War, as my friend Aaron says, has a rapid feedback loop. There, the rules of reality are strictly enforced and bad decisions have immediate consequences. It’s an environment that tends to focus the mind, illuminating what’s most important, second by second. It’s almost addictive, binding you to slow time. And like all addictions, it’s bad for your future.
In some ways, the cycle of war and peace is the cycle of reality and unreality. The farther you get from war – the richer and more stable a country is – the greater freedom to experiment and build and create your own world. Progress happens this way. Take for example the United States. With oceans to the east and west and friendly neighbors north and south, this freedom exists in abundance. In his book, History has Begun, Bruno Maçães suggests that America’s wide ability to create its own reality will define the future for the planet. Even the (still imperfectly realized) founding story of this country – that we are all created equal – is a victory over the reality of the human experience since the dawn of civilization.
But there is a risk. When we get far from reality, we risk losing a sense of perspective. To begin, we may forget that war is an ever-present threat to far too many across the world. For a country that spent the last 22 years at war, you’d think this wouldn’t be so. But those wars have been – and are – fought by less than one tenth of one percent of the population and very far from home. More pressing, we seem in danger of forgetting that the process itself – the civic and cultural institutions large and small – that allows this country to work is a miracle; a process that in part emerged naturally from our deep diversity. As John Adams wrote, any nation will have either balance or despotism. A great range of diverse interests tend to conversation, compromise, and balance. Two great opposing interests – say, the right and left today – tend to despotism.
This is not to discount the profound flaws of our nation’s birth and growth. The pursuit of a more perfect union has been slow and hard. When I see commentators on the right and left lamenting some halcyon time in the past, I wonder what era it is to which they are referring. Besides, ends are an illusion, it’s the means that matter. This is something the United States embodies as a country; it is nearly alone in the world and history as a living state; a place, like a person, ever in a state of becoming. It’s the process that makes this possible.
The Context
I strongly agree with Maimonides that we should accept the truth from whoever speaks it. Today, however, we are conditioned (correctly, if unfortunately) to filter any truth through the experience of the speaker. There are both well intentioned reasons (highlighting historically marginalized voices) and cynical reasons (exploiting tribal emotion in the fiscal imperative for clicks) for this, but the result is a media environment that is as predictable as it is chaotic.
Which isn’t to say that partisan, breathless media is new. The concept of detached objectivity was a recent invention. And the current doubts about objectivity – that we all have our biases and these are impossible to fully suppress – are not unreasonable. But many have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Civil’s raison d'être is the pursuit of objectivity. Yes, pure objectivity is impossible and inadequate. But, like the pursuit of a more perfect union, the process is everything.
Begin with our point of view at Civil: liberal democracy is good and isolationism is generally bad. All things flow from that.[i] But still, the pursuit of objectivity lies not just in how you cover a story. It’s more about what you cover; what you put on your platform for people to consume in their limited time. This moment, for example, in Israel. In all the immensely complicated history of the region and the enormity of what’s happening now, what story do you tell? I’ll come back to this, but first, some context on my experience.
The first time I was shot was in Afghanistan. He was an al-qa’ida suicide bomber, and I shot him back in a near simultaneous exchange. Though given the C4 strapped to his chest, it’s hard to say if the bullets killed him or the explosion.[ii] In the years before and after, I deployed to many other places as part of the War on Terror. I recognized the places destroyed by American munitions in Sana, Yemen by the people I knew there. I’ve seen dead families and have friends who’ve had to pull dead children from the rubble of US airstrikes. I’ve known more than a dozen friends and colleagues killed from Africa to the Middle East to South Asia. I know their widows and kids. For my close friends who served longer than I did, the number is two or three times that. I did not personally know anyone that died on 9/11, but being on active duty in the Marines at the time, I well recall the intense emotion watching the TV that day, seeing people jump from the towers rather than burn to death. I remember hardly sleeping for weeks during the fall of Kabul, trying to get people out; I remember discovering for the first time what betrayal felt like.
Now, consider the context in Israel right now. It’s generally irresponsible and callous to equate tragedies, but there are objective comparisons we can make to 9/11. In the United States that day, nearly 3,000 people were killed and more than 6,000 were wounded. The population of the United States is almost 340 million. As of this writing, 1,300 Israelis have killed by Hamas, more than 3,000 wounded, 100 taken prisoner, and the Israeli population is less than a tenth the size of the United States. Terrorists came into people’s homes and shot children in front of parents, raped women next to their dead friends, murdered babies in their cribs. They filmed executions with the victims’ own phones and posted the videos to their Facebook pages for their friends and family to see. For these and other reasons (the strong confidence in their security services as one sense of national identity, for example), this is something worse than ‘Israel’s 9/11.’
Recall also what followed 9/11. Afghanistan, Iraq, ISIS, and now the Taliban again in power in Kabul. Consider that Hamas - and perhaps Iran - had the American experience in mind when planning the attack. Consider what Israel faces in the weeks ahead. Hezbollah, the Iranian backed political party and militia in Lebanon, will not likely remain on the sidelines. Syrian forces, which have invaded Israel three times, are positioned on the border of the Golan Heights. Consider the fact that the two million people in the Gaza Strip live in the most densely populated place in the world; consider the three million in the West Bank. Consider that 43% of the people who live in Gaza are children under the age of 15, that their electricity and water have been cut off, and much worse is ahead.
Back to Objectivity
The power of video lies in the levels on which you can communicate. If done well, it can tell stories of emotional complexity and intellectual depth in a short space. Doing this with nuance and balance, and building the technology that will provide the tools to sift through the avalanche of misinformation coming in the next few years is our goal (more on this when we send the update that this was originally planned to be). This is what you have invested in and this is what we owe you.
But the emotional power of video can also be a danger. Is objectivity just sending raw images of tragedy? What about context? Which images do you use? Every decision is rooted in your point of view. Where to begin in Israel? Is it an analysis of fault; the intelligence failure or Netanyahu’s administration? Is it a look at the plight of the Palestinians, both in history and the coming weeks? Where do you begin with the cause? Is it the rebellion against the Romans almost 2,000 years ago and the subsequent massacre and expulsion of the Jews from their ancestral homeland? The pogroms or the Holocaust? Perhaps the missing piece is role of the world in all this. Zionism was born of the belief that neither God nor the world would protect the Jewish people, and they needed a state to protect themselves. After World War II, the UN General Assembly endorsed the idea, and Israel was reborn. But what of the Arabs who lived in the region? Was it unreasonable that they resisted the Western-led UN plan to take their land, asking why it should be they – and not the Europeans or Americans; who both had a history of resisting Jewish immigration – who should provide a Jewish homeland? What of the fact that Israel’s expansion past the 1948 borders was the result of three wars begun and lost by Israel’s Arab neighbors? Further, what of the Persian and Arab roles in stoking the Palestinian cause and resisting a two-state solution for their own domestic reasons? Yes, it is immensely complicated. Europe, the UN, the United States, Iran, and the Arab states all played a role in getting to this point. It’s going to take more than Israel to stop it.
As a fledgling media company that is still months away from a full launch, these questions are largely theoretical for us. Further, the focus for Civil is, and will be, on domestic stories. This doesn’t mean that we won’t cover the war, but our strength will be in covering how it affects all Americans and how we may facilitate understanding, if not always agreement. Admittedly, this is a far easier task than covering the war itself. But we did not think we could say nothing about what is happening. This essay is only an acknowledgment of the tragedy, an exploration into how we think, and an explanation of where we are trying to go. Remembering all that came after 9/11, I worry it will be a long road.
Ian Allen is the CEO and cofounder of Civil
[i] Liberal in the classical sense: individual rights, a society where we are all tolerant of each other’s beliefs and delusions, and politics with limited ambitions. Also, I wrote ‘isolationism is generally bad.’ Our foreign policy should be engaged and humble. This doesn’t always lead to big, satisfying triumphs. But it does limit the potential for catastrophe like the kind with which we’ve had so much recent experience.
[ii] Lest I make this sound more heroic than it was: there were several al-Qa’ida fighters on one side, and several Americans and Afghans on the other. It wasn’t a lone old west style standoff, but rather a confused firefight at night among a group of us. Very likely the fighter that shot me was also hit by several shots apart from mine.
Also, the suicide vest went low order which is the reason why I’m still here to write this.