sunni Islam (Mutaharri, “Islam and Iran” 58).

While Mutahhari highlighted the difference between a Persian and Arab pursuit of Islam, Ali Shariati’s writings were key in noting ways in which Shi’a and Sunni Islam espoused different forms of governance. At first, Shariati criticized Western democracy, which he considered to be an ideological tool that effectively oppressed people in positions of disadvantage, such as the poor (Shariati, “Reflections of Humanity”). Shariati advocated for a political system based on liberty and equality, albeit informed by the spiritual perspective that characterized pre-modern societies. The main problem that can be identified in this political approach is that the status of minorities is significantly diminished. Shariati’s arguments emphasize the need to keep “alive the hope of redemption after martyrdom,” promoting the advent of “revenge and revolt” against the tyrannical leaders that did not work for the benefit of the people (Shariati, “Red Shi’ism vs Black Shi’ism”).

A 1980 postage stamp honoring the memory of Ali Shariati.

Shariati highlighted the need to preserve the “faith in the ultimate downfall of tyrants and the decrees of destiny against the ruling powers who dispense justice by the sword” (Shariati, “Red Shi’ism vs Black Shi’ism”). Shariati’s writings set the tone for the strict distinction between Sunni and Shi’a Islam that would inform the system of government that prevails in Iran, alluding to Sunni Islam’s tendency to espouse tyrannic dictators (indicating Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States), and emphasizing the moral superiority of Shi’a Islam in its usefulness for advancing the idea of the unity of mankind and God.

The tenets of Shi’a Islam additionally influenced the nationalist philosophy espoused by the Islamic regime since 1979. Ali Shariati emphasized the putative dangers involved in assimilating the cultural perspective of other people, noting that the person who adopts other religious and cultural models “forgets his own background, national character and culture or, if he remembers them at all, recalls them with contempt.” One of the main implications of this way of thinking is the reduction of the scope of pluralism within the Islamic system of government established in Iran in 1979 (Shariati, “Reflections of Humanity”).

The system of government that has operated in Iran since 1979 is centered around the principle that all the political parties that participate in the legislative process need to abide by the tenets of the Islamic Revolution—this allows for a great deal of political debate regarding the best way to safeguard the interests of the country. As discussed prior, the Iranian Constitution nominally guarantees the basic freedoms of the ahl al-kitab religious minorities living in the country. Article 13 states: “Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian Iranians are the only recognized religious minorities, who, within the limits of the law, are free to perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education.” Furthermore, Article 14 specifies that “the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and all Muslims are duty-bound to treat non- Muslims in conformity with ethical norms and the principles of Islamic justice and equity, and to respect their human rights.” Article 64 guarantees some minority representation in government, stating that “Zoroastrians and [Assyrian, Chaldean and Armenian] Christians and Jews will each elect one representative” to the Islamic Consultative Assembly.

The inauguration of the 10th Islamic Consultative Assembly-- Iran’s current parliament-- at the Majles headquarters in 2016.

Notwithstanding the existence of these constitutional guarantees, religious minorities face several constraints that effectively hinder their participation in Iran’s political system beyond their symbolic inclusion in the Majles. Non-Muslims are prohibited from occupying more than their one guaranteed parliamentary seat, which is arbitrary given the major differences in population size between different protected religious minorities. Members of these communities are also disqualified from holding any higher office. The system of government that prevails in Iran has established the primacy of Shi’a Islam as the main form of political organization; therefore, all candidates in the public sector are thoroughly vetted in order to determine whether they will use their public post to fulfill the Islam Republic’s mission “for ensuring the continuation of the revolution at home and abroad” (Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran). It would be impossible to suggest that any member of a religious minority who intends to run for office could ever fulfill the duties required for continuing the revolution in it’s entirety, as this would necessitate the individual’s own conversion to Islam. This can be highlighted in the Quranic verse 21:92, ”This, your community, is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me,” which is referenced in the Preamble of Iranian Constitution, substantiating the Revolution’s attempt to establish a single [Shi’i] world community—more clearly, directly writing this Quranic verse in the Constitution reveals that the ultimate goal of the Revolution is to establish a single Shi’i world (Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran). By this logic, electing any non-Shi’i would be paradoxical and negate this ambition. 

There are significant obstacles that prevent religious minorities from enjoying full citizenship rights, in spite of the fact that religious minorities have political representation in the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majles). For instance, access to a university education requires extensive knowledge of the principles of Shi’a Islam, which means that the members of religious minorities are put at a disadvantage or pressured to study overseas. There is also a penalty of death for any Shi’a Muslims who abandon their faith (whereas other faiths are actively encouraged to do so and adopt Shi’ism), and intermarriage is effectively forbidden unless the non-Shi’a partner converts. These are all issues that attest to the fact that freedom of religion in Iran is nominal and limited, at least in the way that it is conceived of in the Western world.

Iranian Jews were especially affected by the ideological undercurrent of the Islamic Revolution, namely because the Jewish population is perpetually threatened by allegations of their potential associations with Zionism. As previously mentioned, a number of Iranian Jews have been executed since the onset of the Islamic Revolution after being accused of spying for the State of Israel. Nevertheless, it is important to note that up until 1979, there was a great deal of support among Iranian Jews for the democratization of the country (Sternfeld 857-858). Before the advent of the Islamic Revolution, many Iranian Jews were involved in intellectual circles that promoted the liberalization of the country and the introduction of the democratic system of government. During the Imperial period, the Jewish population of Iran found opportunities for economic progression and social advancement, which led to their increased support for activities of Muslim clerics and leaders involved in revolutionary activities. Furthermore, during the period of revolutionary upheaval, the Jewish Sapir Hospital provided medical attention to the revolutionary protesters who had been injured by the police (Sternfeld 869).

Forty years after the Revolution, the relationship between Iranian Jews and the Islamic Republic remains tenuous, to say the least; the regime still peddles a strong degree of suspicion regarding the loyalty of the Jewish community to the Islamic regime, and continues to maintain a largely conspiratorial perspective on Israel’s actions and the occurrence of the Holocaust (Gerech and Takeyh). This is one factor of many that has led to the migration of most of the Jewish population to Israel, the US, and other countries since 1979. Those that have remained in Iran are generally quiet when it comes to politics, and hesitate to publicly criticize the status quo- although the head of Tehran’s Jewish community once criticized then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the wake of his repeated denials of the Holocaust (Cohler-Esses). Jews in Iran today operate their own small institutions and practice their religion freely, reporting that they live comfortable lives and feel secure. However, it is difficult to gauge the accuracy of such claims, given fears of possible repercussions from the current Iranian regime, which strictly polices the content of interviews with foreign media outlets.

A man observes the decorations at Yusef Abad Synagogue in northern Tehran.

Overall, the official position of the religious minorities falls in line with the tenets espoused by the intellectuals of the Islamic Revolution during the erosion of the Imperial period. The religious minorities that receive official protection are considered to be the recipients of the divine message handed down by God to his prophets. Mentions of religious minorities in official documents are largely meant to paint a sanitized image of an Islamic regime which has successfully incorporated all its citizens, regardless of religion. The relationship between the Islamic regime and its religious minorities is guided by a strict ontological demarcation, which is meant to affirm the moral and intellectual superiority  of Shi’a Islam over all other religions, in spite of some attempts to incorporate other philosophical and intellectual perspectives into Iranian political life (Abrahamian 188). 

In conclusion, the system of government established in the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 is based on the exclusion of the religious minorities from political life. And while the Islamic Republic of Iran nominally protects the rights of religious minorities, it also imposes significant restrictions on their mobility within Iranian society, particularly when it comes to their participation in the various echelons of governance and their ability to criticize the status quo. The Islamic Revolution emphasizes the rights of the community over the rights of the individual, in clear contrast from the tenets of Western democracy. This ultimately entails the firm prioritization and privileging of the Shi’a majority by appealing to religious, nationalist and populist themes (Abrahamian 143). Moreover, the intellectual framework set out by scholars such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Morteza Mutahhari and Ali Shariati paved the way for the implementation of a guiding “Twelver Islam” redemptionist philosophy in government, necessitating the subjugation of minorities to create an environment guided by jurisprudence in anticipation of the Mahdi. Therefore, in spite of a rhetoric based on freedom and equality, the Islamic Republic of Iran tends to connect the presence of religious minorities to heresy, corruption of Islam, rebellion against the regime, and inhibition of the ever-continuous Revolution.

 The anonymous author is a Persian Jewish student from Los Angeles.

Works Cited

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Ahmad, Jal-al Al. Occidentosis: a Plague from the West. Tehran: Islam International Publications, 1984.

Amanat, Abbas. Iran: A Modern History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979) – Retrieved from www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/ir00000_.html on November 4, 2019.

Cohler-Esses, Larry. “What PBS got right-- and so wrong-- about the Jews of Iran.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 4, 2018. https://www.jta.org/2018/12/04/culture/pbs-got-right-wrong-jews-iran

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Gerecht, Reuel Marc, and Ray Takeyh. “Iran's Holocaust Denial Is Part of a Malevolent Strategy.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 27 May 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/irans-holocaust-denial-is-part-of-a-malevolent- strategy/2016/05/27/312cbc48-2374-11e6-aa84-42391ba52c91_story.html.

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Khomeini, Ruhollah. Islamic Government-Governance of the Jurist. London: Alhoda Press, 2017.

McHugo, John. A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018.

Mutahhari, Morteza. Jihad The Holy War of Islam and Its Legitimacy in the Quran, Teheran: Islamic Propagation Organization, 1988. https://www.al-islam.org

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Shariati, Ali. Red Shi'ism (the religion of martyrdom) vs. Black Shi'ism (the religion of mourning). http://www.iranchamber.com/personalities/ashariati/works/ red_black_shiism.php

Sternfeld, Lior. The Revolution's Forgotten Sons and Daughters: The Jewish Community in Tehran during the 1979 Revolution. Iranian Studies, Vol 47, no. 6, 2014. 857-869.

Sternfled, Lior. “Iranian Revolution: Unintended Consequences.” Tablet Magazine, 15 Jan. 2019, www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/278343/unintended- consequences.

[psychicdan]

Chapter II:  Jack enters the time portal in pursuit of Magnus, the man who assaulted his home and father. He lands in Magnus's future and one thing leads to another, labeling him a criminal. Who is Magnus, what is the Magnus Protectorate, and how does he escape? Jack runs from his human enemies as he reunites with someone dear in this grim new future.

Samurai Jack: Renegade Samurai Rating T to M, depending how graphic you see this. Warning: The following is a work of fanfiction and is not intentionally connected to real word places, events, or people, nor intended to copy others’ work. Samurai Jack is the work of Genndy Tartakovsky, his team and affiliated studios and companies. This is solely fanfiction for fun and not profit. Chapter II: Reunion in the Grim New World The sensation of the black and white ring time portal was both familiar and different to Jack. The flickering lights and feelings of distortions along his body brought back some memories, many unpleasant. The first time it happened, Aku had sent him to the future that he had conquered in Jack’s absence, and the Jack didn’t know it then, the sudden loss of his victory then as well as the dramatic uncertainty of the experience was traumatic. He had found several time portals of similar nature to that one of black and white distortions in space, but many times he was denied. The only pleasant time travel he ever had was when Ashi had used Aku’s own powers that she inherited to send Jack back home, a dream he thought long lost. Even that happy memory was tinged with pain, as the changes Jack caused in the past erased Ashi as well. It brought even further pain when he realized that erasing Ashi with Aku’s destruction meant the whole future was erased, and all his friends and experiences were no more. All he could tell himself then was that hopefully they would all exist again in the new future, free from Aku and leading happier lives. Even if his adventures never really happened, he took some solace knowing he might have saved them all in the long run rather than condemn them, but that was something he would never know in his once again normal lifespan, losing his agelessness with his return to the proper time period and Aku’s destruction then, him being responsible for ripping Jack from his proper moment in time, at least, that was Jack felt and surmised. Even the people of the future couldn’t make sense of time travel. What felt different about his latest time travel was that rather than falling down, he felt being drawn forward. Made sense, since previous time portals were in the ground while he entered one from in front of him, but what was most different was what he was thinking and feeling now compared to when Aku first tricked him. He wasn’t distraught or panicked, but now travelled with purpose. He would eventually return home again some way, but not until he set out what he intended to do. Whatever time this took him to, he would find Magnus. Whatever his reasons or formidability, he repeated in his mind he would have Magnus answer for the assault on his father and people and return the stolen key, whatever Magnus intended it for. There was no fear, only steeled resolve. Of course, no matter the resolve, it would soon be overshadowed by the surprise Jack would find himself in. He finally exited the portal and found himself in midair like last time, coming near the side of a tall building. Jack collected himself and stabbed his sword into the building to slow his descent, and once he stopped, he saw some hovercars within his range. He flung himself using his own momentum, ejecting himself and the sword to the traffic flow. The hover car he collided with got into a panic, a flew out of the flow into an array of buildings. Jack quickly realized he was at the front window, and crawled to the top of the car. The driver could finally respond, and it seemed they were a good one, considering all the near crash incidents that they barely dodged in that interval. Soon there was the sound of sirens and a booming mechanized voiced. “Stop, in the name of the Protectorate, or we will fire!” said the voice from an armored flying vehicle with firearms and black and grey aesthetic. The warning seemed only a formality though, as warning shots came across and the second volley turned serious towards Jack. It seemed they had noticed him. Not this again, thought Jack, as he jumped from vehicle to vehicle to the pursuit vehicle. He deflected the shots that came at him with his sword as he got on top of the vehicle and made his way to the back turbines, slashing them to disable the vehicle’s flight. The vehicle came crashing into a nearby street as Jack jumped off before the crash. Looking from the vehicle, he now took in his surroundings with stunned awe. This was definitely the future alright, but not Aku’s future. No longer was there a perpetual smoggy red sky with blackened buildings and jagged arcs in the image of the demon. The air seemed cleaner, and the sun gazed on the city, appearing to between evening and twilight with sun radiating in the distance. The buildings appeared of greater variety and emitting varying lights, obviously bearing different purposes. He could now see plants here and there, such as a series of trees lined near the street. The hovercars were nothing new, though they also crowded streets on the ground too. There were displays on the buildings too, advertising various things, but none of them Aku. The aesthetics of the city resembled nothing of the dark ruler, instead bearing geometrical aesthetics such as pillars in the form of hexagons here and there. A common element Jack noted was an insignia marked across the city. Whether on flag posts, draped near street lights, or placed on the sides of walls, was an insignia of a gray shield, and in that gray shield, a black armored figure raising its fist in the air. It evoked a feeling of power, force, and protection, and Jack wondered if it was the national symbol here. Despite the noted improvement compared to last time, Jack couldn’t help but feel that the city felt… cold, or down, something conveying an unsettling feeling. Not the ever-present evil in Aku’s cities, but the city did not feel as welcoming as he thought it looked somehow. He looked around, and a crowd was starting to gather. He noticed their garb was similar to what he saw back in the previous future, generally aesthetics like shirts, jeans, and shoes that would be widely available then and make his garb look out of place. There was a discrepancy he noticed though. Back in Aku’s future, the crowds were populated by many alien races, with the human population under Aku’s oppression becoming a minority. Here, it looked reversed, with so many humans but the nonhumans few and far between. In fact, the nonhumans seemed to be the most distant, as though they wanted to avoid the crowd more than Jack. Everyone looked at Jack as though he were dangerous. “Wait please, I don’t wish to cause ha_”, “Stop right there or die!” shouted a mechanized voice coming towards Jack. The crowd backed up, and Jack tensed as he saw the guard coming up, as he was the same as the soldiers who assaulted the palace. Jack readied his sword and let out a battle cry, with the soldier readying his weapon in fire. Jack ran and deflected the fire and slashed the soldier’s arm, blood spilling and unable to resist. Jack pointed his sword at him. “Where am I, what do you want of me, and where is Magnus?!” demanded Jack. “Wha, the Lord Protector, what’s a criminal like you, ahh?!” the soldrier said in a pained voice as he collapsed from his injuries. “YOU, STEP AWAY AND STAND DOWN!” shouted another mechanized voice. Jack kept his guard up, refusing to let down his guard before his clear enemies. The guards were only pissed off by this, and grunted as they let lose more gunfire, ignoring the screaming crowd they risked fire at. Jack was upset they would harm bystanders, and returned his attention to them as he charged them, gracefully jumping from the spot they fired at, cutting one guard down with a descending slash at cutting the next one with a follow up on the ground. Jack was surprised as screams followed. “AHHH, MURDER! MURDERER!” cried someone in the crowd. They spilled away in terror, another person shouting, “Someone call the Protectorate, there’s a crazy killer out here!”. “No, wait!” shouted Jack, but it was too late. He should have thought this out more, he knew his opponents were, in some regards anyway, human, so of course people would be terrified to armed soldiers killed by a stranger. He only acted in self-defense though, not trusting the killers who assaulted his home. Still, he stood there in saddened dismay, distraught he alarmed innocents. He was soon alerted to the sound of sirens booming through the city, and in the distance, he saw more pursuit vehicles. Jack darted to the crowds of buildings, intending to lose his pursuers through the alleys and lose his pursuers. Hopefully, he could then figure out what kind of world he had gotten into this time. … Within a steel fortress of black and gray, designed with both grace and imposing pressure, a meeting was being carried out with a rather displeased man, none other than the Lord Protector himself. The current area was the throne room of his Citadel, and carried the cold geometric aesthetic of the cities, appearing steel with a touch of black here and there and lit by white lights and the sun from the windows overhead on the wall. The Lord Protector, Magnus, looked down, appearing the same as Jack had when he faced him, only now with a cape behind him. He wore it for formalities, but discarded it in battle, as it was frankly a nuisance otherwise. To his downward gaze were representatives of an alien race called the Synolicans, beings who, like ants, had thick exoskeleton outside and the rest inside. They were here to discuss immigration to his world. Yes, it was another long day for the Lord Protector. “Great Lord Protector of the planet Earth, we are humbled by your presence and grace to meet with us. Our planet has fallen into civil war between the between the super powers that have had a falling out, leading to widespread catastrophe. Those who do not fight have been caught in the middle and, with our people dying day by, we could only leave in exile for a new, peaceful world that can take us in and support us. We have looked and looked, but yours is the only one with enough peace and stability to sustain us. We are merely 500,000 now, and would be forever grateful to live under your benevolence. Caution and suspicion dwelled within Magnus’s eyes rather than sympathy. “I believe our interplanetary immigration policies were laid out from the beginning to you. We will only allow admittance of 1000 nonhumans from each population each month after the proper negotiation procedures, and each person will be screened through the process to avoid the chance of inviting galactic criminals. It is the duty of Protectorate admittance officials to decide when and where you will be sent. Still, I have looked over it myself, given you are a new race, and have already decided to allocate you to one of our immigration cities in Section D. Employment Division is already been informed, and your people will be allowed to labor opportunities." The Lord Protector said flatly. The presenter’s companion spoke out of turn with “L-Lord Protector, those terms are abominable, our people are very weary, some wounded and sick. We can’t live as space vagrants for so long! We need access to resources to help rebuild ourselves, and 1000 a month?! We would never be able to relocate everyone in time, please give us more reasonable,” before a steel pillar came crashing down at him with a wave Magnus’s hand, the Citadel itself connected to him. “I’m sure your aware that we have had issues in the past and therefore our own planet is in a precarious situation. We restrict immigration from other worlds to keep the consumption of resources beneath their growth, else we risk starving ourselves. Introducing foreign populations will put our own people into unrest and promote conflict, and so nonhumans from other worlds must be integrated at the proper pace. Do we have an understanding? THEN GET THE HELL OUT!” Magnus screamed with impatience, through with his political persona for the day. The remaining Synolican quickly scampered out, not wishing to share the same fate. “Oh, and someone clean up this bloody mess, why do they have to talk back?” sighed Magnus As cleaning personnel arrived, showing this was not uncommon, an official came through the door. “Um, pardon me, Lord Protector Magnus” said the Protectorate official nervously with his head down. “Grrr, what is it now?” grumbled Magnus. He had already sat through his fair share of meetings and paperwork today, and the only reason someone would come to him outside of appointment could only mean more messes to deal with. “Well, sir, field observation had taken, um, notice of strange readings in City Area 1B37, and upon examination of this, it resembled chronal energy readings, the original formation suggesting use of a time portal, my Lord Protector.” The informant told him, sweat clenched in his hands, knowing that his ruler was already in an ill mood, “I’m sorry, what? Time portals don’t appear at random, and the only person who possesses the means to open and authorize them is me, and I know I authorized no such thing. So why are you here bothering me with nonsense?” said Magnus sternly. The attended gulped before collecting himself. “Well, Lord Protector, we were suspicious, so we had looked into the area to see if there were any noted incidents in conjunction with the recorded events. Cyber Trooper patrols had shown an armed stranger in Japanese traditional garment appearing and causing trouble in air traffic, and had assaulted several guards and terrorized the citizenry. He has yet to be apprehended, but we have images from recording devices.” Reported the informant as he used device to display holographs of images and other data from the incident. Magnus looked at them with just a flick of interest. What he saw was puzzlingly familiar though. This man in a white gi and sword, he swore he saw him somewhere before. Then the memory hit him. “Wait, that yokel Samurai from way back when, he’s the cause of all this? I suppose I did just leave that portal there, but I didn’t think he would just charge in. It’s been thirty years though, so I suppose he went in at the last minute and got delayed.”. Yes, it had been thirty years from Magnus’ perspective since he bested the Samurai in his own time and home, yet he had not aged a day. Magnus looked at the video of the ensuing violence, and the only interest then was of mild irritation. “So, can anyone here explain to me why our soldiers CAN’T SHOOT FOR SHIT?! I mean, this guy is bringing a sword to a gun fight, and our troops are getting cut like salami!”. The audience within his throne room fell silent, but everyone, particularly the officials in charge of military and law enforcement operations, had cramped, sweating faces. Magnus merely held his hand to his face as he sighed. “I suppose we’ll have to focus on the aiming issues of our troops another time. Still, I have faced this Samurai before, and if our troops can’t handle it immediately, we’ll just have someone specialized help them in the meantime. Come to think of it, didn’t the High Overseer from the Inner Sanctum request an opportunity for real life combat situations to test her Special Assassination Force? Last I checked, she had been raising those experimental soldiers for over 20 years, was it?” Magnus proposed. “Ah, yes Lord Protector, somewhere along that timeline. The High Overseer reporter her, uh, “daughters”, have been of age for a few years now and that their training has been promising, an actual field experience is all that is required.” Stated one of the military operation personnel. “Well then, this is a good opportunity as any, but don’t send all seven, that’s just overkill and prevents us from gauging their value. Tell the High Overseer to send whoever she thinks would benefit most from it”, stated Magnus. “Yes, Lord Protector Magnus.” said all the order pertained to. … Within a remote sealed base belonging to Magnus, armored women patrolled and trained in dedication to the Lord Protector himself, a statue of the man centered in the central corridor where they trained under his guidance. This was the Inner Sanctum, a section of the Magnus Protectorate that could be the most dedicated to Magnus. In part, it was an experiment to see how effective and devoted the troops could be in response to the Protectorate’s modified doctrine in extreme degrees. It was also where several other “questionable” experimental procedures took place, all for the sake of creating more effective and loyal soldiers who doubled as followers. In the long run, it’s true purpose was to spring up a faith surrounding Magnus himself. There were mostly women as it was still more risky to implement cybernetics into women compared to men, and so most women ended up here instead of in the main infantry, with some exceptions. Some women did take well to the process and became adept troopers, but worst comes to worst it could result in paralysis or fatality, and even the men weren’t absolved of this possibility ether. Still, to put female personnel into military service without the dangerous use of cybernetics, this was the place. That being said, given how secretive it was, all manner of inhumane conditions was leased without the public to disapprove. It’s founder, the High Overseer, was a true devotee to the Lord Protectorate. So much so, all the other personnel in Magnus’s circle tensed at her presence, and even Magnus found her fanaticism a bit overmuch, choosing to speak through proxies so he wouldn’t have to lose hours to maddening praise. Perhaps the Inner Sanctum’s faith was a little too effective. The Special Assassination Force was one of the earliest projects given to her close to the Inner Sanctum’s beginning. She was to test a certain genetic modification substance and conceive infants in the hope raising super soldiers. It couldn’t be known immediately if it was successful enough to generate the next generation of soldiers, so the seven daughters birthed from the High Overseer would be first trained and observed to be put in service of the Magnus Protectorate. They were taught the doctrine from birth, learning of the Lord Protector Magnus and his deeds, the safety and protection he provided the world, and how anyone who opposed Magnus and the Protectorate was an agent of chaos threatening the world Magnus strove for. They were trained to destroy such enemies. Learning the highest martial arts and combat routines one could learn in the Protectorate, and training in several melee weapons as well as firearms. All were dutiful in their training except one. Lately, the eldest of the septuplet daughters had been plagued by dreams and visions of late. She told of how in the reality she saw in these moments, the Inner Sanctum was a cult, and the one worshipped was a demon instead of Magnus. Other parts she left out. The more comforting visions detailed a man who she saw herself fighting against, with the more recent ones becoming kinder, seeing the man in white garb affectionately and comfortingly, something reality in the Inner Sanctum had not granted her. There was one vision where she passionately embraced this man for an instant, but the most recent one she experienced was horrible. She was walking towards the man in a moment of bliss, but then felt weak, the man holding her in his arms. She felt herself fade as she stared into the man as she awoke from her nightmare. Looking up, she saw her mother, the High Overseer. “It is time you learn to disregard these ridiculous distractions and serve our Lord Protector. We have received a request from the Lord Protector about a dangerous individual running in City Area 1B37, and the main forces are having some difficulty. I’ve chosen you because you are the strongest and most skilled, but also the most troubled of late. Perhaps this will put you back in place. This is your chance to prove to our Lord Protector the value of yourself, your sisters, and the Inner Sanctum. Return with success, or don’t return alive at all.”. “Yes, mother.” Said her daughter solemnly. In the end, she knew these were only false ideas in her head, and if they proved to distract her, then she was better off dying in service to the Lord Protector. Any who can’t serve him were less than worthless. The assassin, already in a padded black uniform that allowed for flexibility and some protection, put on her mask, resembling a thinner, tighter fit of the helmets Cyber Troopers wore. Finally, she prepared her weapons, a kusarigama and an SMG. She headed for the teleportation device to begin her mission. … Jack had been running and hiding for several hours, evading pursuits and patrols by any means he could. Though he was in no place to choose, hiding in the garbage was not particularly honorable for a Samurai. But engaging the soldiers in combat would be eventual suicide. They knew and controlled the city, he knew that much, and it would only be a matter of time before such a fight let them overwhelm with tactics and force. They weren’t like the beetle drones who just marched on programming and destructed without a care. Despite their internal circuitry, these soldiers were human enough, so they all fought with survival instinct. More than that, they could plan in advance and in combat, and some were trained enough in effective tactics. He might still have the advantage in skill, but enough of them with a strategy would prove his undoing. So, for now, avoiding them was the best chance for survival. Honestly, Jack couldn’t believe he missed fighting the robots. Fortunately, night had fallen, allowing the Samurai to move more easily under its cover. He went to the top of a building looking down at the streets to see the soldiers’ patrols still ongoing. The citizens appeared to be confined in their homes, frightful of what happened. What happened? There is no sign of Aku, who was responsible for everything wrong with the future before. I thought with him gone, things would be better, but now the future makes even less sense than before. Men made of flesh and technology, people cowering in their presence, and Magnus is connected to all of it, but how? Why?” Jack thought. Jack’s thoughts were interrupted yet again as the bladed edge of kusarigama crackling with energy grazed his side, leaving a minor injury. He turned to his midair opponent, a figure in black wielding both the weapon and then firing an SMG at him. Jack ran and roll from the bullets to his cover, somehow feeling a sense of nostalgia in the danger. His second of reprieve ended, as the assassin appeared over his cover and ran the chain of her weapon towards him, wrapping it around his weapon, closing in as she tried to wrench it away. Jack resists, but it gave his opponent the opportunity for few jabs at his chest, jaw and forehead, disorienting him. She held the bladed component of her weapon and lunged, intending for a fatal strike on the hated enemy of Magnus. But Jack foresaw that follow up and was able to lift his sword just in time for a block. He then grabbed the chain, wresting the weapon and her hand as he headbutts his opponent, freeing his sword from the chain and breaking pieces of the assassin’s helmet. His opponent shook her head, but not simply from the headbutt. Ever since she saw the stranger, her head was actually searing in pain, as the dreams and visions felt very real, this man, was he the same one from her visions? That was ridiculous, he was a criminal, an enemy of Magnus. Yet the details were starting to become clearer as they fought, as though a past life recalled from this encounter. She had fought this man in another time, and with her sisters. They had served a different lord, but in the end, they couldn’t succeed, and she was the only survivor, her opponent spared her and shown her the truth of the demonic master. The assassin turned from her reforming memories to her target, as Jack charged with her sword, with the assassin, evading the cuts as bust she could and parrying with the blade of her weapon. That was cutting it close though, as the enemy’s blade had left a cut here and there, as well as chipping off more of the mask. Jack himself wasn’t having such a headache, but he swore this was familiar. The weapon the fighting style, and even the presence his enemy gave off was so familiar, but where had he seen it before? No, that was absurd, he thought, she was gone, why would she even be here, of all places? His mental distraction took enough focus though, as the assassin gout in a headbutt and punch of her own, sending him off from the edge of the building as he grabbed a hold of a jutted edge in the next though. He prepared himself by placing his feet on wall he had grabbed, a propelled himself as the assassin went in for midair attack. The countered each other and reached opposing ends, Jack grabbing another jutted edge and as well as the assassin. They continued this pattern as they descended to the ground of the alley, and the assassin’s mask cracked more and more from the force of the fight. She found an opening though, as she was a little above Jack as the parried one another, allowing her to kick him down to the ground below. They had descended enough that the fall wasn’t serious for the Samurai, but the impact took the wind out of him, giving the assassin her chance as she descended upon him to bring her blade upon him. As she stared into the eyes of her enemy though, she knew she had met this man somehow, that he was not the enemy, and the worst mental attack yet had seized her. The visions turned into clear memories crashing into her thoughts, and it was not pleasant as she screamed plain, colliding her face with her hand as she made sense through the raw information and pain, causing her mask to finally collapse. Jack was dumbfounded by what had happened, as he had no idea what was happening, but the slow reveal of his enemy’s face stirred more familiarity from the surface. Finally, the assassin’s pain subsided and she released her hand from her face, and Jack knew without a doubt who this was. “A-Ashi?” said Jack in stunned disbelief. The assassin, clearly the same Ashi, with the same face, hair, and voice he had known when they journeyed together, looked at him with a mixture of confusion and recognition as she said, “J-Jack?” … “A-ASHI!” Jack yelled, all the tension and uncertainty turning to joy as he hugged her as passionately as he could, no longer thinking how or why, just glad he could see her when he thought she was lost. Ashi, was surprised by this, but was also swept by feelings of joy to see Jack again, returning his embrace. After a moment, Jack parted to look at her, still overjoyed, but with questions. “I-I don’t understand Ashi, I’m happy to see you, but how are here, I thought you vanished, why are you in a place like this?” he questioned. “I don’t know, it’s like I remember two lives now. The last I remember was seeing you when I faded at the wedding, and now I also have these memories of training with my mother and sisters,” Ashi responded and then suddenly stopping with fear and shock, getting a grip of the situation. Her mother and sisters were alive again in this new timeline, just as brutal in the last, only serving some new self-centered master. Chances were the doctrine was false like Aku’s. Fear sprang up in her mind, not for herself, but for Jack. She had been sent here under orders from the Lord Protector to kill him. She would never do it now, having recalled her previous life with him, but the things she had learned of her current world, though limited, told enough to confirm something grave. Jack was not safe. He somehow antagonized the most powerful entity of this world, and now they wanted him dead. Ashi didn’t care now about the rewards and consequences of success and failure of her mission, now she just wanted to save Jack from the massive danger coming for him. “Jack, listen to me, you need to go back home, now!” she said to him with stern fear. “Wait, go back, not safe, what are you talking about Ashi?” said Jack confused and alarmed by the fear in her voice. “Don’t question it, Lord Protecto-, ugh, Magnus wants you dead, so-aahh, quick follow me!” she commanded as she pulled him along as a pursuit vehicle came towards them flashing a light down, barely escaping the search light. Jack, though puzzled, did as told, as Ashi led him down to the lower areas of the city, as it lost its elegance resembled a ghetto. Here, it seemed the patrols stopped looking, allowing Jack and Ashi to catch a breath. “Ashi, what is going on here, who are these people, and how do you know of them?” Jack asked perplexed. Ashi looked at him with a grim look in her eyes, telling him of her brutal life in this grim new world. She explained how she had been having strange visions of him lately, and meeting him caused her previous memories to return, but she didn’t know how. Maybe her existence then and now was connected in some way. She explained the Inner Sanctum and its doctrine, noting it wasn’t all too different from the Cult of Aku, and so what she learned there was very suspect. She did know now that her family had fallen into similar state of brutality as last time, which saddened Jack, knowing Aku’s destruction didn’t spare Ashi from that life. Ashi disregarded that, and told him what she confirmed based on what little she knew was true from the Inner Sanctum and her current observations. That a man named Magnus now ruled the world, supposedly eternal and unaging, and commands all the world through the power and force of his Magnus Protectorate, claiming to do it for the protection and guidance of all, as he was some hero in the past that saved everything, that he knew best. Ashi definitely doubted that part, as her upbringing was too similar to Aku’s rule, not to mention that it was Magnus that ordered Jack’s assassination. Jack more or less understood what was happening, realizing he had basically landed in a future run by an extreme regime. “So, Magnus rules this world in the name of “protection”, and the government is run by his Protectorate and… Cyber Troopers was it?” Jack asked. “Cyborg soldiers basically, at least that’s what I heard.” Said Ashi. Jack affirmed this, as he had fought cyborg bounty hunters before. It didn’t comfort him that he would be needing to face more and more human opponents now, as killing living beings still left him with the pain. “Anyway Jack, you need to find some time portal and head straight back home! It’s not safe here!” Ashi pleaded with him. “I can’t go back home, not until I have Magnus answer for the crimes against my people.” said Jack sternly. Ashi looked confused by this, and Jack understood he didn’t explain his side. He explained how he had been readjusting to life back home, but how that was all torn from him when Magnus invaded from the future. Ashi was perplexed, wondering how and why Magnus time travelled from here to the past. It didn’t make sense. When he told of how Magnus had slaughtered many of his people and fatally struck down his father the Emperor, Ashi was caught in grief. She had not known him long, but she had become acquainted with him enough to see a kind, honorable man who gave his all for his family and people, and knew how close to Jack’s heart he was. “Even when I return, father… likely won’t survive his injuries.” said Jack in saddened pain. “Jack…, I’m sorry.” said Ashi, at a loss on what to say now. Jack decided that it was best not to dwell on it and focus on figuring out his new quest. “For now, I intend on blending in and getting information, in the hopes to find where Magnus is and how to confront him.” said Jack with determination. “By yourself, are you crazy?! He has armies all over the world, and you couldn’t beat him in your own time. Like hell I’m letting you go alone.” Ashi said with irritation. Jack looked at her in surprise, saying “Wait, you mean…”. “Well yeah, what else did you think I was going to do? I think those cuts and bruises show I can still beat you to the punch.” said Ashi with confidence. Jack looked at her affectionately, relieved he was together with her again and not alone in this formidable endeavor. That tender moment was interrupted by the sound of screaming and struggling down the street. “HEY, LET GO YOU CYBORG BASTARD!” screamed a male voice with similar remarks from a female voice. Jack and Ashi ran to the site to see two youths a bit younger than them in their very early 20s, being held and dragged away by Cyber Troopers. “Let them go, now.” Ashi said, not intending to give a second warning. “Hey, wait, is that…” said one of the troops. “White robe, sword, yeah, he matches the target description, so shoot on sight." The troops disregarded their captive to shoot at them. Ashi pulled her SMG and shot back, riddling one troop with holes while other ducked and looked for cover. It was an opening for Jack though, as cut through the guard before he could fire in surprise. The two youths looked up at Jack and Ashi in surprise. “Who are you, are you dead-enders too or something?” said the girl in surprise. “Dead-enders?” said Jack, looking at Ashi who only shrugged. “Grr, listen thanks but we can’t stay here, more will be here soon!” said the young man in frustration. “Um, you can come with us, if you want, we have a hideout they don’t know about.” said the girl cautiously. “I-I guess it’s cool, just follow quickly.” the boy grumbled. Jack and Ashi looked at each other and affirmed, a safe refuge would be best in this situation. “Yo, what are your names anyway?” said the boy. “Ashi” she responded. Jack reminisced about his name from the last future, now using it once more. “You can call me Jack.” Author’s note: So, that was a huge information dump, huh. Sorry for being wordy, but I kind of visualize the scenes in my heads and put detail in the actions, characters, and settings so people can see it when they read it. It is Samurai Jack after all. So, Jack’s hasn’t been in Magnus’s future for two minutes and he’s already a criminal. Speaking of the Lord Protector, I hope you like him so far. My sketch wasn’t so great, but basically his build and age is similar to Jack, only he’s a head taller, has a more pointed chin and nose, and wears armor designed for both flexibility and protection. There will be plenty of character building that parallels and contrasts him and Jack, but right now I wanted to portray an antagonist who is brutal as a regime ruler needs to be, human and humorous in a human way, such as his frustration with politics and the incompetence with his troops. They might as well be discount storm troopers in his eyes, huh? Now, Ashi. I wanted to bring back Ashi in a meaningful way and have her become a part of Jack’s journey early on. I could have delayed the memory catch up, but that felt like interfering drama. Basically, she is technically the same person, just having lived a different life in Magnus’s future. Since she was the center of the time paradox before, I’m kind of screwing with time travel concepts like Butterfly Effect and whatnot (like it’s not vague enough already. I also plan to use this in her character building later. Speaking of that, there will be original characters joining their journey in later chapters and fleshing out. For now, I will be building up the world and action, so if you’re wondering where the hell the Scotsman is, calm down, I’ll get to him when the story permits. Be patient for Chapter III.

[myreadingsshannonreid]

Reading three week one

The

  Sixth

Sense

    The Meaning of Atmosphere and Mood

Juhani Pallasmaa

Through its blinkered emphasis on visual form and function, has modernity divorced us from our sense of belonging to the cosmos? What, then, is the secret of creating architecture

that envelops and inspires us? As scientific research increasingly favours the point of view that our unconscious – as opposed to detailed – perception has higher existential value, Helsinki-based architect and professor emeritus Juhani Pallasmaa argues that peripheral vision is key. Only through engagement with this can architects trigger what could be described as our sixth sense – the atmospheric.

       126

        Joseph Mallord William Turner, Interior of a Great House: The Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle,

c 1830

Turner’s atmospheric interior pulls the viewer into the embrace of the space.

Whether people are conscious of it or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the ‘atmosphere’ of the things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant is in the soil in which it is planted.

— Frank Lloyd Wright, 19541

Why do we identify with and feel a strong emotional attachment to certain spaces and places, while others leave us cold, or even frightened? Why do we feel like insiders and participants in some spaces, whereas in others we experience alienation and ‘existential outsideness’?2 Is this not because the settings of the first type embrace and stimulate us, make us surrender ourselves to them, and feel protected and sensually nourished, strengthening our sense of reality, belonging and self; whereas alienating and disturbing settings weaken our sense of being?

Guest-editor Matias del Campo introduces this 3 with the following: ‘Instead of perpetuating the techno mantra of computational design, this issue of 3 strives to examine the characteristics of contemporary architectural production in terms of their ability to evoke mood, radiate atmospheric conditions and portray phenomenological traits of the sensual as well as the actual.’ From this point of departure I have chosen to give certain historical and biological perspectives in order to frame the notions of mood and atmosphere in an experientially meaningful context. It is evident that modern and contemporary architectures have turned a blind eye to many of the fundamental sensory and mental issues concerning our relationships with physical settings, both ‘natural’ and man-made. Through modernity, the art of building has gradually focused on the technical, formal and aesthetic concerns of architecture instead of cultivating its inherent relational and mediating characteristics.

Harmony as an Architectural Aspiration

Resonance with the cosmos and a distinct proportional tuning were essential qualities of architecture from antiquity until the instrumentalised and aestheticised construction of the industrial era. The fundamental task of architecture was to create a correspondence between the

                127

   Tuning the world – harmony of numbers in music and architecture

Pythagoras (570–495 BC) established the relations between number ratios

and sound frequencies.

This woodcut shows him experimenting with bells, water glasses, stretched cords and various-sized pipes. His Hebrew counterpart, Jubal, uses weighted hammers on an anvil. From F Gafuro, Theorica musice, 1472.

Since the beginning of modernity, architectural theory, education and practice have primarily been concerned with the expressive qualities of form and space.

       Aulis Blomstedt, Study of Pythagorean intervals applied

to the human scale, undated, late 1950s

Blomstedt connected visual and musical harmonies in

a system of numbers in accordance with Pythagorean principles. He concluded his meticulous studies in the early 1960s in a proportional system that he entitled Canon 60.

     128

      Jaakko Klemetinpoika Leppänen, Petäjävesi Church, Petäjävesi, Finland, 1764

The intoxicating and haptic atmosphere of an all-wood space.

        microcosm of the human realm and the macrocosm of the universe. This was sought through proportionality based on small natural numbers following Pythagorean harmonics. The Renaissance also introduced the competing proportional ideal of the Golden Section. But while during the modern era only a handful of scholars and architects, such as Hans Kayser, Rudolph Schindler, Le Corbusier and Aulis Blomstedt, were interested in proportional harmony as a means of assuring an experiential coherence of architectural works, similar to musical tuning, in today’s consumerist and utilitarian society any aspiration for harmonic attunement of a larger context, or inner harmonic cohesion within the architectural work itself, has been entirely abandoned.3

Since the beginning of modernity, architectural theory, education and practice have primarily been concerned with the expressive qualities of form and space. Form and formal expression have even become synonymous with modernity.

This orientation favours focused vision and the Gestalt principles described in psychological literature. Le Corbusier’s credo ‘Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light’, illustrates this visual and formal orientation.4 Studies on vision have been primarily interested in focused perception and static gaze, which, however, are exceptional conditions in the lived reality. It is evident that focused vision necessarily implies outsideness in relation to what is seen. Thus, the fundamental experience of being embraced by space necessarily calls for diffuse and peripheral perception in motion.

It is this omnidirectional, multisensory, embodied and emotive encounter with space and place that makes us insiders and participants. I suggest, therefore, that it is the biased focusing on visual form that is responsible for the weak atmospheric quality and sense of interiority in much contemporary architecture. Architects in the modern era have considered ambiences, feelings and moods as something naive, romantic and entertaining instead of regarding such experiences as necessary constituents of environmental quality. Indeed, it is only recently that atmosphere, mood and attunement have become part of modern architectural theory and discourse.5 Modern thinking

   129

      has been interested in phenomena that can be consciously observed and rationally analysed, but the experience of mood and feeling does not arise from directed, focused and conscious attention.

Mood seeps into our mental constitution in an unnoticed and unstructured manner, in

the same way that we feel temperature, humidity or the smell of the air, unintentionally and in an embodied manner.

Altogether, mood is closer to an embodied haptic sensation than to an external visual percept.

The atmospheric paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner, the Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists evoke strong sensations of interiority, tactility and the feel of the skin. The art forms of painting, cinema, literature and theatre, and especially music, have been more aware of the significance of atmosphere, feeling and mood than architects. Some time ago I asked a Finnish composer and a pianist6 about the role of atmospheres in their music. Smiling enigmatically, both answered: ‘Music

is all atmosphere.’ Is this not why music is used in films to create and heighten moods, or to evoke specific tunings and desires in commercial settings? A master novelist’s skill as well as that of the film or theatre director is likewise to evoke, articulate and sustain specific moods in order to create the dramatic flow and continuum of the narrative. Should this not also be the task of the architect?

Visual Elementarism and Embodied Understanding

Modernism has favoured an elementarist view where entities are assumed to arise from elementary units and percepts. However, when we study our perceptions and experiences critically, we seem to be perceiving essences of complex multisensory entities such as the characteristics of spaces, places, landscapes and urban settings in an instant. These perceptions take place even quicker than we become conscious of any details, or even our own active attention. We gaze intentionally at visual objects and events, whereas atmospheres come to us omnidirectionally, similarly to acoustic and olfactory sensations.

We sense the overall mood, tuning, feeling, ambience and atmosphere of a setting before we have become conscious of it, or have identified any of its constituent features. In the process of design, atmospheric qualities also arise unconsciously in an embodied and haptic manner rather than through conscious retinal strategies and intentions. The sense of a coherent experiential entity is evoked by the designer’s

sense of existence and body more than conscious and deliberate visual intentionality.

Atmosphere is certainly closely related with the spirit of place, its genius loci, as well as our empathic and affective capacities. In the same way that music can charge a spatial or social situation with a particular mood, the ambience of a landscape, townscape or interior space can project similar integrating and encompassing feelings. Emotional reactions usually arise vaguely, without any distinct focused object or nameable cause. Love, happiness and hate, for instance, are not objects; they are relationships, moods and states of mind. Similarly, we may never intellectually ‘understand’ a work of art, but it can convey an ineffable influence throughout our entire lives.

‘Understanding is not a quality coming to human reality from the outside; it is its characteristic way of existing,’ argued Jean-Paul Sartre.7 This implies that, contrary to our accepted beliefs, we grasp entities before details, singularities before their components, multisensory syntheses before individual sensory features, and emotive or existential meanings before intellectual explanations. We sense embodied and existential meanings outside of the direct, conscious cognitive channels of our life situations. This exemplifies embodied and tacit knowledge. Yet these processes are

in evident conflict with established perceptual assumptions as well as the

‘Understanding

is not a quality coming to human reality from the outside; it is its characteristic way of existing’ — Jean-Paul Sartre

            130

                 Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona,

1938

Perfect harmony and atmospheric attunement of landscape and architecture.

unquestioned priority given to formal and focused vision and cognitive understanding. Since the Greek philosophers, focused vision has been regarded as synonymous with knowledge and truth. However, neuroscience lends support to the view that we experience entities before elements, and we intuit lived meanings without conceptual or verbal signification. Our atmospheric

sense is clearly an evolutionary priority and a consequence of the activities of our right-brain hemisphere.8

Atmospheric Perception in Evolutionary Perspective

I suggest that we have developed our capacities of judging entities at the edge of our awareness through evolutionary processes. This point is also made by therapist-philosopher Iain McGilchrist.9 It has obviously been advantageous for humans to get the meaning of settings

in an instant in terms of their existential and survival qualities. We have developed, as other animals to various degrees, two independent yet complementary systems of perceiving; one mode of precise focused perception and the second of diffuse and unfocused peripheral scanning.10 Today’s science confirms the assumption that we have these two systems of perception – the conscious and unconscious – and that the first is activated 20 to 30 milliseconds before the latter. According to scholars such as Anton Ehrenzweig, unconscious scanning is also our creative mode of perception.11

 131

     Alvar Aalto, Säynätsalo Town Hall, Säynätsalo,

Finland,

1952

An emotive, atmospheric image of an Italian hill town concealed in contemporary architecture.

      Peter Zumthor, Therme Vals, Graubünden, Switzerland, 1996

Zumthor is one of the internationally known architects today writing about the significance of atmospheres in architecture. His own architectural works project a strong atmospheric quality and cohesion.

     132

      Notes

1. Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘The Natural House’ [1954], in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (ed), The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Writings

on Architecture, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2010, p 350.

2. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, Pion (London), 1986, p 51.

3. For information on proportionality, see: Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Academy Editions and St Martin’s Press (London and NewYork), 1988; Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement,

MIT Press (Cambridge, MA

and London), 2016; and Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Man, Measure,

and Proportion’, Encounters 1 – Juhani Pallasmaa: Architectural Essays, Rakennustieto Publishing (Helsinki), 2012, pp 231–48.

4. Le Corbusier, Towards

a New Architecture, The Architectural Press (London), 1959, p 31.

5.The most recent studies of this subject are the books and writings of Peter Zumthor, Tonino Griffero, Jean-Paul Thibault and Alberto Pérez- Gómez.

6. Composer Kalevi Aho and pianist Minna Pöllänen.

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: An Outline of a Theory, Carol Publishing Co (NewYork), 1993, p 9.

8. See Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary:The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT and London), 2009, p 40.

9. Ibid, p 12.

10. Ibid, p 102.

11. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art [1970], Paladin (St Albans), 1973.

12. Ibid, p 59.

13. Ibid.

14. Iain McGilchrist, ‘Tending to the World’, in Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa

(eds), Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 2015, pp 99–122.

15. Gabriele d’Annunzio, Contemplazioni della morte, Milan, 1912, pp 17–18. As quoted in Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Pegasus Foundation (Dallas, TX), 1983, p 16.

16. Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL and London), 2007, p 9.

17. See Ehrenzweig, op cit,

p 284.

18. Matti Bergström, Aivojen fysiologiasta ja psyykestä (On the Physiology of the Brain and Psyche), WSOY (Helsinki), 1979, pp 77–8.

19. David Howes (ed),The Sixth Sense Reader, Berg Publishers (Oxford and NewYork), 2011, pp 23–4.

However, precision needs to be suppressed for the purpose of observing

large entities. The mathematician Jacques Hadamard suggested that even in mathematics, the ultimate decision must be left to the unconscious, as a clear visualisation of problems is usually impossible.12 He stated categorically that it is mandatory ‘to cloud one’s consciousness in order to make the right judgement’.13 McGilchrist relates this divided attention with the differentiation of our two brain hemispheres. It is biologically advantageous to be able to make precise and focused observations and general, vague peripheral ones simultaneously, but would this

be impossible within a single system of perception?14 Focused vision detaches

itself from contextual interactions, whereas atmospheric observations fuse and unite all the sensations through the sense of being and self. The omnidirectional senses of hearing, hapticity and smell complement the visual sensations to produce a multisensory existential experience relating us fully with our setting. The experience of atmosphere or mood is thus predominantly an emotive, pre-reflective mode of experience.

Mood and Emotion

The richest experiences happen long before the soul takes notice. And when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have already been supporters of the invisible for a long time.15

— Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1912

One reason why peripheric perceptions have been undervalued, or totally neglected, in architecture is that we have not acknowledged that emotions evaluate, articulate and structure our relations with the world.

Emotions are regarded as unconscious, secondary reactions, instead of possessing intentionality and factual value. Yet emotions arise from primal levels of consciousness and, significantly, the first wave of neural signals is always directed to these unconscious systems. As the philosopher Mark Johnson has argued: ‘There is no cognition without emotion ... emotions are not second-rate cognitions; rather they are affective patterns of our encounter with our world, by which we take the meaning of things at a primordial level.’16 There is strong evidence that the unconscious system of perception has a higher existential priority.17 The potential superiority of the unconscious processes in comparison with consciousness is revealed dramatically by the neurological fact that the information-handling capacity of our entire nervous system is estimated to be 1015 times the capacity of our conscious system.18

The nature of vision itself has been grossly misunderstood as something automatic, objective and precise. Research has revealed that the process of

vision is a fragmented and discontinuous mosaic that constantly fuses perceptions with memory and imagination. A visual image itself is composed of separate percepts

of colour, form and movement, received at the temporal distance of 40 to 60 milliseconds. In addition, our focused vision sees what we have learned and

what we want to see, whereas the peripheral system of perception is capable of identifying what is genuinely new. Mood tunes us emotively with our environment, and as a consequence we do not need to continuously and consciously monitor its overwhelming medley of details.

We are not related to our environments only through the five Aristotelian senses;

in fact, The Sixth Sense Reader (2011)19 lists over 30 systems through which we

are connected with the world. I suggest that the atmospheric sense could be named our sixth sense, and it is likely to be existentially our most important. Simply, we do not stop at our skin; we extend our bodily self by means of our senses and our technological and constructed extensions. The elecromagnetic waves of the human heart can now be measured from a distance of 5 metres (16 feet) away, but in principle they extend to infinity. Thus, we unknowingly inhabit the entire universe. 1

              Text © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 126 © Photo Adolfo Vera; p 127 Digital image © Tate, London, 2014; p 128(b) © Aulis Blomstedt Estate; p 129 © Photo Kari Hakli; pp 130-31 © Michael DeFreitas North America/Alamy Stock Photo; p 132(t) Courtesy Alvar Aalto Museum, photo Eino Mäkinen; p 132(b) © Hélène Binet

133

[sheminecrafts]

Facebook should ban campaign ads. End the lies.

Permitting falsehood in political advertising would work if we had a model democracy, but we don’t. Not only are candidates dishonest, but voters aren’t educated, and the media isn’t objective. And now, hyperlinks turn lies into donations and donations into louder lies. The checks don’t balance. What we face is a self-reinforcing disinformation dystopia.

That’s why if Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube don’t want to be the arbiters of truth in campaign ads, they should stop selling them. If they can’t be distributed safely, they shouldn’t be distributed at all.

No one wants historically untrustworthy social networks becoming the honesty police, deciding what’s factual enough to fly. But the alternative of allowing deception to run rampant is unacceptable. Until voter-elected officials can implement reasonable policies to preserve truth in campaign ads, the tech giants should go a step further and refuse to run them.

This problem came to a head recently when Facebook formalized its policy of allowing politicians to lie in ads and refusing to send their claims to third-party fact-checkers. “We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny” Facebook’s VP of policy Nick Clegg wrote.

The Trump campaign was already running ads with false claims about Democrats trying to repeal the Second Amendment and weeks-long scams about a “midnight deadline” for a contest to win the one-millionth MAGA hat.

After the announcement, Trump’s campaign began running ads smearing potential opponent Joe Biden with widely debunked claims about his relationship with Ukraine. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter refused to remove the ad when asked by Biden.

In response to the policy, Elizabeth Warren is running ads claiming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorses Trump because it’s allowing his campaign lies. She’s continued to press Facebook on the issue, asking “you can be in the disinformation-for-profit business, or you can hold yourself to some standards.”

We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook’s ad platform to see if it’d be approved. It got approved quickly and the ad is now running on Facebook. Take a look: pic.twitter.com/7NQyThWHgO

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 12, 2019

It’s easy to imagine campaign ads escalating into an arms race of dishonesty.

Campaigns could advertise increasingly untrue and defamatory claims about each other tied to urgent calls for donations. Once all sides are complicit in the misinformation, lying loses its stigma, becomes the status quo, and ceases to have consequences. Otherwise, whichever campaign misleads more aggressively will have an edge.

“In open democracies, voters rightly believe that, as a general rule, they should be able to judge what politicians say themselves.” Facebook’s Clegg writes.

But as is emblematic of Facebook’s past mistakes, it’s putting too much idealistic faith in society. If all voters were well educated and we weren’t surrounded by hyperpartisan media from Fox News to far-left Facebook Pages, maybe this hands-off approach might work. But in reality, juicy lies spread further than boring truths, and plenty of “news” outlets are financially incentivized to share sensationalism and whatever keeps their team in power.

Protecting the electorate should fall to legislators. But incumbents have few reasons to change the rules that got them their jobs. The FCC already has truth in advertising policies, but exempts campaign ads and a judge struck down a law mandating accuracy.

Granted, there have always been dishonest candidates, uninformed voters, and one-sided news outlets. But it’s all gotten worse. We’re in a post-truth era now where the spoils won through deceptive demagoguery are clear. Cable news and digitally native publications have turned distortion of facts into a huge business.

Most critically, targeted social network advertising combined with donation links create a perpetual misinformation machine. Politicians can target vulnerable demographics with frightening lies, then say only their financial contribution will let the candidate save them. A few clicks later and the candidate has the cash to buy more ads, amplifying more untruths and raising even more money. Without the friction of having to pick up the phone, mail a letter, or even type in a URL like TV ads request, the feedback loop is shorter and things spiral out of control.

Many countries including the UK, Ireland, and the EU ban or heavily restrict TV campaign ads. There’s plenty of precedent for policies keeping candidates’ money out of the most powerful communication mediums.

Campaign commercials on US television might need additional regulation as well. However, the lack of direct connections to donate buttons, microtargeting, and rapid variable testing weaken their potential for abuse. Individual networks can refuse ads for containing falsehoods as CNN recently did without the same backlash over bias that an entity as powerful as Facebook receives.

This is why the social networks should halt sales of political campaign ads now. They’re the one set of stakeholders with flexibility and that could make a united decision. You’ll never get all the politicians and media to be honest, or the public to understand, but just a few companies could set a policy that would protect democracy from the world’s . And they could do it without having to pick sides or make questionable decisions on a case-by-case basis. Just block them all from all candidates.

Facebook wrote in response to Biden’s request to block the Trump ads that “Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is.”

But banning campaign ads would still leave room for open political expression that’s subject to public scrutiny. Social networks should continue to let politicians say what they want to their own followers, barring calls for violence. Tech giants can offer a degree of freedom of speech, just not freedom of reach. Whoever wants to listen can, but they shouldn’t be able to jam misinformation into the feeds of the unsuspecting.

If the tech giants want to stop short of completely banning campaign ads, they could introduce a format designed to minimize misinformation. Politicians could be allowed to simply promote themselves with a set of stock messages, but without the option to make claims about themselves or their opponents.

Campaign ads aren’t a huge revenue driver for social apps, nor are they a high-margin business nowadays. The Trump and Clinton campaigns spent only a combined $81 million on 2016 election ads, a fraction of Facebook’s $27 billion in revenue that year. $284 million was spent in total on 2018 midterm election ads versus Facebook’s $55 billion in revenue last year, says Tech For Campaigns. Zuckerberg even said that Facebook will lose money selling political ads because of all the moderators it hires to weed out election interference by foreign parties.

Surely, there would be some unfortunate repercussions from blocking campaign ads. New candidates in local to national elections would lose a tool for reducing the lead of incumbents, some of which have already benefited from years of advertising. Some campaign ads might be pushed “underground” where they’re not properly labeled, though the major spenders could be kept under watch.

If the social apps can still offer free expression through candidates’ own accounts, aren’t reliant on politicians’ cash to survive, won’t police specific lies in their promos, and would rather let the government regulate the situation, then they should respectfully decline to sell campaign advertising. Following the law isn’t enough until the laws adapt. This will be an ongoing issue through the 2020 election, and leaving the floodgates open is irresponsible.

If a game is dangerous, you don’t eliminate the referee. You stop playing until you can play safe.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2IMUz4y via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

Permitting falsehood in political advertising would work if we had a model democracy, but we don’t. Not only are candidates dishonest, but voters aren’t educated, and the media isn’t objective. And now, hyperlinks turn lies into donations and donations into louder lies. The checks don’t balance. What we face is a self-reinforcing disinformation dystopia.

That’s why if Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube don’t want to be the arbiters of truth in campaign ads, they should stop selling them. If they can’t be distributed safely, they shouldn’t be distributed at all.

No one wants historically untrustworthy social networks becoming the honesty police, deciding what’s factual enough to fly. But the alternative of allowing deception to run rampant is unacceptable. Until voter-elected officials can implement reasonable policies to preserve truth in campaign ads, the tech giants should go a step further and refuse to run them.

This problem came to a head recently when Facebook formalized its policy of allowing politicians to lie in ads and refusing to send their claims to third-party fact-checkers. “We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny” Facebook’s VP of policy Nick Clegg wrote.

The Trump campaign was already running ads with false claims about Democrats trying to repeal the Second Amendment and weeks-long scams about a “midnight deadline” for a contest to win the one-millionth MAGA hat.

After the announcement, Trump’s campaign began running ads smearing potential opponent Joe Biden with widely debunked claims about his relationship with Ukraine. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter refused to remove the ad when asked by Biden.

In response to the policy, Elizabeth Warren is running ads claiming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorses Trump because it’s allowing his campaign lies. She’s continued to press Facebook on the issue, asking “you can be in the disinformation-for-profit business, or you can hold yourself to some standards.”

We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook’s ad platform to see if it’d be approved. It got approved quickly and the ad is now running on Facebook. Take a look: pic.twitter.com/7NQyThWHgO

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 12, 2019

It’s easy to imagine campaign ads escalating into an arms race of dishonesty.

Campaigns could advertise increasingly untrue and defamatory claims about each other tied to urgent calls for donations. Once all sides are complicit in the misinformation, lying loses its stigma, becomes the status quo, and ceases to have consequences. Otherwise, whichever campaign misleads more aggressively will have an edge.

“In open democracies, voters rightly believe that, as a general rule, they should be able to judge what politicians say themselves.” Facebook’s Clegg writes.

But as is emblematic of Facebook’s past mistakes, it’s putting too much idealistic faith in society. If all voters were well educated and we weren’t surrounded by hyperpartisan media from Fox News to far-left Facebook Pages, maybe this hands-off approach might work. But in reality, juicy lies spread further than boring truths, and plenty of “news” outlets are financially incentivized to share sensationalism and whatever keeps their team in power.

Protecting the electorate should fall to legislators. But incumbents have few reasons to change the rules that got them their jobs. The FCC already has truth in advertising policies, but exempts campaign ads and a judge struck down a law mandating accuracy.

Granted, there have always been dishonest candidates, uninformed voters, and one-sided news outlets. But it’s all gotten worse. We’re in a post-truth era now where the spoils won through deceptive demagoguery are clear. Cable news and digitally native publications have turned distortion of facts into a huge business.

Most critically, targeted social network advertising combined with donation links create a perpetual misinformation machine. Politicians can target vulnerable demographics with frightening lies, then say only their financial contribution will let the candidate save them. A few clicks later and the candidate has the cash to buy more ads, amplifying more untruths and raising even more money. Without the friction of having to pick up the phone, mail a letter, or even type in a URL like TV ads request, the feedback loop is shorter and things spiral out of control.

This is why the social networks should halt sales of political campaign ads now. They’re the one set of stakeholders with flexibility and that could make a united decision. You’ll never get all the politicians and media to be honest, or the public to understand, but just a few companies could set a policy that would protect democracy from the world’s . And they could do it without having to pick sides or make questionable decisions on a case-by-case basis. Just block them all from all candidates.

Facebook wrote in response to Biden’s request to block the Trump ads that “Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is.”

But banning campaign ads would still leave room for open political expression that’s subject to public scrutiny. Social networks should continue to let politicians say what they want to their own followers, barring calls for violence. Tech giants can offer a degree of freedom of speech, just not freedom of reach. Whoever wants to listen can, but they shouldn’t be able to jam misinformation into the feeds of the unsuspecting.

If the tech giants want to stop short of completely banning campaign ads, they could introduce a format designed to minimize misinformation. Politicians could be allowed to simply promote themselves with a set of stock messages, but without the option to make claims about themselves or their opponents.

Campaign ads aren’t a huge revenue driver for social apps, nor are they a high-margin business nowadays. The Trump and Clinton campaigns spent only a combined $81 million on 2016 election ads, a fraction of Facebook’s $27 billion in revenue that year. $284 million was spent in total on 2018 midterm election ads versus Facebook’s $55 billion in revenue last year, says Tech For Campaigns. Zuckerberg even said that Facebook will lose money selling political ads because of all the moderators it hires to weed out election interference by foreign parties.

Surely, there would be some unfortunate repercussions from blocking campaign ads. New candidates in local to national elections would lose a tool for reducing the lead of incumbents, some of which have already benefited from years of advertising. Some campaign ads might be pushed “underground” where they’re not properly labeled, though the major spenders could be kept under watch.

If the social apps can still offer free expression through candidates’ own accounts, aren’t reliant on politicians’ cash to survive, won’t police specific lies in their promos, and would rather let the government regulate the situation, then they should respectfully decline to sell campaign advertising. Following the law isn’t enough until the laws adapt. This will be an ongoing issue through the 2020 election, and leaving the floodgates open is irresponsible.

If a game is dangerous, you don’t eliminate the referee. You stop playing until you can play safe.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2IMUz4y Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[viralnewstime]

Permitting falsehood in political advertising would work if we had a model democracy, but we don’t. Not only are candidates dishonest, but voters aren’t educated, and the media isn’t objective. And now, hyperlinks turn lies into donations and donations into louder lies. The checks don’t balance. What we face is a self-reinforcing disinformation dystopia.

That’s why if Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube don’t want to be the arbiters of truth in campaign ads, they should stop selling them. If they can’t be distributed safely, they shouldn’t be distributed at all.

No one wants historically untrustworthy social networks becoming the honesty police, deciding what’s factual enough to fly. But the alternative of allowing deception to run rampant is unacceptable. Until voter-elected officials can implement reasonable policies to preserve truth in campaign ads, the tech giants should go a step further and refuse to run them.

This problem came to a head recently when Facebook formalized its policy of allowing politicians to lie in ads and refusing to send their claims to third-party fact-checkers. “We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny” Facebook’s VP of policy Nick Clegg wrote.

The Trump campaign was already running ads with false claims about Democrats trying to repeal the Second Amendment and weeks-long scams about a “midnight deadline” for a contest to win the one-millionth MAGA hat.

After the announcement, Trump’s campaign began running ads smearing potential opponent Joe Biden with widely debunked claims about his relationship with Ukraine. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter refused to remove the ad when asked by Biden.

In response to the policy, Elizabeth Warren is running ads claiming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorses Trump because it’s allowing his campaign lies. She’s continued to press Facebook on the issue, asking “you can be in the disinformation-for-profit business, or you can hold yourself to some standards.”

We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook’s ad platform to see if it’d be approved. It got approved quickly and the ad is now running on Facebook. Take a look: pic.twitter.com/7NQyThWHgO

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 12, 2019

It’s easy to imagine campaign ads escalating into an arms race of dishonesty.

Campaigns could advertise increasingly untrue and defamatory claims about each other tied to urgent calls for donations. Once all sides are complicit in the misinformation, lying loses its stigma, becomes the status quo, and ceases to have consequences. Otherwise, whichever campaign misleads more aggressively will have an edge.

“In open democracies, voters rightly believe that, as a general rule, they should be able to judge what politicians say themselves.” Facebook’s Clegg writes.

But as is emblematic of Facebook’s past mistakes, it’s putting too much idealistic faith in society. If all voters were well educated and we weren’t surrounded by hyperpartisan media from Fox News to far-left Facebook Pages, maybe this hands-off approach might work. But in reality, juicy lies spread further than boring truths, and plenty of “news” outlets are financially incentivized to share sensationalism and whatever keeps their team in power.

Protecting the electorate should fall to legislators. But incumbents have few reasons to change the rules that got them their jobs. The FCC already has truth in advertising policies, but exempts campaign ads and a judge struck down a law mandating accuracy.

Granted, there have always been dishonest candidates, uninformed voters, and one-sided news outlets. But it’s all gotten worse. We’re in a post-truth era now where the spoils won through deceptive demagoguery are clear. Cable news and digitally native publications have turned distortion of facts into a huge business.

Most critically, targeted social network advertising combined with donation links create a perpetual misinformation machine. Politicians can target vulnerable demographics with frightening lies, then say only their financial contribution will let the candidate save them. A few clicks later and the candidate has the cash to buy more ads, amplifying more untruths and raising even more money. Without the friction of having to pick up the phone, mail a letter, or even type in a URL like TV ads request, the feedback loop is shorter and things spiral out of control.

This is why the social networks should halt sales of political campaign ads now. They’re the one set of stakeholders with flexibility and that could make a united decision. You’ll never get all the politicians and media to be honest, or the public to understand, but just a few companies could set a policy that would protect democracy from the world’s . And they could do it without having to pick sides or make questionable decisions on a case-by-case basis. Just block them all from all candidates.

Facebook wrote in response to Biden’s request to block the Trump ads that “Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is.”

But banning campaign ads would still leave room for open political expression that’s subject to public scrutiny. Social networks should continue to let politicians say what they want to their own followers, barring calls for violence. Tech giants can offer a degree of freedom of speech, just not freedom of reach. Whoever wants to listen can, but they shouldn’t be able to jam misinformation into the feeds of the unsuspecting.

If the tech giants want to stop short of completely banning campaign ads, they could introduce a format designed to minimize misinformation. Politicians could be allowed to simply promote themselves with a set of stock messages, but without the option to make claims about themselves or their opponents.

Campaign ads aren’t a huge revenue driver for social apps, nor are they a high-margin business nowadays. The Trump and Clinton campaigns spent only a combined $81 million on 2016 election ads, a fraction of Facebook’s $27 billion in revenue that year. $284 million was spent in total on 2018 midterm election ads versus Facebook’s $55 billion in revenue last year, says Tech For Campaigns. Zuckerberg even said that Facebook will lose money selling political ads because of all the moderators it hires to weed out election interference by foreign parties.

Surely, there would be some unfortunate repercussions from blocking campaign ads. New candidates in local to national elections would lose a tool for reducing the lead of incumbents, some of which have already benefited from years of advertising. Some campaign ads might be pushed “underground” where they’re not properly labeled, though the major spenders could be kept under watch.

If the social apps can still offer free expression through candidates’ own accounts, aren’t reliant on politicians’ cash to survive, won’t police specific lies in their promos, and would rather let the government regulate the situation, then they should respectfully decline to sell campaign advertising. Following the law isn’t enough until the laws adapt. This will be an ongoing issue through the 2020 election, and leaving the floodgates open is irresponsible.

If a game is dangerous, you don’t eliminate the referee. You stop playing until you can play safe.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2IMUz4y

[hallamkelly]

To what extent do Eilidh MacAskill and Rosana Cade reinforce gender norms in their portrayal of men in Moot Moot? An Essay

Rosana Cade and Eilidh MacAskill’s production Moot Moot is a lighthearted performance involving the two women taking on the personae of two male radio show hosts, both called Barry. The show involves the two endlessly asking a non-existent listening audience to phone in and talk to them, otherwise it’s “just Barry and Barry”, until they end with the realisation that all they have is each other. The two Barrys are portrayed as typical masculine men, and Cade and MacAskill employ a number of semiotic devices to show this to the audience. Both performers identify as feminists, and it is fair to assume that their use of male stereotypes is intended to act as a deconstruction or destabilisation of patriarchal gender norms. However, in emphasising a gender binary in this way, are they simply perpetuating these norms?

In contemporary Western society, gender is a much debated concept. Many theorists, such as Judith Butler, argue that gender is distinct from sex, and is in fact “culturally constructed” (Butler, 1990, 6). In fact, this is the dominant view in sociology and medicine, and even the World Health Organisation defines gender as “the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women” (World Health Organisation 2017). 

However, many people in our society still see gender as fixed, dependant on the sex of the person, and therefore a binary of man and woman, with nothing in between or besides. From a feminist perspective this is troubling and dangerous. Political philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper describes gender as “the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary characteristics” and goes on to assert that they “represent a binary caste system or hierarchy, a value system with two positions: maleness above femaleness, manhood above womanhood, masculinity above femininity” (Reilly-Cooper, 2016).

She goes on to argue that in order to produce a truly equal society “the solution is to abolish gender altogether” (Reilly-Cooper, 2016). No course of action for how to achieve this is suggested, other than for everyone to live how they want to, without reference to ones perceived “gender”. However, I would add that a more active approach to this deconstruction of gender in society would be to challenge a binary concept of gender wherever we can, and thus not to enforce or display traditional gender norms and stereotypes.

In Moot Moot, Cade and MacAskill draw on the relatively young tradition of drag kings that came into popularity in the 1990s. In fact, Barry and Barry are textbook kings, as described in The Drag King Book by Jack Halberstam, with photography by Del LaGrace Volcano - “They sport vintage suits and fancy ties, slicked-back hair and neat moustaches”. According to Halberstam, “a Drag King is a performer who makes masculinity into his or her act”, as opposed to a butch lesbian, who is “not necessarily dressing up like a man” (Volcano and Halberstam, 1999, 32). In this way, Cade and MacAskill are explicitly performing masculine traits, and therefore the accompanying gender norms.

For example, they wear formal, grey suits, connoting wealth, conservatism and a very traditional brand of masculinity, which immediately positions them in a patriarchal, dominant role. This harks back to a time when men “wore the trousers” and would work for a living while their wives would cook, clean and look after the children. There is a certain power that comes with donning a suit, historically the outfit of a wealthy or important man.

The shape of their glasses and headphones suggest 60s-70s era male radio hosts, and yet there is never a specific time period given to the performance. Therefore, the personae rely on a particular stereotype of a man that comes from this era: one who is self-assured, jovial and confident. It is the man who can be trusted as an expert at what he does. The glasses are particularly reminiscent of Robert W. Morgan, a Los Angeles radio host from the late 60s who was famous for his wit and charm. Perhaps the performers were intentionally referencing him for this comedic aspect - another common (and false) stereotype being that men are funnier than women.

Certain masculine gestures are used, such as the mimed firing of a shotgun, indicative of male violence and aggression. Their empty banter is also stereotypical of men - lines such as “I’m good thanks Barry, how are you?” are repeated over and over again, perhaps a suggestion of men’s incapability to form a real connection with each other. They talk about having a “deep debate”, spoken in as deep a voice as possible, suggesting these “men” are interested in matters of great importance, and yet the debate is never had - just more empty posturing.

These traits are all socio-cultural masculine ones, as opposed to biological male ones. However, they do give themselves specifically male traits too. They wear fake moustaches, and their voices are pitched down to create an auditory illusion of maleness. Interestingly, the performers did not seem to try to lower their own voices, instead relying on digital sound production to do it, perhaps an acknowledgement that the only difference between a man and a woman is often nothing more than the pitch of their voice. It sets them apart from simply being “women dressed as men”, for everything else - the clothes, the language, the mannerisms - can be seen as elements of female masculinity. As Jack Halberstam says in his book Female Masculinity, “masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects” (Halberstam, 1998, 1), but Cade and MacAskill not only make themselves over-masculine, but more male too. 

All these elements can be seen as mere devices used to convey a “male” persona to the audience, but they mostly rely on underlying gender norms, and thus on the dominant conception of a patriarchal gender binary. Drag queens have often been criticised for “the reproduction of a specifically sexualized rendering of feminine identity, which reflects persistent hierarchies of desire and desirability: of men dressing as the male-oriented version of women” (Coles, 2007). I am not going to argue that drag kings have an analogous problem, since women are historically oppressed by men, and not the other way around. However, sexual hierarchies can still be represented, and therefore perpetuated, by women posing as men.

Of course, the gender of the performers is vitally important in considering whether or not patriarchal structures are being perpetuated. Rosana Cade identifies as a cis-gender woman, and Eilidh MacAskill was assigned female at birth, although goes by ‘they/them’ pronouns. Both artists will have suffered sexism and misogyny under the patriarchy, and have a deep understanding of gender politics. Their appropriation of male identities is intrinsically subversive, and clearly intended to dismantle these oppressive structures, as drag kings always have. Jack Halberstam describes how certain drag kings “turn dominant masculinity around by parodying male superstardom and working conventional modes of performed sexism and misogyny into successful comedy routines” (Halberstam, 1998, 30), and although he is talking about performance that critiques blatant misogyny, whereas the characters in Moot Moot never use overtly sexist language, the point still stands. Drag king performance is a way for artists to hold a mirror up to men, and ask them to question their own masculinity.

In this way, Moot Moot and the work of other drag kings is certainly a force for change in our society, by reversing traditional gender norms and thus disrupting and deconstructing them. However, in an ideal world in which gender were meaningless, the sort of world Rebecca Reilly-Cooper envisions, this type of performance would be seen as sexist, offensive and dangerous, given its overt portrayals of masculine men. For a radical feminist for whom “the aim is to abolish gender altogether” (Reilly-Cooper, 2016), a boundary pushing performance should be purely genderless.

We do not live in that world, however. The patriarchy is going strong, cis-het men cling to power and stay wilfully ignorant of the great inequality between them and the rest of the population. Cade and MacAskill’s work is justified by the great strides that still must be taken before we can wave goodbye to gender altogether.

Word count: 1,376

Bibliography:

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, p. 6.

Reilly-Cooper, R. (2016). Gender is not a spectrum. Aeon

Volcano, D. and Halberstam, J. (1999). The drag king book. London: Serpent's Tail, p.32.

Halberstam, J. (1998). Female Masculinity. [S.l.]: Duke University Press, p.1, p.30.

Coles, C. (2007). The Question of Power and Authority in Gender Performance: Judith Butler's Drag Strategy. Glasgow: eSharp, p.1.

Websites:

http://www.who.int/gender-equity-rights/understanding/gender-definition/en/

[fvisualvomits]

"It's one they say has a ghost in the garden..." (Ondaatje 30)

Disappearance and Degeneration: The Ethicality of Bearing Witness in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost 

One can only hope for ghosts to be contained within the garden. In Sri Lanka, there are so many ghosts that they walk, barely disguised, amongst the living. The Sri Lankan civil war relentlessly entrenched the deaths of “more than 20,000 people” (Nilsson 1329) into the psyche of civilians. Vibrant Sri Lanka was resultantly transformed into a macabre death world, where mortality and annihilation walked hand in hand, rather than ‘6 feet’ apart. Bearing witness aims to consolidate the trauma of loss, to provide retribution and composure in such troubled times to those afflicted. It proffers the preservation of sanity within gruelling scenarios, conserving those who have ‘disappeared’ and immortalising their legacies. However, time is a vital, fragmenting factor, enforcing a multiplicity of disappearances that transcends physicality. It eliminates the very essence of a human soul: the sound of the deceased’s voice is forgotten, their scent irretrievable, their very bones disintegrated. The temporality of what can be preserved and what we can ‘bear witness’ to is resultantly within a perpetual state of liminality. While this places boundaries upon bearing witness, the practice is necessitated by lack of alternative, it is the only requisite for peace. Samuel Hynes remarks that “if you make the truth survive, however terrible it is, you are retaliating against inhumanity, in the only way the powerless have” (Hynes 129). Ondaatje’s purpose for Anil’s Ghost is the ‘survival’ of the ‘terrible truth’. Anil and Sarath’s quest to identify Sailor’s remains transcends Sailor’s skeleton – it is the first step in denying the government absolution from blame. Solving Sailor’s mystery is ‘retaliating against inhumanity’ to provide a voice for the ‘powerless’ civilians such as Ananda who are affected.

This essay begins by exploring the ethics of bearing witness altogether in troubled states such as Sri Lanka. Should we bear witness? Can we explore ethics and ‘truth’ in a land devoid of ethics, as the designated protector of the people (government) transforms into the enemy? Most importantly, what allows Anil, a Sri Lankan expat, the agency to return to her origins and unsettle the narrative? Certainly, the notion of who is able to bear witness is certainly a focal point of Ondaatje’s novel. It is ultimately the ‘true’ Easterners, the truly ‘powerless’ who are able to access the ‘truth’, not the returning westerner who is allowed to admission to the truth. It is certainly Ananda whose narrative is most aligned with this depravity, as a victim himself, However, through Sailor’s tale, Ondaatje strays from the conventional narrative of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The advances towards identifying Sailor transpire via the necessity of touch. While Sailor is metaphorically ‘disappeared’, he retains a physical presence via his skeletal remains. Realistically, the ‘disappeared’ was literal: the bodily forms of those selected spirited away into thin air, without any clues towards deciphering events. Ananda’s wife is never found. He is resultantly our most apt and poignant source to analyse and divulge the true impact of being ‘disappeared’: the secondary effect of ‘degeneration’. His attempted suicide is one of the primary scenes within the novel, and his characterisation integral in divulging how to appropriately bear witness. Bearing witness is a highly complex system of trying to restore and rationalise what has been lost, yet as with all traumatic scenarios, one must be incredibly careful in how to enact the process. Through his complex and compelling narrative, Ondaatje sets up a riveting duality of disappearance/degeneration and physical/psychological effect. As the reader, we must probe towards the consequences of bearing witness itself, and Sarath’s murder is our gateway towards this, as while distressing and “undefended” (Ondaatje 286), or unjustified, it is arguably the only knock-on benefit of Anil and Sarath’s initial inquest. His sacrifice allows the potential for Anil to return to America with her evidence – yet we are intentionally left in the dark as to whether she successfully escapes. In such a precarious game of life or death, perhaps sometimes the injury outweighs the gain. More than simply a restoration, perhaps bearing witness is simply a wish to return to the past and find solidarity in relations. Palipana is the exemplary model for Ondaatje, as he bears witness in a unique way. He escapes the atrocity of Sri Lanka to inhibit a space that is pre-trauma, pre-pain, pre-loss. His ocular degradation is almost a blessing as he can identify the ‘truth’ without witnessing the visible trauma. Yet in the case of a death - a psychologically cruel event - the metaphorical sense of digging for the corpse is ultimately as traumatic as the physical. The soil of pain is occasionally best left unturned.

The events of the Sri Lankan Civil War did not only constitute a vast ‘disappearance’ in bodies but a shocking loss of social normality and created mass panic. As the ghosts walked along their familiarised routes, they permeated and altered the atmosphere in incomprehensible ways. The alteration within the general mood is palatable, as stereotypical “war brings to any society it’s electric, exhilarating atmosphere” (Hynes 111). This ‘atmosphere’ is not the reality of war, but rather the boyish glorification of war that existed in examples such as British enlistment propaganda. Stereotypical war is enacted upon other societies, perhaps subordinate or distant, but always the Other. Civil war is a subversion of conventional war. An ‘exhilarating’ atmosphere is replaced by tentative ‘sides’ and a detonation of all normalisation. Civil war is “a battlefield gothic without a battlefield – or a battle. It makes excruciatingly vivid what war may become when absolute power confronts absolute powerlessness” (Hynes 253). The tactics within the civil war are beyond immorality, they sabotage all formality of virtue as there is no clear division of friend/foe, any indication of what step, in any direction, will lead oneself into enemy territory. And “how is a formless war, a war without a front, to be won?”, after all? If there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ then there is resultantly no ‘truth’. The practice of bearing witness is resultantly inhibited within civil war, as without the ability to share one’s fears with friends, family, friends, there is inevitable severe psychological trauma. The internalisation of death through natural causes is difficult; the unjustified murders of entire families and communities are impossible to vindicate. Sri Lanka echoes George Orwell’s 1984, wherein the world is in a state of perpetual siege through an omnipresent governmental presence. However, instead of violence being enacted within the private eye as within Orwell’s novel, Sri Lanka is riddled with public torture wherein mutilated bodies bear enemy threats to… anyone. There is no particular message, nor is there a particular target. This is killing for the sake of killing, abasement and torture as threatening symbols, yet there is a state of warfare with no clear war. Milena Marinkova notes that:

“The numerous instances of display of tortured bodies in the novel suggest that the public humiliation of the corporeal serves not only to instil terror but also to affirm control in a moment of major epistemological slippage.” (Marinkova 120)

The public humiliation of the ‘corporeal’ is a brutalist method of dissuading civilians not to rebel against the government, to ‘instil terror’ to the point of silence. Foucault’s panopticon within Discipline and Punish is similar to the idea of what is occurring within Sri Lanka. We have civilians. similar to inmates, self-policing themselves in a state of terror. This is what transforms Sri Lanka into death world, the omnipresent ‘terror’ to ‘affirm control’. Similarly, to Foucault’s panoptical model, when civilians (or inmates) believe that they are being observed, they will regulate their behaviours to align with what they believe is expected of them. However, policing a society in such a manner completely eradicates individualism. The people are ‘powerless’ not only in their attempts to protect their lives but also due to their lack of agency and personality. These civilians are dead men walking, not only because of the omnipresent risk of death, their psychological trauma, but also because of eradication of language in the face of objection. Without language and communication, there is no community civilisation, a ‘powerlessness’ through a liminality of linguistics. Even aesthetic linguistics are shunned in fear of discovery, and so without verbalisation or written content, the lack of trust destroys all potential records of the ‘truth’. Anil and Sarath’s inaugural relationship is insight into the social atmosphere, permeated by a widespread hesitance to trust others. Anil immediately doubts Sarath’s position, wondering if he is “neutral in this war” (Ondaatje 25), and Sarath makes sure Anil’s tape recorder is off, “and only then answered her question” (Ondaatje 41). They are both alarmed to reveal any ammunition that could implicate themselves to the other. In the event of bearing witness, one would expect an intimate and personal relationship between a forensic pathologist and an archaeologist within a partnership. However, within the civil war, even professional modalities of bearing witness are redacted and proscribed towards neutrality. Ondaatje questions:

“How to render the act of witnessing ‘safe’ amidst the epistemic violence of hegemonic and hegemonising constructions of history and culture that provide the enabling context for extrajudicial killings and terrorism.” (Salgado 129)

Witnessing is naturally perilous under ‘epistemic violence’. Within civil war, it is precisely the ‘epistemic’ knowledge that renders witnessing ‘unsafe’. To be aware is to be at risk. Anil and Sarath’s bearing witness is enacted through verbal yet distant roundabouts until she directly confronts ‘which side’ he is on. Even though Sailor is already a skeleton, she is afraid Sarath may “disappear” (Ondaatje 49) him. Herein lies the problem: despite a skeleton’s lack of identity, the physical form is integral to bearing witness. This rationalises the vexed atmosphere of the war: identity with a physical loss. We cannot bear witness to invisible bones. Moreover, even when we believe Sarath and Anil have developed a confident relationship, it is undermined by Anil’s “fears” (Ondaatje 265) that Sarath has still betrayed her, despite his involvement in compiling a report that would condemn the Sri Lankan government. Ultimately, it is Anil’s ‘fears’ themselves that ‘render the act of witnessing’ unsafe. Her doubts of Sarath provide momentum, the premature delivery of their report to the government and its subsequent ruination, alongside Sarath’s murder. Reader, alongside Ananda, must bear witness to this hecatomb in various, yet ethical, ways, in which I return to later in this essay.

While Anil and Sarath’s modalities of bearing witness are not ‘safe’, Palipana’s practice of bearing witness is unique in his isolation. His rejection of a contemporary lifestyle and his preconceived notions of how to extract ‘truth’ are idiosyncratic. He is able to divulge through from the medium of touch alone, his senses heightened from ocular loss. While the fact is accessible, the truth is not. He suggests that “we have never had the truth” (Ondaatje 98). This undermines the entire ‘quest’ of Anil’s Ghost as we probe for Sailor’s ‘truth’: the details of his murder, the ‘how’ and the vital ‘why’? Minoli Salgado divulges that our “central concern is not so much how to bear witness to traumatic events, but how to find ‘truth’ – or rather truths – in variable and shifting registers of meaning” (Salgado 129). Ondaatje’s text is certainly concerned with multifarious truths, I concur that ‘how’ is our direct path to the truth. The novel is obsessed with ‘how’ – ‘how’ Sailor was murdered, ‘how’ he was chosen, ‘how’ he can be used as a voice for a subjugated voice of Sri Lanka. ‘How’ and ‘Truth’ are concurrent, and from an evidence point of view, intrinsically linked. Furthermore, how do we find truth within death, especially death as isolated as a ‘disappearance’? While we can clutch at the facts of Sailor’s death, we don’t ever know the ‘truth’. While identified as Ruwan Kumara, a mine worker, he was chosen by a “billa… a monster, a ghost” (Ondaatje 265) as ‘the rebel sympathiser’. The ‘monster’ trope adds a black humour to the narrative. This is the demon that lurks under your bed, in the dark and inside your closet: except instead of being a wives’ tale or a child’s vivid imagination, it is a terrifying reality that at any moment, the ‘monster’ will snatch you.

However, unlike Ruwan, Palipana is safe in his grove, “governed only by the elements” (Ondaatje 80), his bearing witness towards history is convoluted. He does not have the threat of the panopticon, perhaps in his age, he is moreover exempt from ‘fear’. After all, “the survivor is the one who, having stood in the path of death, knowing of many deaths and standing in the midst of the fallen, is still alive” (Mmbebe 30) Palipana is not only surviving ‘disappearance’ and psychological ‘degeneration’, he directly challenges it. He is embedded in Sri Lanka’s roots both literally and metaphysically and thus has the power to not only bear witness but moreover to create witness.  Can we trust a man who invents facts, rather than deciphers them? Is this not what every author does? His tactics to propel himself into scholarly fame are perhaps overly ambitious and consequently calamitous, but simultaneously genius in their genesis:

“He had discovered and translated a linguistic subtext that explained the political tides and royal eddies of the island in the sixth century… [yet] there was no real evidence for the existence of these texts” (Ondaatje 77)

Is linguistic truth is limited to certitude? Everything that has been created, whether linguistically, physically, has stolen a prerequisite of what has come before. For Ondaatje’s text, fiction certainly has the potential to resemble while not replicating truth. Through informing westernised readers of the events happening in Sri Lanka, knowledge is spread. The narratives will not be exactly akin to reality, yet similar to Palipana’s oeuvre, they are nugatory. Ondaatje’s text resultantly bears witness even unto itself, as it both educates and simultaneously mourns the transgressions of civil war.

Once again, we must consider the ethicality of bearing witness as a whole. Anil’s intrusion into Sri Lanka is certainly well-intentioned, yet an extreme failure of bearing witness is the insensitivity and precautions granted towards locals by westernised influence. A pivotal example is via looking forward to the 2004 Tsunami and the extant ramifications of the civil war:

“The humanitarian system also showed limited competence and creativity in challenging the inhumanity of a war that set new precedents in a pattern of abuse and instrumentalization of relief programs that deepened the humanitarian consequences of the war.” (Niland 3)

Anil’s system shows ‘limited competence’ in how she enacts her agency. She submits the incomplete government report through bearing witness in an act of self-preservation. In prioritising herself, she damns Sarath. As a westerner, she exempts herself from the repercussions of opening Pandora’s box: she knows she can return to England and begin a new narrative. Ondaatje recognises the westerner’s ability to “opt out” (Ondaatje 283) of the atrocities within the Eastern world. “The American or Englishman gets on the plane and leaves. That’s it… the tired hero… he’s going home. So the war to all purposes, is over. Go home. Write a Book. Hit the circuit” (Ondaatje 282). This statement exudes undertones of hostility. Is this Ondaatje’s own internalised guilt from not being present in Sri Lanka throughout the war, an expat similar to Anil? It is a directly hostile social commentary perhaps on the system of bearing witness as a whole as system congruent to cultural appropriation. I infer that the westerner may leave the area of subjugation with a stupendous tale, yet they retain none of the calamity they have caused or intercepted. The story of the Sri Lankan skeleton is colonised, adapted to a western rhetoric of storytelling while ignoring the detrimental reality – a ‘reality fiction’ that excludes those affected.

It is not only literal ghosts but metaphysical ghosts that haunt the streets of Sri Lanka due to both ‘disappearance’ and ‘degradation’. One could surmise that degradation is the secondary effect of disappearance. As the numbers of fatalities soar, the psychological climate concurrently ebbs. Ananda’s attempted suicide, following by Sarath’s murder, are both incredibly important in exploring nuances of sensitivity within Anil’s Ghost. Through including Ananda within their search for ‘truth’, Sarath and Anil severely err by forcing him to relive his trauma of losing his wife. He has clearly decided, in a deep state of depression, to leave the home of his in-laws and to isolate himself to a “petrol station” (Ondaatje 157). In a move similar to Palipana, we can assume he has done so not only to avoid the potential damnation of isolation but detach himself from reality. Perhaps his self-banishment from society, especially within a petrol station is a sign of incoming suicidal intentions. Surrounded by petrol (if the station has not been ransacked for use in homemade bombs), he is in a site of danger, easily set ablaze. Initially asked only to identify a skeleton, we may assume that he is unaware of the ‘digging’ he must partake. His revived trauma is evident through his decline into alcoholism. His drinking “hadn’t become serious until he began working on the head” (Ondaatje 164). As a man, formerly “unconcerned’ (Ondaatje 159), even as they cross a roadblock, this is a steep emotive declination. Something is unmistakeably triggering Ananda to reject sobriety alongside reality. A particular scene predicates the incoming trauma of Ananda’s inimical personality. Anil discovers Ananda drunk, playing her headphones upon his head:

“Tom Waits singing ‘Dig, Dig, Dig… channelled itself into his inner brain, and he rose off the floor terrified. He was hearing, he must have thought, voices of the dead. He reeled, as if unable to escape the sounds within him”. (Ondaatje 165)

The ‘dig, dig, dig’ is no linguistic coincidence by Ondaatje. Ananda does not speak English but the particular scene stands an allegory for his suppressed anguish. In handling Sailor’s skull, he is plunged into a death narrative. In ‘digging’ for Sailor, or Ruwan Kumara as he is identified, he must ponder the fate of the skull. Unfortunately, “war persists in the minds of those who have fought or suffered” (Hynes 282) and Ananda’s mind is in perpetual conflict. He cannot ‘escape the sounds within him’. Put simply, the civil war has rewritten Ananda’s account. His narrative is a perverse amalgamation of various modalities of trauma and suffering. Unfortunately, Anil has proved that Humanitarian influence ‘deepened’ the ‘pattern of abuse and instrumentalization’. To return to ‘Dig Dig Dig’, a particular lyric is “But we don't know what we dig 'em for.” We must ask of Anil: Why do we dig in gardens that do not belong to us? Human nature is a labyrinthine maze, yet I proffer the reason of self-gain. In self-bettering, of resolving her absence from the country, her giving back is a selfish modem of internalised conciliation for her abandonment of her ‘roots’. Such regrets are inappropriate to the extent of appropriating Ananda’s sadness through the loss of his wife. By openly weeping in front of his recreation of Sailor’s likeness, it is near insulting. Ananda’s narrative of loss, the entire archive of Sri Lankan loss is not Anil’s to lament. In a culturally appropriating narrative, one must not impose as Anil does so by openly weeping. Ananda resultantly attempts suicide directly after this event:

“Ananda was lying against a corner, trying with what energy he had left to stab himself in the throat. The blood on the knife and in his fingers and down his arm. His eyes like a deer in her light. The sound coming from God knows where. Not his throat. It couldn’t be his throat.” (Ondaatje 191)

Ananda has “called forth the dead” (Ondaatje 192) and this phrase has a duplicity. Ananda is presumably gurgling, blood seeping from his throat in an unnatural, guttural tone. The repetition of ‘dig, dig, dig’ when the ‘d’ is emphasised resembles a noise akin to heavy dripping, as Ananda’s blood seeps into the floor. We can read this as Ananda’s ‘truth’ leaking, his blood akin to his mental state. Something that should not be revealed leaking from private to public sphere. His truth. Anil recognises her miscalculation in saving him soon after, “she had interrupted his death. She was the obstacle to what he wanted” (Ondaatje 193). This does not only provide commentary upon the appropriation of bearing witness but any form of appropriation that involves a narrative outside of one’s own. One simply does not have the right to invade upon anyone else’s narrative.

However, in the bare honesty of suicide, Salgado observes that “Ananda represents the artist as a truth seeker, and it is his fate, according to Ondaatje, that forms “the central core of the book’ as “he is the only person to effectively humanise sailor” (Salgado 137). Ananda’s ‘humanisation’ of Sailor is not only through providing a rough cranial reconstruction, but the addition of emotion within his facial attributes. Instead of simple phrenology, we possess characterisation. Ananda manages to encapsulate the true pain of the Sri Lankan war and integrate it because it is a necessity, because it is his own. It is his own method of bearing witness to the tragedy that has befallen his wife.  Beyond his work, he is attuned to Sailor. Ananda is a working-class man from a village seemingly as remote as Sailor. Perhaps Ananda is alarmed that it could easily have been him, rather than Sailor, who was chosen as a sacrifice to police civilians. Familiar narrative, especially that of tribulation, is perturbing. We reject intimate narratives in our own way of self-preservation. To further unsettle and humanise his characters, Ondaatje provides a short story based upon Ananda’s wife, Sirissa. Her story only serves as an extension of his tragedy, a wife with ‘silk-like hair’ (Ondaatje 169) who teaches in a school, a woman who is inherently good. Who, within her narrative, lacks any implication of being an insurgent. Through a personal narrative, an injection of compassion, our personal narratives are brought into account to bear witness to the afflictions of others. Yet this injection of such tales ethical? “The human heart may be colder and crueller than our experience has shown us” (Hynes 269). Through providing a narrative as such, purposefully upsetting a reader, we empathise. We posit ourselves in their shoes, replace their familial relations with our own. We imagine and feel the torture and pain the government inflicted. Is this not triggering for people who have lost their loved ones or recently experienced a great trauma, such as death? While I doubt that Ondaatje purposefully sets out to trigger people, this kind of deviance from the path, similarly to what the government have done in their attack upon the insurgents, can have expansive ramifications that may inspire further events. Hynes probes into this narrative style:

“Personal narratives are not like that… they don’t glorify war, or aestheticize it, or make it literary or heroic; they speak in their own voices, in their own plain language… they make war actual, without making it familiar. They bear witness” (Hynes 30)

Personal narratives can certainly aestheticize war, as Ondaatje has proven. Moreover, despite being a fiction, it has been noted that fiction borrows from reality, except in the case of fantasy novels. Could Ondaatje’s novel not be read as a personal narrative? A non-fiction? It certainly isn’t heroic, but it is definitely familiarised through a variety of voices that bear witness to the reality of atrocity. Perhaps it is the provision of ‘calm’ scenes, cut into a disturbing narrative that only confounds our emotive selves. We will all experience loss in the trajectory of existence. It is merely a sliding scale, afflicted by a conglomeration of factors, that decrees how potent this loss may be. We cannot help but bear witness in any atrocity, as all atrocities are part of the human condition.

Alternatively, Sarath’s death at the conclusion of the novel, sacrificing himself so Anil can (potentially) escape with their results, can be read as the sole ‘ethical’ death within the novel. His suicide provides plausible cause for the retribution of thousands of others within Sri Lanka. Sarath, resultantly, ascends toward the status of a Bodhisattva. It is no coincidence that Ondaatje mentions that ‘he [Ananda] and the woman Anil would always carry the ghost of Sarath Diyasena�� (Ondaatje 301) before the carving of the statue begins. This directly proposes the idea of bearing witness within one’s heart and the liminality of linguistics. Bearing witness is something that is best kept within the private sphere, the psyche, rather than exposed. It is the only way it can be retained as a ‘truth’, without adaptation. Ananda wears, both physically and mentally, “Sarath’s cotton shirt – the one he had promised himself he would wear for this morning’s ceremony” (Ondaatje 301). These subtle references to Sarath, assuming Ananda is aware of his fate, implies not only Sarath’s embodiment within Ananda’s identity, but within the statue, as it looks toward the ‘ceremony’, a new way to celebrate bearing witness. There is necessitation to wearing Sarath’s shirt and thus this ceremony patently involves his physical (cotton shirt) and metaphysical (ghost) presence. The Buddha statue in question possesses a “pure sad glance” (Ondaatje 303) which encapsulates a man such as Sarath, or anyone who has born witness to the events in Sri Lanka. Yet this statue stands as more than a nod towards Sarath, it is the representation of anyone subjected to injustice. The eyes being painted are an allegory for truth, not only within Sri Lanka but all depraved narrative. The act of painting, of ‘opening’, stands for raising awareness of trauma and injustice. Ananda’s mentioning that the statue is looking ‘north’ is a nod to the ‘true north’ as upon a compass. Not only a physical guide such as upon a compass, but a metaphysical representation the ‘truth’ one so desperately seeks.

Ondaatje has proven that “the helpless man opposes by bearing witness” (Hynes 274) yet this is clearly uncomplicated when the nonhelpless intervenes. Bearing witness is a complex manner of responding to tragedy, insofar as there are no limits as to how we enact it, only limits within its truth. We can expose our response to trauma in abundant and diverse ways because pain is monolithic. I propose that one could compare Anil’s Ghost to Edward Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of The Mountain King’ (YouTube, In the Hall of the Mountain King). The erratic narrative arch of the novel is concurrent with the thunderous and frenzied climaxes of the orchestra as the protagonist of the musical piece, Peer Gynt, ‘digs’, or travels, deeper into a mountain, similarly as Sarath and Anil grow closer to the facts of their investigation. Ondaatje’s interruptions of narrative to include snippets of other tales, such as that of Sirissa’s, collude with the backing strings coming in. This is the narrative decide in which Ondaatje builds up a more cohesive account of degradation, how the orchestra raises tension. The repetition of the music becomes familiar, as do the characters within the novel. With each stroke of a bow, or page, the composition accelerates. This shadows the urgency and macabre pressure upon Anil and Sarath to resolve their transgression promptly as they attempt to outpace the ‘degeneration’ unfolding. Time, as the combatant threatens governmental disarray alongside destroying keystones who would have witnessed the epoch within Sailor’s history. The culmination of the orchestral piece is a terrific clatter. It echoes the narrative arch in which we discover that Sarath has been murdered before the crescendo fades to a peaceful silence. For we certainly experience a ‘clatter’ in the form of shock as Gamini pulls the blanket away to expose a mutilated Sarath. The silence of Grieg’s opus resonates with the scene in which Ananda paints the eyes of the reconstructed Buddha, a resolution despite a precarious journey.

Comparing aesthetic linguistics to audible shift proves that the process of internalising events and trauma is consistently similar. We could compare these patterns to a panic attack, the tension building as the heartbeat increases before, suddenly, everything is just as before – although it is not. Something is different, slightly skewed from before. The same applies to civil war, if not all mediums of conflict. Post-event, normality resumes, although there is a marked difference amongst those who have opened their eyes to ‘truth’. Bearing witness is a modality divulging truth that is so prolifically complicated that perhaps it cannot ever bear ethics, as it is an art so subjective within itself that it can never be truly understood, except within a personal narrative.

Yet ultimately, no matter how we choose to bear witness, it requires a semblance of physicality. If not the body of the ‘disappeared’ or lost, the emotions that internally bear witness. We use bearing witness as our fight against ‘degeneration’, yet the two are mutually exclusive. We cannot experience trauma without long-term, widespread effect. And so, eternally amongst us, but just out of reach, these ghosts reside under unmarked gravestones. Is a gravestone not a flower, a graveyard not a garden? Civil injustice waters the stones and the flowers bloom at an alarming rate. Occasionally the weeds of a government official infiltrate the garden, entangling with the countless young infantile stems, suffocating their narratives. But there is no one left to tend for the plot, for all the gardeners, like their crops, have wilted, traumatised by the effects of the deathly drought. Perhaps one day, a visitor will tend the garden, but the eternal question will be if they can do so without damaging the indigenous crops.

Works Cited

• Berliner Philharmoniker. “Grieg: Peer Gynt/Järvi” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, June 14.   2010. Web.   29 Dec. 2017.

• Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.  

• Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1997. Print.

• Marinkova, Milena. "Perceiving […] in one’s own body: The Violence of History, Politics and Writing: Anil’s Ghost and Witness Writing." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.3 (2009): 107-25. Web. 01 Jan. 2018.

• Niland, Noah. Inhumanity and Humanitarian Action: Protection Failures in Sri Lanka. Feinstein International Center, Tufts University: Medford, USA. Web.

• Nilsson, Ann-Charlotte. Children and Youth in Armed Conflict. Nijhoff, 2013. Print.

• Ondaatje, Michael. Anil's Ghost. London: Vintage, 2011. Print.

• Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print.

• Rosenblatt, Adam. "Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity.” Human Rights Quarterly 38.1 (2016): 224-28. Web. 05 Jan. 2018.

• Salgado, Minoli. Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance & the Politics of Place. Routledge, 2012. Print.

[jumazo]

How to find inner peace

Allow yourself to be happy/content as you are, and then build upon the happiness. If you are looking to the future and wanting to build happiness, but not content or happy now, essentially you are building on a foundation that won't support what we are trying to achieve. In life, most people want happiness in their lives and are looking to achieve happiness. Most of our life plans are to gain happiness or what we believe will bring happiness, so we make these plans, we look to the future and we strive to achieve happiness. The problem is a "plan" is only as good as the concept and the concept needs developing and building to be achieved and brought to life. So we have thought long and hard about our plan, we have blue prints, and designs of how to build our structure of happiness, let's call it a house. We have our plan now, and we are set to lay our foundation and the first brick in our structure that ultimately leads us to happiness. What is the brick made of? And what is our present state of emotional being as we lay that first brick? If it's not happiness what is it? I mean we have to start somewhere right, and happiness is our future goal, so let's just pour that foundation and start building "I don't have much time to build( my happiness) and I'm not getting any younger you know". LOL. So we're working away and building now, laying brick after brick, getting closer to our perception of happiness :) We are not concerned with what our house is made of just now, as we are focussed, driven, and we get a sense of satisfaction from our achievements in life as we go, and that's a good thing, we deserve this, we have been building hard and this is life! So we keep building our house, bricks and all, coming from a place of dissatisfaction, and we finally reach our finished ambition of what we perceived would give us happiness, "our house is finished and it ready for you to move in". Maybe our metaphor house was the job you always wanted, financial freedom, maybe it's the car, the house, and financial freedom. So what happens now? We move into your house of happiness and you bask in it for a while, all of our achievements on display lined up for our own recognition and validation, and we pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. But over time we start to look closer at our house, and notice the foundation that was poured, was full of longing and desire! (something, a feeling, that will never leave a person who continues to long with desire) We look at the first brick laid in our building of happiness, and notice it's made from discontent and frustration....we keep looking further into our house and see that because we never came from a place of happiness and contentment at the outset of our life's construction, we haven't actually built a house of happiness for ourselves, our house is made of the very emotions and dissatisfaction we started our lives with in the first place. The objects we now hold, as the items of our happiness, are in fact, just that! Items! Things and achievements someone else made, that we first desired and then built our lives around. Everything we were running from in the first place, our discontent, fear driven ambition and our desire for something over contentment, is still very much a part of us, In fact, we have spent a lifetime building a monument to it, and now we are living in it! Whatever we may think will bring us happiness in the future, if not first built upon happiness, will only ever become more of the emotions and sense of self we are self-perpetuating every day. While we building our lives, our memories and past emotions are the building blocks of what we tangibly have right now in our possession. This does not mean our past is solely responsible for our present happiness, but more the suggestion that what we feel now, is the foundation of what we tangibly have tomorrow. Building happiness with a material that does not come from happiness itself is like wanting a house made from concrete, but building with paper, and then wondering why our house is made from the paper when it's finished. This is rather illogical, Nonsensical, and could even be considered the definition of egotistical ignorance if we don't take the time to analyze our present surroundings while still continuing to question what went wrong in our search for happiness. Perhaps this is a question we need to ask and answer in ourselves, learning as we go, but I do believe in a future where once we have found our individual happiness, we can then come together as a community to build bigger stronger realms of happiness together and no longer fight to achieve this seemingly simple ideology alone. I have come to believe, what we strive for in life, needs to come from a place of contentment within our inner selves. We need to discover the happiness we hold, is only tangible in the present life moment, built from our memories and "past-present" moments. Without this realization, I wonder, if we don't look back at what we have built, realizing it comes from a place, that is not intentionally what we have spent our lives trying to achieve, defying the purpose of what we set out to do in the first place. A potentially sad situation to what started as a very ambitious, and driven desire for greater happiness. Let's not live like that, let's choose something different, let's choose happiness for the sake of happiness without definition or parameters of..... One of my favourite sayings right now is, " Flowers for Flower's sake"... when asked what's the occasion for the flowers, my reply is now, the most simplified version of what brings me back to happiness. In this case, the flowers! The flowers were there, they were beautiful, they made me happy, and I wanted to share the happiness with you. It could be someone's birthday, Xmas, anniversary etc, but is that why we bought them a gift? Or did we perhaps buy them the gift to make them happy? The entire exercise of purchasing a gift for someone can and should probably be defined within the moment of happiness we felt when we thought of that person, and the happiness we bring when we share it with them. So why define it as an occasion? In order to find happiness shouldn't we first recognise it in everyday tasks, like simply picking the flowers? Doesn't it make sense to elevate the emotion itself, how we felt as we picked them, saw them, in stead of the occasion of giving them? Haven't we achieved what we wanted, by first enjoying the moment ourselves and then giving that feeling to others? As is common in society today, too often, we focus on the task at hand, the occasion behind the task, instead of the emotion of how we felt while fulfilling the task. Our moment of happiness is what should hold our attention, whether it was the thought of buying the flowers for someone, or seeing the flower's as we walked by and picked them. It all started with the flowers, so why complicate it? Why are we focused on the occasion? it's only the "constructive formality" behind an original idea of bringing someone happiness, isn't it? isn't the occasion of a birthday to express happiness, & the reason for giving the flowers, to pass happiness on? Why not remove the complication surrounding our actions, and bring our attention to the emotion behind the actions & not the occasion. The true cause and effect of our actions began as an emotion, so why give focus to anything else...In this case, flowers were the true momentary cause and effect of ours, and someone else's emotions (happiness) so why focus on anything else? "Flowers for Flower's sake" Find contentment, passion for life and love for what's present before us now, and we'll find the foundation for happiness has already laid itself and the structures are purpose built and made to fit us perfectly. Only then can we share it with others and build our communities of tomorrow!