Writing and publishing – Page 12 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

The new haves vs. the have-nots: Broadband

With all the horrendous conflicts escalating in the Middle East, it may seem a tad trite to observe the obvious – that monitoring the world via the internet without broadband is a drag. Try contributing to an events focused blog without it. (and mega-kudos to Helena for managing it even while traveling!)
More than a cute phrase, we have a serious “digital divide” afflicting tens of millions of Americans, separating those who can get affordable “broad band” access to the internet from those of us who cannot in any form. To those who must endure the barrage of TV commercials laying on the guilt trip about how deprived their children are without broadband, it seems quite the “injustice” – one that cries out for attention from our political and business leaders.
I think my own “quest for broadband” saga is not atypical of what those millions of American “have-nots” suffer. As of today, my own tale has a happy, if bizarre ending, which I’ll save… for the end. I now “have” it, but I will never forget what it was like to be a broadband “have-not.”

Continue reading “The new haves vs. the have-nots: Broadband”

Got broadband, succumbed briefly to blog-addiction

Spouse made slight error in planning last night and we ended up in a place with in-room broadband.
It has proved a little distracting, as you can see. Now I’m going to go back into occultation.

Every heart a peace factory!

Whew!! I just finished the painstaking process of going over the page proofs for my upcoming book Amnesty After Atrocity? Healing Nations After Genocide and War Crimes. The page layout looks really good… very readable indeed.
The hardback is priced ways high for my taste. I need to look at the contract to see when Paradigm are planning to put out a paperback…
Anyway, I am really happy to have done it. By and large the text still reads well. (Though of course I have a l’esprit de l’escalier-ish regret regarding some portions where I wish I had expressed myself better. Too late! It is nearly ready to go– and at this stage, changes that I request start costing me heavily– as well as, always, introducing the possibility of further glitches and infelicities. Mainly, I just have to trust the careful wholetext edit I did back in February.)
Anyway, working with the material has also been a great retreading of memory lane, and has once again reminded me why I thought this material and this project was important.
Two of the most inspiring people I interviewed in connection with it– two of the most inspiring people I have ever met in my life– were the (Catholic) Cardinal Alexandre Dos Santos and the (Anglican) Bishop Dinis Sengulane… both in Maputo, Mozambique. They and a small group of other church leaders had all played a key role in starting/enabling the direct Frelimo-Renamo peace talks that in October 1992 brought an end to the 15 years of atrocity-laden conflict that had wracked their country. Dos Santos, who was already nearly 80 years old when I interviewed him in 2003, had an ethereal, almost pure-spirit air about him. Sengulane was probably 20 or so years younger, but also extremely wise.
One of the many memorable things Sengulane said was at the point when he was describing the role the Mozambican churches had played in building popular support for the 1992 peace. He said,

making our hearts into ‘peace factories’.

What a beautiful concept! It’s so completely Christian, so completely Buddhist, so completely true. Hostile acts start with hostile intent, and peacemaking acts have to start with peacemaking intent.
It’s true, good intent is never enough on its own. But it is an indispensable starting point… and it’s not one that’s necessarily always easy to achieve. In the book of Henri Nouwen’s that I commented on here not long ago, Nouwen pointed out that many people who want to work for a peaceable world use scaremongering (and in his view, counter-productive) ways to do so:

Panic, fear, and anxiety are not part of peacemaking. This might seem obvious, but many who struggle against the threat of a world war not only are themselves motivated by fear but also use fear to bring others to action. Fear is the most tempting force in peacemaking… We need to be reminded in very concrete ways of the demonic power at work in our world, but when an increase of fear is the main result we become the easy victims of these same powers. When peacemaking is based on fear it is not much different from warmaking… (Peacework, p.35)

The radical Quaker activist of the 1930s A.J. Muste captured something of the same insistence on the organic unity of ends and means when he said, quite simply: There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
But I like Sengulane’s formulation, too. It reminds us (well, me, anyway) of the need to continually audit my own intentions and practices, to try to make sure that my heart really is a peace factory. As the old song goes, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”

Article on East Timor in TomPaine.com

I have a piece on TomPaine.com today, about East Timor.
It was a good experience working with them. Their turnround time on the piece was about one hour. So it was almost the same instant gratification I get from blogging, plus I got paid (a modest amount.) Does life get any better than this?
I don’t think they have comments there. You can go to the JWN comments blog and discuss Timor there.

Too much work on dead-tree publications!

My schedule has been crazy. Last week I got back the copyedited and laid-out versions of two significant longer articles that I needed to review very carefully. One was my piece on Hamas for Boston Review. The other was my article on the british counter-insurgency campaign in Kenya for Radical History Review. Each required a lot of concentration, and also required me to re-upload a huge amount of arcane knowledge back into my poor suffering grey cells.
And that was before I got an enquiry from Paradigm Publishers as to whether I’d finished reviewing the copyedited version my book on post-atrocity policies in Africa, that they had sent to me in early April… But the darn thing never arrived in my AOL inbox!!!!! So now the book’s editing and production schedule has been delayed by a whole month… and instead of having some nice leisurely time in early April to go over that edit, I need to be doing it between last Thursday and May 17 or so– a period when I already had a horrendous amount of projects scheduled.
Okay, whine, whine, whine. Now I’ll shut up. This morning I told myself “Okay Helena repeat after me: ‘It’s great that I have such a lot of such great, meaningful work to do.’… ” So yes, okay, it’s great. But still, it has felt a bit burdensome. (She takes a deep breath.)
Actually, it’s proceeding okay. I just finished reviewing Ch.4 of the copyedits on the book. I have two chapters to go– and then I need to compose things like the Preface, the Dedication, etc.
And I’ve been doing a bunch of other things, too.
In a couple of hours, I’m driving to DC. I’ll be there a couple of nights. Going to a good mini-conference tomorrow morning that I’ll try to blog about… Then I’m helping to set up the Eyes Wide Open exhibit that’s going to take a poignant antiwar message to the National Mall. …
All this is to say that i recognize that my posting onto JWN has been a little spotty these past few days, and may be for the next few days, too. But I’ll do what I can. Anyway, Blair and Bush are both still in big trouble. That hasn’t changed– so having that headline at the top there for the past few days hasn’t been bad, at all.
Now, I’m going to post a couple of things quickly before I leave for DC….

The international courts discussion grows

Well, my article in Foreign Policy on international war-crimes courts has been getting a gratifying amount of attention. My intention in publishing it was, after all, to open up the discussion on this topic to include the previously under-heard point of view that questions or even criticises the general social utility of such courts…
This Thursday, I’m doing a call-in show on the topic on the San Francisco-based radio station KALW-FM. It’s an NPR affiliate there. It runs from 1-2 p.m. Eastern Time, so I guess that’s 10-11 a.m. Pacific Time.
Tune on in, Bay Area readers. And call in with all your questions.
How many times can I mention JWN in one hour, I wonder?
Also, FP just sent me a bunch of letters that they’ll be running in response to my article in, I think, their next issue. Seven letters including only one that’s supportive of my argument. Of the six critics, five are law professors. Vested interests, anyone? Okay, I know this is not totally a valid case for me to make– I realise that these people are also voicing some substantive criticisms of my argument that need to be addressed… And indeed, will be, since FP are giving me a princely 400 words to come back at ’em…
Good. Maybe I could stir things up a bit by mentioning Ramesh Thakur’s term “judicial colonialism” in there, somewhere?
So I see that one of these letters is from David Scheffer, now a law prof, previously Pres. Clinton’s “Special Ambassador for War Crimes Affairs”. Actually, it was hearing David talk about the criminal prosecutions program in post-genocide Rwanda that got me started on that whole entire research project and now soon-to-be book on Transitional Justice.
I remember it as though it were yesterday. It was September 2000, at a conference the Hilton Humanitarian Foundation was holding in Geneva, where David and I were both speakers. I heard him say something like, “Well, the Rwandan government’s plan to prosecute all the perpetrators of the genocide is going ahead very well indeed. We’re most pleased with their diligence. However, there is a bit of a backlog there, with currently around 135,000 suspects in jail and awaiting trial… And so far, unfortunately, the government has very little capacity to try them, so some of them have been there for more than five years already without having the chance to get into a courtroom… ”
And I thought, Oh my G-d, that’s huge! Especially given that the whole population of the country was then somewhere under 8 million. So I came away from the conference determined to start looking into it… and… and…
So when do I get to write the mega-long piece about Palestinian politics that I’ve promised to Deb Chasman at Boston review, you may ask?
Erm… maybe on the 6-hour train-ride going up to NYC this Sunday? Alternatively, I could reframe the piece from being mega-long to being short, sharp, and elegantly composed? Nah. That sounds even harder… Don’t worry, I’ll think of something… (Maybe blogging less could be an option?)

CSM column on the Israeli election

The CSM today published my column on the Israeli election (here and here). It underlines the fact that in this election, the main platform plank of the front-running party is that, as I write, it will,

turns its back on 58 years of Israeli commitment to negotiating peace with its neighbors, promising voters instead that a Kadima-led government is ready and eager to draw Israel’s borders quite unilaterally.

Perhaps I was too generous. Perhaps I should have written, “58 years of Israeli avowals of commitment to negotiating peace”… Since if there had been a real commitment to a negotiated peace over these past 39 years, then successive Israeli governments would surely not have devoted a lot of effort and resources to implanting lavish, Jews-only colonies in the heart of the occupied territories?
But still, until now, those avowals of committment to a negotiated peace have been politically important in many ways. Crucially, they have allowed the US a big “in” to play the key role of “third party mediator” that since late 1973 has dominated all attempts at negotiations.
But if Israel– the major beneficiary of US “foreign aid” funding over all those decades– is now openly saying, “to heck with negotiations”, then where does that leave the US? Merely as Israel’s main backer, I would say, without any longer also enjoying the fig-leaf of being the main peace-broker between it and its neighbors.
As I note in the column, Olmert has said that his unilateralist plans

had been shared with the Bush administration, which “refrained from public comment.” He implied this gave him at least an yellow light to go ahead.

I believe that those fearless members of the US press corps who attend State Department or White House briefings should follow up aggressively on this issue. If I were one of them, here are the kinds of question I would ask:

Well, I’m sure you get my drift. But I doubt if many members of the inside-the-beltway press corps will push very hard on questions like these.
By the way, I wrote the piece before Olmert’s latest “unilateralist spectacular”, the raid on the Jericho prison. Laila el-Haddad’s been doing some great blogging about it. (1, 2, 3.)

Articles in Salon.com, Foreign Policy

So the piece I wrote for Salon on Hamas went up onto their site last night. It’s here. If you don’t have a subscription you just have to sit through a little ad thing that comes on, before you can read it.
This is a new experience for me, writing for an online publication. I was sued to a whirlwind news cycle back when I worked for Reuters in the 1970s. Recently, in my ‘composed’ writings I’ve become used to a much more leisurely pace. (Btw, my piece on international courts is now up on the Foreign Policy website, but there’s a strict pre-registration thing you need to go through there if you want to read it.)
On the other hand, I’ve also been blogging for three years– and that can be just as immediate as you (I) want it to be.
My CSM columns typically have a turnround time of some 2-3 days. Working on the Salon piece felt fairly similar to that.

Still in receive mode here

I hope that y’all are sitting on the edge of your chairs to see what I’ll be reporting during my time here in Israel/Palestine. It will come. But I’m still in fairly frantic receive mode, and will get stuff loaded up onto the blog as and when I can.

Africa book re-edit finished

So I finished it today, coming in with a whole text that I feel fairly good about and that is under 94,000 words… Plus, two days before deadline.
At times there, cutting my own carefully crafted prose felt like cutting a live baby. At times, I got totally into the Zen of it and remembered why it is I just love burying myself in text and working with it like clay. (I work on the text; the text works on me.)
No-one ever taught me to write. When I was in high school in England from age 14 onwards I only studied Pure Maths, Applied Maths, and Physics (that was my A/S levels)– oh, I guess there was a nothingy little exam in there that one had to take called “Use of English.” Three or four years ago, when I was co-writing our Quaker book on Palestine with a bunch of (mainly) US-educated people around my age (or older), I was gobsmacked to discover all the formulaic things they’d been taught about “How to Write”, back in 4th grade– and they had stuck with them ever since. My friend Jim Matlack said he felt phsyically almost sick when he saw me trying to start a sentence with “But”– and he said he could still feel his fourth-grade teacher sitting on his shoulder spelling out all her writing rules to him
Who knew?
A few years ago, I figured out about myself that I really need to get into the physicality and the flow of any long text I’m working on… to be able to read it all in front of me and see the broad flow of the argument and the rhythm of the prose as it unfolds. So at some point– even though I now have a very wide computer screen that lets me put two or three whole pages of text up side by side– I have to work with printout. One-sided printout. And I’ll carefully read each page, mark it up for revisions in a complicated hierarchy of erasable colored pencils (with Post-it notes added where needed), and then shove it off to the left… and then keep doing that till all the pages are laid out side by side there. Well, you can only do that with– on our dining-room table with both leaves extended– 13 pages of text side by side. So then the next 13 pages have to be placed below those; and then the next 13… and by that time I’m crammed off the near-side of the table and this whole text is up there in front of me. And I can stand up on a chair (like G-d?) and look down and see what my creation looks like.
(The reason I’m on the dining-room table at that point is that the very long work counter in my study that I designed specially to be able to do this same thing with has been piled with an archeologically significant set of striations of books and papers for the past 3-4 years.)
But the dining-room table thing only works for text that is 39 or fewer pages long. Some of these chapters I’ve been working with over the past month were around twice that long, and I couldn’t get them all into my head in that very phsyical/visceral/visual way that I need to, all at the same time. I had some anxiety about that.
Then, keyboarding in the edits was a pain. Literally. A couple of times my right shoulder became very inflamed from all the mousing in there. (Apparently, I need to get something called a mouse bridge.) Intermittently I would think, “Hey, Helena,you should really hire some grad student to be doing this.” If I were a male person from a certain generation, no doubt I’d have a lovely wife at home to do it for me. But I do it myself. Okay, I’m not exactly a control freak… but still, there is something valuable about having repeated, intimate relations with a piece of text.
So last night I almost-almost finished it. (Okay, truth in advertising: I thought I had finished it.) I ran myself a deep, hot bath, ate a bunch of chocolate, and had a glass of wine. Spouse still overseas, but son very supportive and celebratory.
I woke up this morning with one final, excellent tweak right at the end of the last chapter in mind… worked on that a bit…chained all the chapters together into a single Word doc and sent it off to Paradigm (and Kinko’s). I ran five miles, did a few other things, picked up the spouse from the airport, and have been generally winding down since then. I think I’ve been going on high adrenaline for about a month and I definitely need to sleep some.
Along the way– did I mention this?– I had to tell the spouse I wouldn’t be going with him on the trip we’d planned to Egypt together. Bummer. But I really needed to focus on this manuscript.
My reward to myself is that next week I’m going to make another trip… one I’m pretty excited about. Yeah, of course I’ll let you all know about it at the appropriate time.
And tomorrow, I’ll get back and write something of my usual insight (!) and trenchancy (?) here on JWN.