Violence’s Imaginarium: Informal Follow-Up to “War is Hell”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/05/30
This will be rewritten for another publication in a non-first person frame.
*Link to selected images from November 22,2023 to December 6, 2023 of the Russo-Ukrainian War.*
War is hell. And I have seen it.
Remus Cernea, “War is Hell”, Keynote Speech, Humanists International World Congress 2023
I’m heading back to Ukraine and need some financial support.
The original idea to travel to Ukraine came from Remus Cernea, the former President of the Green Party in Romania and the Founder/Co-Founder of the Romanian humanist movement, after meeting at the World Congress and General Assembly 2023 of Humanists International. Cernea was a keynote speaker alongside Oleksandra Romantsova, the Executive Director of the Nobel Peace Prize winning Center for Civil Liberties, they are the first and only organization, or individuals, in Ukraine to win the Nobel Peace Prize. They won in 2022.
I requested interviews with the two of them during the conference, after having been impressed by the presentations and the personalities, and, thankfully, both accepted — so began the journey through the war context of Ukraine. We had interviews, pretty much, on the spot. Those became part of a promise to continue working on the war until its cessation. The current project is the construction of a repository of voices from human rights defenders, humanists, civilians, and the like, on the war, alongside individuals and articles written on the Russo-Ukrainian war.
These will simply follow in the mostly universally accepted condemnation of the Russian aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The most genericized condemnation from the start of the full-scale invasion was UN General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1 adopted on March 2, 2022. The international consensus came to 141 votes in favor, 5 against, and 35 abstentions. These broadly condemned the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.
I understand the relevant risks to life and wellbeing traveling to Ukraine with the potential to come back maimed or in a body bag. As was stated by Edem Wosornu, Director of Operations and Advocacy at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, recently:
Ukraine is currently enduring some of the worst attacks since the start of this war… No region of Ukraine has been spared by this war… wave after massive wave of attacks continue to kill and injure civilians and cause widespread damage and destruction to critical civilian infrastructure.
The case of travelling to a foreign country, especially travelling far from one of the safest countries in the world, Canada. It seems like a bit of a head trip to go out into this area of the world during an active war, full-invasion or — what has euphemistically been continually labelled — a ‘special military operation” by Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.
The funny thing about, not only war correspondence traipsing but, travel in general. I hate it. I am a home body. It’s one of the most distasteful things imaginable to me — worse than a trip to the dentist! I like basic routines, but I, like Remus, feel the need to go out and simply do the work. “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one,” Aurelius reminds us.
Cernea repeatedly said to me, ‘I do not want to be here, but I feel I have to be here.’ It’s neither lofty nor august. This is quite straightforward. Namely, if people are too afraid to travel to a war, and if you can, though, at least support in some manner, I am an independent journalist, then assist others in that way. Which is to say, I am a dealer in narratives. I have to go and get the stories. Remus is a politician and a war correspondent with Newsweek Romania. He feels the same way and deals in human tales and human affairs.
I do not necessarily believe in the idea of an objective journalist. However, I can affirm the relatively true notion of objective language used by a journalist. Even with the most careful and prudent of wordcrafting, we have word count limitations. We have time limits. We have interest limits. We have psychological temperaments, profiles, cognitive abilities, language barriers, and the like.
It’s simply the nature of being a person, and writing for different publications. Chomsky was right, in many regards, about the media. Some are benignly true, though, generally speaking. We talk about the word count in a publication, say a news article. That’s concision in action. You have to make the point, punchily. It limits extended thought and deeper analysis.
This limitation further stifles the possibility of objectivity, because some points must be included and others must be excluded based on the judgment of the individual journalist. That’s structural, in most news organizations, insofar as I can tell, but there are far more experienced journalists who could speak more accurately to the truth of that or not. That’s in the nature, the policies, of the media institutions. And it has its uses.
It forces you to make your points, briefly and summarily. More depth ironically has this counterintuitive duality: It allows better approximation of objectivity through more inclusion of data if not propaganda, while better approximating the subjective impressions and judgments of the journalist as it’s more deeply crafted by the mind of the reporter. It’s both more objective and more subjective if done well — which is weird, but rarely stated in objective language and always incorporative of the subjective impressions and judgments of the journalist (read: their prejudices of mind and valence).
What does this miss out? It misses something not in a single article, in the large reportage done rarely in a series of articles thematically spread and announced. I am lucky. I have outlets to write for publications in such a manner so as to write at length and with a decent amount of editorial freedom. The key goal here with the live war environment is to create a repository.
This includes a necessary element of reportage from the bombed sites, from the war zone — the country, to get human rights experts, to get other perspectives relevant to the involved concerned, and then compile in an online resource and then, eventually, a book project. This bypasses the limitations of “concision” and creates an online resource for interested parties through time.
I am no different coming to a war context as a Stray Canadian (™). My subjective impressions and individual judgment will bias the production of material, selection of interviewees, length and depth of material, frame, and the like. While, as with most journalists, I will work to report the facts accurately. So, my eternal mainstay seems like a fundamental anti-religious psychology: Not “Believe me,” but “do not believe me”; do not have faith in me, be skeptical of me, I want to encourage critical thought most in and about me, and derivatively in that which I report: find out for yourself. I’ll be, generally speaking, grateful for the correction if any.
My aim is to travel to Ukraine again this year for a couple to a few weeks. Please take this article as an encouragement to reach out to correspond, recommend interviewees, sources, und so weiter, any financial support in this independent journalistic endeavour would be greatly appreciated.
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