Here’s an article I wrote recently about cycles of generational violence and trauma for my good friends at News Decoder. It’s about El Salvador, where I worked in the early 1990s, but it could be about many other places too. Repression and violence breed future trauma, and where trauma is unresolved there is no lasting peace.
Professional spooks know what a powerful tool disinformation is.
She was an intelligence analyst at the CIA. Now she writes about the dangers of ‘fake news.’
I wrote a piece on Latin America’s protests in late 2019 – and why they matter, especially to young people – for my good friends at News-Decoder. Here’s a link! I think it stands up quite well still.
(I took this photo more than 30 years ago at an opposition hunger strike to demand fair elections in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1986.)
Important work here from the good people at First Draft:
My former mothership Reuters has announced the expansion of its award-winning e-learning course on helping newsrooms around the world spot deepfakes and manipulated media in 12 additional languages.
This is an excellent resource, instructive for anyone interested in learning how to spot real fakery and manipulation.
Shocking, I know, but here are 14 sensible recommendations for the upcoming U.S. elections and an executive summary that will take maybe two minutes to read. What are some other exciting words? Pragmatic. Non-inflammatory. Feasible. Worth a read.
Fair Elections During a Crisis: Bipartisan and Diverse Blue-Ribbon Group of Scholars and Thinkers Releases Report on Urgent Changes Needed for November U.S. Elections
— Read on www.law.uci.edu/news/press-releases/2020/fair-elections-report.html
This is a time when facts save lives and misinformation can kill. Here are some useful resources I’ve consulted in recent weeks:
Newsguard: Who are the misinformation super-spreaders?
Smithsonian Magazine: How to Avoid Misinformation About COVID-19
This is the original clean version of my soundscape “Soldier’s Heart,” recorded April 27, 2019.
“Soldier’s heart” is a 19th-century term, used during the American Civil War, for what was later called “shell shock” or “combat fatigue,” nowadays known as post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Alongside my writing, I’ve been experimenting with soundscapes based on time distortions of improvised drum patterns. I am interested in possible connections between soundscapes, which I believe can slow the mind into contemplative states, and mental health. I firmly believe in the power of art of all kinds to transform negative experience into positive, to challenge preconceptions and to jolt the mind into a more open, healthier (if often initially disconcerting) place.
In this time of virus lockdown, social distancing and polarization, these lines from the final pages of “The Plague” by Albert Camus (1947) seem useful:
“(He) decided then to write the account which ends here, in order not to be among those who stay silent, in order to leave at least a memory of the injustice and violence done to them, and to state simply what we learn in the midst of plagues, that in humankind there are more things to admire than things to despise. But he knew nevertheless that this chronicle could not be that of a final victory. It could only bear witness to what had to be done and would have, no doubt, to be done still, against fear and its tireless weaponry, despite their personal losses, by all the people who, unable to be saints and refusing to accept pestilence, try nevertheless to be healers.”
(Translation is mine. Camus uses “médecins” at the end, which usually means “doctors,” but since we can’t all be doctors like his narrator, I chose a broader term. We can all be healers, one way or another, even if we can’t be saints. Just saying.)
I just finished “Agency,” William Gibson’s latest, 10 days or so ago and the ending still resonates in my imagination. Well worth the meticulous and fascinating buildup. It’s a worthy sequel to “The Peripheral,” and, like that novel, very much about the present day, however richly the future/alternative worlds are imagined. I reviewed “The Peripheral” back in the day. I’m pleased to see much of it holds up for “Agency” too.
Martin Langfield 