A common idea in this week’s readings is that children suffer in a multitude of ways during war. In A Faith Under Siege, for instance, we hear about how the Russian state wounds, kills, and abducts Ukrainian children. “Rules of war” are thrown aside altogether, as suggested by the example of a church with the word “children” written outside in chalk, which was attacked by the Russian military regardless. Even kids who are not physically harmed by war, however, aren’t able to live a peaceful childhood. The NYT article provides a quite sobering look at how children’s books, which we may think of as a medium to tell happy stories about friendships and families, can instead be used to deliver an otherwise incomprehensible reality. I was reminded of a museum on incarceration I visited for a Princeton trip, which featured children’s literature explaining why prison meant that children could not see their parents. In warfare, there is a “new normal.”
The way in which the Russian state uses the church and religion to justify its aims was fascinating. In particular, I thought the image in the documentary of priests blessing a missile was so absurd that it could have been satire. I’d be interested to find out exactly how intertwined the Russian state and church are, and how the church changes and adapts its ideology (and from where these changes come from) in order to justify atrocities.
I was also interested in the way technology has seemingly made war less asymmetrical. The Reuters podcast, for instance, notes that drones are comparatively very cheap technologies compared to missiles or tanks, and they can inflict disproportionate damage with the right methods, allowing Ukraine to put up a fight against Russia, a country with significantly more manpower and money. Even volunteers can be mobilized for the cause, as Deb’s Substack notes. The logical extension of some of the technologies with AI, though, seems uniquely unsettling: the possibility of warfare without humans “in the loop” seems to be a completely different level of armed conflict, and I wonder how that would square away with questions of responsibility: it’s already very hard to hold perpetrators of war crimes to account in the status quo — how would we even approach accountability if AI systems are responsible for these crimes?
Finally, I thought Panievsky’s book nicely explained patterns in the war on media. In particular, she identifies part of the new rhetorical strategy as framing journalism that does not align with populist goals (whatever they may be at the moment) as betrayal, which I found interesting. In a sense, journalists betray their subjects constantly, since the stories that they produce often present different accounts from stories that their subjects hold as truths (I think it was Janet Malcolm who explored this idea most thoroughly). However, Panievsky identifies how the wounding of feelings goes from happening on an individual level to a group level, and it’s in that change, the homogenization of “us” vs. “them,” that fuels populism.
