How revolution spreads

Marc Herman is back home from Libya and has written up his experiences as a Kindle Single called The Shores of Tripoli. (Be sure to read his recent blog post about the market forces in the magazine industry that led him to choose this outlet.)

It's a fascinating read. One of the points that particularly compelled me was the discussion of the rebellion finally hitting the small mountain town of Nalut. The residents knew of the uprisings in the big coastal cities, and the local loyalist soldiers knew of them, too. And they had all seen videos of the regime slaughtering protesters. But nothing had yet happened in Nalut. As one of the residents says,

"Some guys from school, and some people who are just my neighbors. We decide to do this thing," as he described it. The thing they would do was to walk to the local Nalut office of Internal Security the next afternoon and tender a request that Moammar Qaddafi, Libya's leader of forty-two years, abdicate. They they would stand there and dare the guards to shoot them, hit them, gas them, or, if they preferred, agree with them. They did not reallly think about what would happen after that.

The book offers a case study as to how a movement spreads. Part of it is simply organic - it was just time, and the thing went viral. Part of it is manufactured - a NATO operative plays a role in the local resistance, and the rebels find help from across the Tunisian border. But it nicely connects the local individual stories to much larger social forces. If you're trying to figure out why something like Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party takes off and other movements don't, here's a nice piece of research for you.

Seeking legal remedies where no law exists

Reporting from Tripoli, Marc Herman describes a horrific attack on a family by a group of Khaddafi loyalists. But what remedies are available? As Marc concludes,

If what appears to have happened to the Mrayed family really did, it would surely be a war crime, and almost certainly only one of many such cases that will emerge from Libya's war. But journalists, to our great frustration, lack subpoena power or the ability to compel on-the-record testimony. The Mrayed family must not only wait for a formal investigation by a viable legal authority, they must wait for Libya to build one.

Why so few Revolutionary War films?

Alyssa Rosenberg and Erik Loomis want to know why there are so few films about the Revolutionary War. It's a good question. It may well be that when you get into the weeds, it's just hard for modern audience to relate to the story. Independence is a great rallying cry, but why would most individual colonists favor the cause, risking their lives in the process? Because of a friggin' tea tax? Drink coffee, dude. (I'm oversimplifying, I grant you.) And the details of the war, for the most part, just aren't that compelling. It was mostly a case of the Americans very cleverly retreating until the French bailed them out -- not really how Americans want to see themselves.

Then again, it's the movies. They can always embellish! Take the film "U-571," a pretty entertaining film about the Americans who took over a U-Boat during WWII and stole the Germans' Enigma code machine. Oh, it was the Brits who did that? Well, let them make a movie about it with Colin Firth and Emma Thompson. Meanwhile, USA! USA! You see my point. One needn't be a slave to history to make an entertaining historical film.

The problem with this argument is that that's exactly what Roland Emmerich did with "The Patriot." Say what you want about Emmerich's and Mel Gibson's films, but they're usually not boring. "The Patriot" kind of was. And they took real liberties to make it compelling. They gave Gibson's character a good background and a bunch of solid reasons to join the rebel cause. They made the Brits unusually evil -- Col. Tavington was a combination of Hitler, Palpatine, and Hannibal Lecter. He locked women and children in a church and burned it to the ground. If anyone actually committed any sort of act during the prosecution of the Revolutionary War, please let me know, but this struck me as a real stretch. Nonetheless, kind of a dull film.

Why? I think it really comes down to the military technology of the time. Stephen Colbert nicely demonstrated the challenges of the front-loading musket in his reenactment of Paul Revere's ride. Shooting, followed by 30 seconds of reloading, followed by shooting, is just a poor visual. Emmerich tried to make it cooler by doing it in slow motion, but that just made it take longer between shots. Daniel Day Lewis nicely overcame these limitations in "Last of the Mohicans" by grabbing lots of rifles. He shot a dude, grabbed the dude's loaded rifle, shot the next dude with it, and so on. But that approach doesn't work as well on a Revolutionary War battlefield. Sure, you could show lots of bayonetting, but that's actually pretty gross.

If people want to keep trying to make a decent Revolutionary War film, I'm happy to go see it, but I tend to think it won't be that watchable until some daring director throws machine guns or laser beams in there.

"You help the soldier, you help the civilian. It is the same person."

Journalist Marc Herman, my far more courageous counterpart in high school, has just returned from a visit to Tunisia and western Libya, where he interviewed people traveling back and forth across the border about their activities in the war there. The first of his dispatches appears in the Atlantic and is pretty fascinating, attesting to the blurring of the soldier/civilian categories. It includes an interview with the owner of a supermarket in Tataoine, Tunisia,* who sells to both pro- and anti-Qaddafi forces. Others in the story are using refugee supplies to specifically aid anti-Qaddafi fighters. Are these people part of the war effort? Are they businesspeople? Humanitarians? As Marc's reporting suggests, these distinctions don't have a great deal of meaning on the ground there.

*I have learned from Marc that the scenes from "Star Wars" set on Tatooine were filmed near the real city of Tataoine, and George Lucas borrowed the name.

UPDATE: I also learn from Marc's Twitter feed that Kenny Rogers and The Onion are huge in Libya right now. If it weren't for all the tyranny, death, and heat, I'd be all over that place.

Someone doesn't know how to manage expectations

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 6/6/44:

You will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.... We will accept nothing less than full victory. Good luck, and let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

All victory is fleeting

A quick reaction to last night's historic announcement that U.S. forces have killed Osama bin Laden. First of all, woot. Seriously, this is pretty huge. I can't remember the last time thousands of young people gathered in front of the White House in support of the actions of its occupant. Major, major props to all those involved.

Second (not to get all political, but that's what I do), how big a bump for Obama? Bouie says his approval ratings will go over 50, Bernstein says around 60... I'll split the difference and go with 55. But I think it important to recognize that this will be a temporary bump -- a month at most. This is a big story, and the president is rightly receiving accolades from political elites on both sides of the aisle, which is what creates a bounce. But it's not the only story out there, and eventually Republicans will find reasons to criticize him again.

Third, does this assure Obama's reelection? Hardly. Keep in mind that this is occurring at roughly the same point in Obama's presidency as the Gulf War victory occurred in George H.W. Bush's. Maybe it will scare off one or two of Obama's challengers, but it really shouldn't. Economic growth over the next year or so, rather than military victories, will determine whether Obama is another Reagan or another Bush 41.

Oh, and by the way, add killing bin Laden to the list of things President Clinton attempted and Obama achieved.

Propaganda

My wife pointed me to this propaganda poster from World War I. It was printed by the United States Food Administration and written entirely in Yiddish.

I'm sure there were plenty of folks at the time who objected to government money being used to print documents in a language other than English. Of course, the poster minces no words in telling Yiddish speakers their responsibilities. Here's the translation:

Food will win the war. You came here seeking freedom, now you must help to preserve it. Wheat is needed for the allies. Waste nothing.

Seeing through party lenses

My old colleague Tom Knecht notes some recent public opinion data on the war in Afghanistan in his paper "Benchmarks in Foreign Policy Opinion," which he recently presented at the Midwest Political Science Association.  My favorite figure:

Basically, asking someone their evaluation of the war in Afghanistan is tantamount to asking them their party identification.  If you're of the same party as the president, you're okay with it.  If not, you're not.  Of course, it isn't a perfect mirror -- Republican support for the war under Bush was more than ten points higher than it is among Democrats under Obama.  This, however, is surely reflective of the substantial chunk of the Democratic electorate that is fundamentally anti-war no matter who the president is, and not an evaluation of the president's actual prosecution of the war.