Using Spatial Reconstruction to Investigate Russia’s War Crimes

Spatial recognition technology is being used to investigate Russian war crimes and has been able to identify the exact site of the 1941 Babyn Yar mass executions.

I have been struggling with depression for much of the past week and probably for much longer than that if I am honest with myself. It’s not a debilitating depression. I can get out of bed. I can pursue my routines of reading, writing, walking, picture making, picture editing, and more. Still it’s a bit like I am moving through a viscous solution as I try to do these things.

Relative to Ukrainians, I have little to be depressed or anxious about, except, I feel deeply that their existential struggle is mine too. The loss of freedom they are threatened with is a loss I am being threatened with.

One of my prime thoughts this week is that the last seven years has been a firehose-shit-stream of angering, worrisome and depressing news. The most salient feature of this news has been the steady decline of Liberalism and Democracy and the steady rise of illiberal Authoritarian tendencies within the United States and around the globe. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it put an exclamation point on this trend towards Authoritarianism.

A vast struggle has broken out into the open in a dramatic way. There is no guarantee of the outcome, though, if we can avoid World War III, I am hopeful that Putin’s aggression will end with his loss of power and serve as a rebuke to Authoritarianism everywhere.

Among the many other thoughts revolving in my head these days:

• Will it ever be possible to have a world free of nuclear sticks?
• Is it possible to construct a world in which bullies don’t exist or can never acquire big sticks?

In The Greeks, H. D. F. Kitto describes the golden age of the Greek Polis, the pinnacle of which occurred in Athens towards the end of the 5th century BCE and lasted for a little more than 100 years. The Polis was a reasonably well balanced democratic organization of society where everyman’s opinion mattered, everyman’s participation was expected and status depended on the “excellence” of a man, not as determined by his wealth, but as determined by his character. One cannot overlook that there was slavery, limitations on the rights of foreign citizens and that women had no rights. But among the male citizens there was a relatively small (by today’s standards) distance between the wealthiest and poorest citizen, a common education around the principles of good character as illuminated by the Homeric epics and decision making by consensus. This is the foundational example of democracy, a more inclusive form of which Liberalism pursues today.

H. D. F. Kitto writes this in The Greeks:

It is an interesting, though idle, speculation, what would be the effect on us if all our reformers, revolutionaries, planners, politicians and life-arrangers in general were soaked in Homer from their youth up, like the Greeks. They might realize that on the happy day when there is a refrigerator in every home, and two in none, when we all have the opportunity of working for the common good (whatever that is), when Common Man (whoever he is) is triumphant, though not improved – that men will still come and go like the generations of leaves in the forest; that he will still be weak, and the gods strong and incalculable; that the quality of a man matters more than his achievement; that violence and recklessness will still lead to disaster, and that this will fall on the innocent as well as on the guilty. The Greeks were fortunate in possessing Homer, and wise in using him as they did.¹

The truth is that humans get enough right about how to arrange and conduct themselves such that golden ages happen now and again, but, so far, only for brief periods of time. We seem only ever to glimpse utopia, never fully achieve it.

Heraclitus came closest to an accurate description of humankind’s condition, proclaiming fire to be the foundational element of the universe and that flux is the norm. He thought wars (fire) inevitable and even necessary as a change agent. History is a churning beast and nothing lasts for very long. What is good eventually becomes bad which eventually becomes good again.

I don’t know what Heraclitus would have though if nuclear weapons existed in his day. Would he still champion fire? What do we do with a bully carrying a nuclear stick? My deepest fear and sadness at the moment is that it is conceivable to me that the nuclear stick will get used. If not this time, then sooner or later.

Bertrand Russell² points out in The History of Western Philosophy that since the time of the pre-socratic philosophers a main endeavor of religion and philosophy in the western world has been to establish something, anything, eternal and relevant to the condition of humankind. The nuclear stick is a definitive refutation that anything eternal for humankind exists.

Enter my sadness.

The past week has been horrid. I can barely watch the news it’s so upsetting.

My wife, on the other hand, is a news junkie. She keeps it running all day long. I suspect it is the ICU nurse in her. She is used to monitoring situations that could easily go sideways in minutes. She is used to knowing what to do if they do. I don’t think she would know what to do if the US, Nato and Russia started shooting at each other. Back in the day, when I was a kid, the advice was to duck and cover.

My wife is kindly wearing earphones during the day so I don’t have to overhear the news. At 4 PM, I emerge from my studio and we watch Nicole Wallace together on MSNBC. I can handle the news if Nicole delivers it and I have a martini in my hand.

I am very frightened. Some part of me believes it is quite possible I am going to die soon.

While on Block Island, during the first few days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I was taking sunrise walks along a stretch of beach that looked out over the Atlantic to the east. I couldn’t keep myself from imagining cruise missiles streaking past on their way to annihilating my country. So much for soothing ocean vibes.

The older I get, the more afraid of dying I am. I try not to be. I tell myself to live the moments as they come; enjoy them; revel in them. It is the better way to think of things, but of course, that is not easy.

Every night I watch interviews with brave, confident, terrified, and/or desperate Ukrainians. Some of them have been on TV successive nights. Each time I see them, I wonder, will I see them tomorrow? Or will the Russians have caught up with them? It is traumatizing to watch, even from such a distance, the horrors being inflicted on the Ukrainian people. More than a million refuges. Cities being reduced to rubble. How many dead?

A great part of my despair comes from not knowing how the world exits this situation without blowing itself up. The US and NATO have been clear and consistent in saying they will not put troops on the ground or planes in the air to help Ukraine. Everyone understands that direct combat with Russia is World War III and nobody imagines that would end well for either side or humanity in general.

But, if one arms one country against another; if one organizes the collapse of that other country’s economy; if one supplies intelligence, even if it stops short of targeting that other country’s assets; if one is doing everything one can to bring that other country to its knees; isn’t one at war with them?

Nightly, the punditry asks, what is the end game? Where is the off ramp? To date, none of them has been able to give me hope there is one.

I go on being afraid.

An-My Lê

… an interesting quote from the review…

_ Simply put, the raison d’etre for the military – despite all protestations to the contrary, despite all the good works they otherwise undertake – is “to engage in combat, should it be required to do so by the national defence policy, and to win. This represents an organisational goal of any military, and the primary focus for military thought through military history.” (Wikipedia) In terms of military doctrine, we note that in the history of the United States of America, the country has been at war 225 out of 243 years since 1776. America is a militarised society where the military prosecutes war on its own terms, disguising power as virtue. In terms of the prosecution of war, the country seems to be manifestly belligerent._

… this is an interesting followup to the Afghanistan article i posted right before it…

… the article catches my attention because it describes a 22 year old Vonnegut as a prisoner of the Germans in Dresden when it was fire bombed… the book is about Dresden… i did not know that…

… have i read this book?, there is a movie, right?, Art Garfunkle?… google informs me that there is a movie, i haven’t seen it, AG wan’t in it… yes, now i remember, that was Catch 22… the book is apparently about the allied bombing of Dresden during World War II, 130,000 peopled dead, target of no strategic importance, except to break the back of the will of the German people… strange to have this come to the front in the same morning Susan Sontag helps me remember and fill in the gaps of the Vietnam and Desert Storm wars… also the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia… H was lamenting the death of one of the breeders of Chas, ‘the universe is cruel” she said, i pointed out that the universe is indifferent, it is people who are cruel… we believe they can choose not to be cruel and shake our heads over and over again when they don’t… is there free will?… prevailing science seems to think not, so maybe even people are not cruel, they cary out the indifference of the universe…

… the article on Literary Hub is a reprint of “a 1969 review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Iconic Anti-War Novel”… Vietnam war era, an oblivious time in my life, the draft ended as i turned 18… i still got a draft card, number 27 or something like that, i would have gone, or J said once, been shipped to Canada…

… i read the review, it mentions Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, as being unstuck in time and abducted by aliens… ahh, i did read it, a long time ago… the aliens and unstuck time welded to my consciousness, the rest i have no memory of…

_To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do, and pictures taken by photographers out in the field of the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs.¹

… this very first sentence arrests me… the truth of it… the kind of picture we can be so certain isn’t staged, images from Vietnam, napalm child, man being shot in the head, among the most noted, notorious?… i read on and the man shot in the head photo was staged in a fashion, execution carried out as theater for the press corps… this moment in time, reverberating down through the ages by photograph… there is a Woody Allen movie in which the image features as wall decoration in the dining room of a luxury apartment… the idea that someone would live with such an image all day every day means that we can become indifferent over time… was that the message?…

… “More upsetting” Sontag goes on to write, is a collection of photographs made by the Khmer Rouge of people condemned to die moments before they are executed… the condemned had committed the crimes of being “intellectuals” or “counter-revolutionaries”… i think about the precarious situation our country finds itself in where one wrong turn, one failure to stand up to the creep of authoritarianism could bring similar atrocities within our borders…

… because of the power of still and moving images, since the Vietnam war, such imagery has been tightly managed by the military with the news media as a kind of accomplice…

American television viewers weren’t allowed to see footage acquired by NBC (which the network then declined to run) of what that superiority could wreak: the fate of thousands of Iraqi conscripts who, having fled Kuwait City at the end of the war, on February 27, were carpet bombed with explosives, napalm, radioactive DU (depleted uranium) rounds, and cluster bombs as they headed north, in convoys and on foot, on the road to Basra, Iraq—a slaughter notoriously described by one American officer as a “turkey shoot.”²

… how is it i was not aware of this?… was it reported at all?… and how is it we are using radioactive rounds (we needed a use for depleted uranium?)… i do remember the slick presentation of the Gulf War, operation Shock and Awe, Desert Storm… neatly packaged for presentation on the evening news… go team!, may our victories be ever more glorious… there is a Star Trek episode in which war has been sanitized of bloody consequence, attacks are computer simulated and the computers determine who reports to the vaporization machines to take their place among the dead… no muss, no fuss, no rebellious population to stop the fighting…

… Sontag notes that the lens which creates the record is the same as the lens that surveils and targets… the actions of doing each belong in the same category of aggression… it seems to me that the increasing resistance people have to being photographed in public is a reaction to this aggression… it is also interesting that the new capture format, smart phones, is much less aggressive in appearance and, consequently, more successful in its aggression… additionally, this is what has changed, with cameras in everyone’s hands, government censorship of photographs and videos is much more difficult, there is abundant footage these days of the killing of black men by police…

… about media self censorship…

This novel insistence on good taste in a culture saturated with commercial incentives to lower standards of taste may be puzzling. But it makes sense if understood as obscuring a host of concerns and anxieties about public order and public morale that cannot be named, as well as pointing to the inability otherwise to formulate or defend traditional conventions of how to mourn. What can be shown, what should not be shown—few issues arouse more public clamor.³

…to be continued…

… The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus, Hendrick Goltzius (1588)…

… Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas…

… Sontag is making the point that photographs differ from paintings in that they are not, in most cases, renderings of what a we imagine a horror to be, they are the horror itself once removed…

But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.¹

… Goya, Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), eighty-three etchings depicting the brutality of Napoleon’s army when invading Spain in 1808 to put down the Spanish rebellion in 1808…

… why must there be brutality for the defeated?, to be thoroughly humiliated?, why do human beings work this way?…

… Sontag makes a point of the non-judgmental captioning of documentary photographs vs. the captions of Goya’s etchings which are very judgmental…

… a painting (sculpture, music score, etc.) is the creation of the artist and its first standard of relevance is the truth of its attribution… a (documentary) photograph’s first standard of reference is the truth of its contents… though authorship can become important when a photograph becomes collectible…

War was and still is the most irresistible—and picturesque—news. (Along with that invaluable substitute for war, international sports.²

… that sporting contests are wars for peacetime is an extremely interesting point, and explains the way news presentation makes war seem little more than sporting contest, at least in the beginning… i remember the broadcast of Operation Desert Storm… the same applies to political contests, with contests for presidency presented in a similar sporting event format… i have spoken of this before…

… The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Roger Fenton… a famous photograph that i have seen in a book somewhere, maybe Sontag’s book, On Photography…

… it appears that many iconic photographs of conflict were staged…

We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and of death, and those being photographed to be unaware of the camera, “off guard.” No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer.³

Only starting with the Vietnam War is it virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were setups.⁴

… Phan Thi Kim Phuc…

After snapping the photograph, Ut took Kim Phúc and the other injured children to Barsky Hospital in Saigon, where it was determined that her burns were so severe that she probably would not survive. After a 14-month hospital stay and 17 surgical procedures including skin transplantations, she was able to return home. A number of the early operations were performed by Finnish plastic surgeon Aarne Rintala. It was only after treatment at a renowned special clinic in Ludwigshafen, West Germany, in 1982, that Kim Phúc was able to properly move again.⁵