/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12541024]

Will we ever get elite tier literature on the war on terror? Would a middle eastern author produce it?

[Anonymous No.12541049]

The war on terror is part of the spectacles so we will never get any relevant literature.

The war on terror does not exist.

[Anonymous No.12541054]

[Anonymous No.12541072]

>>12541024

There's a guy from /lit/ writing a verse play Antigone version of the war in Afghanistan

[Anonymous No.12541073]

>>12541024
Not literature but what did you guys think of Generation Kill?
I just watched it and found like 80% of it to be very enjoyable, I lovd the violence and gore mixed with bureaucratic nonsense and CO incompetence, it felt like a journey through hell. The 20% I didn't like was the transparent favoring of Brad Colbert and Nathaniel Fick, and how clumsily this bias was expressed through dialogue.

[Anonymous No.12541596]

https://www.amazon.com/War-Porn-Roy-Scranton/dp/1616957158/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

[Anonymous No.12541634]

>>12541049
What do you mean by the spectacles?

[Anonymous No.12541645]

>>12541024
Noone wants to read that edgy shit

[Anonymous No.12541673]

>>12541634
Check out Debord and Baudrillard.

[Anonymous No.12541796]

>>12541024

The so-called war on terror is nothing but a hoax.

All of these wars were devised by the servants of Israel deep inside the US apparatus of government.

[Anonymous No.12541938]

>>12541645
That makes no sense. when the germans say the great war suck it's a fucking masterpiece but when there is a legitimate war going on and people are writing about it the story is edgy?

[Anonymous No.12541948]

Anything written by an American author about this subject is necessarily shitty. It will either read like an apology or a retarded indictement of warmongering.

[Anonymous No.12541961]

>>12541948
Well i highly doubt that the taliban and ISIS will be making their debut in the world of literature anytime soon. sure there is some taliban poems but those were literally taken from place that coalition forces raided.

[Anonymous No.12542133]

>>12541073
Its based on a book so it literally is literature.

[Anonymous No.12542184]

These are two of my favorite war books, both are set in Iraq
>Black Hearts by Jim Frederick
>Sniper One by Dan Mills
the first one's real bleak and dark and involves a group of marines raping a girl and killing her and her family, the second one's lighter on tone but a solid read nonetheless. Check them out.

[Anonymous No.12542369]

>>12541024
>dat filename
Subtle

[Anonymous No.12542409]

>>12541073
easily one of the best depictions of war ever produced. the defining portrait of the iraq war so far

[Anonymous No.12542545]

>>12542184
both sound horrible

[Anonymous No.12542563]

>>12542545
How so?

[Anonymous No.12542640]

>>12542545
You expect someone to write a grand, sweeping book filled with ten dollar words on the Iraq war? Nigger

[Anonymous No.12542656]

>>12541024
The corpse exhibition is p. Good

[Anonymous No.12543073]

>>12542133
I was talking about the show.

[Anonymous No.12543123]

>>12541054
>>12542656
This, I love the story about the weird old guy who lives in the well.

[Anonymous No.12543207]

>>12541024
I'd like something about the abu ghraib torture prison but I doubt the US will release everything about the events in my lifetime

[Anonymous No.12543378]

>>12541054
>The Corpse Exhibition and the Corpse Exhibition Other and Other Stories of Iraq Stories Hassan Blasim of Iraq Hassan Blasim

[Anonymous No.12543452]

>>12543207
Man, that was such a bizarre incident. the reservists where just dicking around and had the approval of the higher ups till they got whistle blown.
It's just like how during the iraq war there were literal kill teams that just murdered civillians. Even today we have Navy SEALs being accused of war crimes, it's so fucking absurd how this shit is happening in the 21st century.

[Anonymous No.12543467]

>>12541024

Cyclonopedia

[Anonymous No.12543562]

>>12541073
The problem I have with Generation Kill as an artifact of the "Global War On Terror" is that since it depicted the invasion of Iraq it doesn't capture the GWOT's most salient characteristics: its interminability and total lack of strategic vision. This isn't the author's fault, but it's a fact.

I'd actually go a little further and say that it fails to capture some of the most salient features of modern high-intensity combat, but that's a quibble and at any rate the book is written from a rifleman's perspective. Again, not the author's fault: he's telling the reader what he saw, and he does a good job of it.

[Anonymous No.12543571]

>>12543452
War never changes, Anon. Nothing ever changes, really. There is nothing new under the sun.

[Anonymous No.12543573]

>>12543452
>Kill teams
One thing that's always blown my mind about this stuff (also with Abu Ghraib) is how unit leadership is barely held accountable for this shit beyond maybe getting kicked out of the Army. At least the My Lai guy got a prison sentence.

Black Hearts, which someone else mentioned, does at least do a pretty good job of explaining why e.g. the platoon leader might have literally not known what was going on. But as someone who's been a platoon leader and company commander (the former in Afghanistan) it boggles my mind how guys were getting away with just driving around shooting people.

[Anonymous No.12543586]

I'm looking for a particular book about a middle easterner that goes to Europe to act as a spy (or work undercover or something like that). The main character comments the sexual dynamics in the west (i.e how men treat women and vice versa). Does anyone know the name of the book?

[Anonymous No.12543683]

>>12543467
>Cyclonopedia
Garbage. It's basically Lovecraft-Chomsky, but shittier versions of both (if that is possible).

>it's a war for oil man and the oil is spoooooky
>you wouldn't understand it DAD, it's theory fiction

[Anonymous No.12544292]

>>12543573
If the US started prosecuting every single case the world will no longer trust them, and that trust is at an all time low.
No matter how many geneva conventions we put out, there is no one to hold the US accountable for breaking them.

[Anonymous No.12544332]

>>12541645
certainly not any am*rican as it would possibly spring some semblance of guilt in their rotten, wretched little soul. and we cant have that can we? cant have anyone second guessing the bloodthirsty maniacs in washington, oh no that'd be bad for business.

[Anonymous No.12544406]

>>12541072
No fucking way, that sounds awesome.

[Anonymous No.12544417]

>>12543378
>stroke.gifv

[Anon No.12544448]

>>12541024
It's difficult to write a truly comprehensive book on the war on terror since the GWOT only exists from the American perspective. For those living in the nations affected, the American presence is only a brief chapter in a broader history of Islamic and Arab political systems. The lasting effects of the American involvement cant be examined without looking at a nation's culture and history. Khaled Hosseini can write about the Taliban in Afghanistan, but not struggle as a whole. An American can write about the GWOT, but will never truly understand it's constituent parts. A leftist might frame this in an even broader context of American imperialism, but the further you zoom out the more divorced you are from the individual experiences which make for great literature.

[Anonymous No.12544472]

>>12543207
>>12543452
Check out Eric Fair’s 2012 essay on it. He was part of it while in the army but went on to become a priest or reverend somewhere.

[Anonymous No.12544484]

>>12541072
What has lit even collectively produced

[Anonymous No.12544730]

>>12544448
>It's difficult to write a truly comprehensive book on the war on terror since the GWOT only exists from the American perspective

Look up "The Centurions" by Larteguy. France was doing the same shit in Algeria and Vietnam up until De Gaulle decided to end Operation Bomb Useless Dirt: Baguette Boogaloo.

[Anonymous No.12544879]

>>12543562
>I'd actually go a little further and say that it fails to capture some of the most salient features of modern high-intensity combat,
So whats it like?

[Anonymous No.12544883]

Writers don’t tend to respect the police very much & this is all policing

[Anonymous No.12544989]

>>12541024
You mean the terrorist's war on terror? You forgot to include the U.S, but I guess killing brown people is fine.

[Anonymous No.12545006]

>>12541024
>Would a middle eastern author produce it?

[Anonymous No.12545151]

>>12541072
>>12544406

Found some bits on the archives:

I’m writing a tragedy were a young Afghan woman called Malalai, after obtaining a degree to teach literature, returns to the mountain village of her ancestors, decided to open a school there. She enters in conflict with some of the village elders, while other elders support her. They made a council and eventually decide that the school will be opened. After that a series of consequences conduct the story to its final tragic climax.

What I am sharing with you is one of the criticisms to the western education made by Malalai’s grandfather, Kala Khan. He is also the chief of the village (although he doesn’t have power to rule the village alone, but must accept the decisions of the majority of the elders of the council).

The original is in Portuguese, metrified but without rhyme (that is, blank verse).

If you people enjoy it I can share some more excerpts.

KALA KHAN: Our knowledge may be limited,
But at least it is pure, clear and healthy.
We live well alone, leave us with our
Small candle, our modest lamp
And remain alone with the blinding splendor
Of your bombs and rockets, your suns of darkness,
Your light which, illuminating the world, makes it even bleaker.
The eloquence of your civilization
It is the refined tie-knot that enlace
The neck of a barbarian, the gloves that surround
The hands of a murderer, the talc that incenses a bear,
A princess with cold eyes, with steel-colored eyes,
Perfumed with gunpowder, with uranium breath.
Just like the prostitute who muddles her face
With so much makeup that a digger
Could mire in the ink, which suffocates
Her natural grace, so also your idols,
With their inventions, pollute nature.
In their metropolises artificial lights
Have hypnotize the night with fictitious candor
And the stars, banished, dissolved themselves in mourning:
What was left for night sky is an opaque melanoma.
The vampirism of their bureaucratic minds
Have sucked all the poetry from the marrow of life.
In the sun they only see an obese spotlight,
On the moon a dry tablet of aspirin,
The eggs they eat have for their yolk the poisonous
Broth of batteries, their breads are modeled
With microchip grains, with electronic flour.
Their milk is gasoline, their olive-oil diesel;
Their souls are so toxic and empty
As the spray of an insecticide can.
Their weapons, their rockets, their bombs, their tanks,
Their warships and warplanes, all of them
They are signs that make up the bitter confession
In which humanity admits its failure:
Your civilization is like a very thin and rosy
Foam that floats in a glass of wine,
A sugary veil of smiling order
Sitting upon a deep ocean of blood.
You and your race of wise men think that you will come
As heroes to our village of Orzala, but you come
Infected by the smallpox of science
That, outside these walls, outside this oasis,
Covers the entire world with sores. You and your plague
Are not welcomed here.

>>/lit/thread/11293732

[Anonymous No.12545153]

>>12545151

I also posted this some weeks ago.

The context of this speech is this: an elderly leader from a provincial mountain village of Afghanistan is urging some of the young men of the place to take up kalashnikovs and save a Taliban lord that is being held hostage by 3 US soldiers in a barn.

A great snowstorm was formed and is coming down upon the mountain. The elderly muslim sees the wrath of Allah in the storm and makes a speech to fuel the wills of his young students.

The original is in Portuguese. I will post my free translation first, and then the original text.

KALA KHAN: Look at the horizon: it is the heart of Allah
That was cut opened: hatred bubbles out from his chest.
Grayish and angry, the skies foam snow;
The winds show their canines, their claws,
Ripping and chewing the world into distortion.
The air, roaring and growling, screaming and howling,
Unbones the trunks of the pines, steal the leaves
From the trees, the gale dresses himself in green,
An emerald ghost slapping the streets.
Lightning invades the eclipse of the atmosphere:
His pale beak, his sparkling nails
Excavate the dark and gnaw night like a liver.
The clouds of lead that have docked on the heavens
Are like colossal mountains that breathe,
In which the bears of the windwhirls sleep.
This is the language of Allah when infuriated:
The appalling architecture of the tempests.

KALA KHAN: Observem o horizonte: é o coração de Alá
Que foi aberto: o ódio borbulha de seu tórax.
Cinzentos e raivosos, os céus espumam neve;
Os ventos mostram seus caninos, suas garras,
Rasgando e mastigando o mundo em distorção.
O ar, rugindo e roncando, gritando e uivando,
Desossa os troncos dos pinheiros, rouba as folhas
Das árvores; o vendaval se veste em verde,
Um fantasma esmeralda a esbofetear as ruas.
O relâmpago invade o eclipse da atmosfera:
Seu bico pálido, suas unhas cintilantes
Escavam o breu, roem a noite feito fígado.
As nuvens de chumbo que nos céus atracaram
São como colossais montanhas que respiram,
Nas quais dormem os ursos dos redemoinhos.
Essa é a linguagem de Alá enfurecido:
A pavorosa arquitetura das tormentas.

>>/lit/thread/11293732

[Anonymous No.12545157]

>>12545153

Another of the old-man's rants:

KALA KHAN: You come to us with arrogance, as if
You were bringing a torch to a dark cave
Where a race of men as blind as bats
Have been feeding on darkness for several generations.
For you living in the big city
The white invaders of America are angels,
But for us the voices of these angels sound
Like wheezes, every single one of their words
Has for tail the rattle of a rattlesnake;
Under the charity that they wear scales
Shine. Yes, you, who know much more than we do,
You believe that you work with angels, with seraphim,
But you can be sure, oh you blind ones who see far,
That the divine Muslim culture, the limpid
And sacred water that kills the thirst of our souls,
When these angels bathe in it,
Will become greasy as the thick cream and filthy broth
Of a harlots bathtub wash:
We will bless ourselves with the pasty foam
Of a dirty body. The learning that you bring us,
The new source that you open up to nourish us,
It is the swinish-sweat and hormone-soup of a satyr,
Yes, it is the sweat of the obese body of sin.
If we choose your creed and forget Islam
We will be the dog that denies the pot of clean water
In favor of a slimy and stagnant puddle,
And, by drinking filth, we will populate
The soul with worms: our immortal diamond
Will be more rotten than the intestinal night
Of the curs from the gutters.

KALA KHAN: Você vem até nós com arrogância, como
Que trazendo uma tocha a uma caverna escura
Onde uma raça de homens cegos quais morcegos
Se alimentam do escuro há várias gerações.
Para você que moram na cidade grande
Os invasores brancos da américa são anjos,
Mas para nós as vozes desses anjos soam
Como sibilos, cada uma de suas palavras
Tem por cauda o chocalho de uma cascavel;
Por sob a caridade que eles vestem brilham
Escamas. Sim, vocês, que vem bem mais que nós,
Creem que trabalham junto de anjos, serafins,
Mas podem ter certeza, ó cegos que veem longe,
Que a divina cultura muçulmana, a límpida
Água sagrada que nos mata a sede da alma,
Quando esses anjos se banharem nela, irá
Ensebar-se na nata espessa e caldo imundo
Do banho de banheira de uma meretriz:
Nós vamos nos benzer com a espuma pastosa
De um corpo sujo. O estudo que você nos traz,
A nova fonte que abre para nos nutrir,
É o suor suíno e sopa de hormônios de um sátiro,
Sim, é o suor do corpo obeso do pecado.
Se escolhermos seu credo e esquecermos do islã
Seremos o cão que nega o pote de água limpa
Em favor de uma poça limosa e estagnada,
E, bebendo imundície, vamos povoar
A alma com vermes: nosso diamante imortal
Será mais podre do que a noite intestinal
Dos vira-latas das sarjetas.

>>/lit/thread/11293732

[Anonymous No.12545160]

>>12545157

This was posted in other thread:

This is a speech from a play I’m writing. Here’s the context: it’s a Taliban warlord, captured by American soldiers, ranting against their technology and modern warfare techniques.

The original is in Portuguese, written with metrical 12-syllable verse lines, but without rhyme (blank verses).

MULLAH AZZAMI: You hide yourselves in the skies, inside your jets,
And thus, disinfected and pasteurized,
Concealed among the cold clouds, as safe
As in the diapers and comfort of your homes,
Just as if you were playing video games,
You launch your rockets, cauterizing the earth:
The spawning of hell made amid yawns.
We merely hear the screeches of your F-18s,
We do not even see your metal lizards
Sliding in the air, but only hear their sonic scream
Eviscerating the skies, the thunder of an invisible
Storm, an earthquake in the heights,
And then, in the blink of an eye, the explosion and the blood,
Bellies foaming off their intestines,
Arms and legs ripped off, the stench
Of human flesh, bones, skin and fat burning.
You, however, do not even see all that from the comfortable
Loins of your steel dragons. The only thing you glimpse
From high above is a cloud of fire, dust and smoke,
And not the horrible hemorrhage beneath it.
You rule the coral language of the flames,
You know the complete orthography of extermination,
You have put leashes in the tridents of the lightning,
You have squeezed the infernal heartburn of volcanoes
Inside cans – your bombs and torpedoes –,
But all this majestic witchcraft
Is at the same time a manifesto of cowards.
You fight with joysticks, you do not nail eye
In eye, you do not even see the color of the blood you shed,
You are not honorable as those who force themselves
To dissolving the white knot of fear in their guts
Because they well know that they might die. You kill
With the ardor of those who make chess moves,
You kill as one that scratches names from a list.
Oh, I wish all wars were from man to man,
Just a knife against a knife. It is then that we would see
Who is brave, embattled and bold and who is just
A mere bureaucrat of fire and rumble.

>>/lit/thread/11508727#p11532126

[Anonymous No.12545990]

>>12541024
surprised nobody's mentioned the 3 essays of"The Gulf War did not take place" by
Baudrillard

[Anonymous No.12546581]

>>12543562
Near the end you have to watch Fick struggle with wanting to do what's right and being forced to abandon people to chaos instead. What did you stop fucking reading or something? You just watched the show didn't you?

It's a huge theme in the last quarter of the book that the Marines feel they aren't accomplishing anything or helping anyone

[Anonymous No.12546610]

>>12545151
>>12545153
>>12545157
>>12545160
wow, that's great. I want to see the finished product if the anon ever completes his job.

[Anonymous No.12546622]

>>12541073
Because Colbert and Fick were the men most respected by the other Marines. Read the book.

Colbert was an accomplished recon marine who was revered for his service in Afghanistan. He was called the Iceman because he always kept cool under fire.

Fick was a young officer who was sociable and kind. He loved his men and kept himself accountable for their actions and their safety.

It's biased for them because the author recognized how much more they were respected than the other men in charge

[Anonymous No.12546646]

>>12546622
Yeah I have no issue with authorial bias except it came across in unrealistic dialogue

[Anonymous No.12546660]

>>12546581
>>12546622
didn't fick write a book?

[Anonymous No.12546694]

>>12544879
If you blow enough dudes away you can call in an AC-130. Double XP on the weekends

[Anonymous No.12546707]

>>12543573

>At least the My Lai guy got a prison sentence.

William Calley was literally one guy in a whole war full of war crimes. He was not exceptional and My Lai was not exceptional in the course of American abuse in Vietnam. Look up Nick Turse's work on American doctrine and other events of that level, My Lai happened many times over and that behavior was encouraged by US doctrine in Vietnam. There was no accountability in Vietnam. Period.

[Anonymous No.12546710]

>>12546610

I read in a thread some weeks ago that he finished the play and was trying to get it staged without much success. The problem is that he writes in Portuguese, not English, so who knows if the guy is going to translate the whole thing. Apart from the bits posted above I saved two more on my folder.

[Anonymous No.12546721]

>>12546710

I’m writing a tragedy were a young Afghan woman called Malalai, after obtaining a degree to teach literature, returns to the mountain village of her ancestors, decided to open a school there. She enters in conflict with some of the village elders, while other elders support her. They made a council and eventually decide that the school will be opened. After that a series of consequences conduct the story to its final tragic climax.

The present speeches are made by a Taliban warlord, when he is already captured by tree American SEALS (they are unable to flee the small rural town on a helicopter because of a snowstorm that comes out of nowhere, so they take shelter with the prisoner in a barn). The Taliban lord remembers the day of the attacks. He and his soldiers weren’t aware of Bin Laden’s intentions, and although he could feel that they would pay for something that they personally didn’t organized, he couldn’t help but feel some joy to see America hit in it’s soft bosom.

The original is in Portuguese, with 12-syllable verse-lines (without rhyme, that is: Blank verse)

MULLAH AZZAMI: I did not know Bin Laden planned
An attack on your towers, I did not even know
That a city like New York, flowered
With such buildings - such howls of steel and glass - existed.
The pinnacle of Babylon before such a city
Was not even the childhood of greatness.
Even marmoreal Rome, in all its glory,
Was nothing but a boy modeling castles
In a sand-box in front of this ecstasy of steel.
But the tears of time dissolve everything;
Rock and metal are blood cousins of dew;
The whispers of crickets today roar louder
Than the legislating of Caesar itching the dust.
Apathetical oblivion devours the purple
Of empires like blackberries. But, returning to your towers,
The Taliban knew nothing, and I, like the whole globe,
Was surprised and gaped at the attack.
But you know what I thought when seeing that hell
On the faded screen of a tiny television?

MOORE: No one cares about your bloody
Mental masturbations you fucking psychopath.
Shut your mouth!

[Anonymous No.12546724]

>>12546721

[I’m cutting some of the dialogue that comes here]

MULLAH AZZAMI: The white house boasts the color of peace as it’s face,
But inside her belly are curling up adipose
Dragons, roundworms and vipers: it is the home of Pharaoh
Of the world, who has long been torturing his servant,
Humanity. So violent is his scourge –
His hand that gutters the world and dines it as a turkey –
That all the horrors, crimes and midnights
Of history, seeing it, feel the urge to cry.
Seated in Washington the pharaoh threw
Arrows against all the tribes of this world
Without any of them returning the insult.
Occasionally one of them held a splinter,
A toothpick, and then it was promptly crushed.
In New York, to mock his prisoners,
The Pharaoh ordered a statue to be erect,
Built with tears from all over the world
Frozen in steel, and called it "Liberty."
But on that day, on the eleventh of September,
For the first time in history a few
Arrows of the thousand that the pharaoh threw around the globe
Turned their chelicerae against his heart.
All over the world dry and fragmented lips
Smiled; eyes undernourished of any hope
For the first time they sparkle like pearls;
Chained wrists rose up with joy.
For the first time someone rubbed embers –
The coral coals from the Infernal country of War –
In the naked heart of the planet’s Hydra.
Seeing the smoke, the dust, the glass, the orange
Flames, I realized that they were the blood
From the hymen of America that had finally been broken.
Watching the reporters and anchormen stuttering,
Not able to believe, not able to understanding, seeing Americans –
The race of humans that predates other humans –
Running and screaming and pulling their hair,
Seeing hell eating Satan himself,
I wasn’t able to say a single word, but my eyes
Then filled with tears, and my heart, trembling,
Sanctified the scent of chaos in silence.

[Anonymous No.12546730]

>>12541673
I remember my 1st year in General Studies too.

[Anonymous No.12546734]

>>12546724

To those that read Portuguese, this is the original:

MULÁ AZZAMI: Eu não sabia que Bin Laden planejava
Um ataque a suas torres, eu sequer sabia
Que uma cidade como Nova York, florida
Com tais prédios – tais urros de aço e vidro – existia.
O auge da Babilônia, frente a tal cidade,
Não era nem mesmo a infância da grandeza.
Mesmo Roma marmórea, em toda sua glória,
Era um menino modelando castelinhos
Numa caixinha de areia frente a esse êxtase do aço.
Porém as lágrimas do tempo a tudo solvem;
Rocha e metal são primos sanguíneos do orvalho;
O cochichar dos grilos hoje ruge mais alto
Que o legislar de César comichando o pó.
O esquecimento apático devora a púrpura
Dos impérios como amoras. Mas, voltando a suas torres,
O Talibã nada sabia, e eu, como o globo,
Fiquei surpreso e boquiaberto com o ataque.
Mas sabem no que pensei vendo aquele inferno
Na tela desbotada de uma tevê minúscula?

MOORE: Ninguém se interessa por suas sangrentas
Masturbações mentais, maldito psicopata.
Cale essa boca!

[cortei alguns pedaços de diálogo aqui]
MULÁ AZZAMI: A casa branca ostenta a cor da paz por rosto,
Mas dentro de seu ventre enroscam-se adiposos
Dragões, lombrigas, víboras: é o lar do Faraó
Do mundo, que já há muito tortura seu servo,
A humanidade. Tão violento é seu flagelo –
Sua mão que estripa o mundo e o janta qual peru –
Que todos os horrores, crimes e meias-noites
Da história, ao vê-lo, sentem ânsia de chorar.
Sentado em Washington o faraó lançava
Flechas contra todas as tribos deste mundo
Sem que nenhuma delas devolvesse o insulto.
Vez por outra uma delas empunhava uma farpa,
Um palito de dentes, e logo era esmagada.
Em Nova York, para zombar de seus prisioneiros,
O faraó mandou que erguessem uma estátua
Construída com lágrimas de todo o mundo
Congeladas em aço, e a chamou “Liberdade”.
Porém naquele dia, no onze de setembro,
Pela primeira vez na história algumas poucas
Flechas das mil que o faraó lançava ao globo
Voltaram suas quelíceras contra seu coração.
Em todo o mundo lábios quebrados e secos
Sorriram; olhos desnutridos de esperança
Pela primeira vez brilharam como pérolas;
Pulsos acorrentados se ergueram de alegria.
Pela primeira vez alguém esfregou brasas –
Os carvões rubros do infernal país da guerra –
No coração desnudo da Hidra do planeta.
Vendo a fumaça, o pó, o vidro, as labaredas
Laranjas, percebi que elas eram o sangue
Do hímen da América que enfim fora rompido.
Vendo os repórteres e âncoras gaguejando,
Sem crer, sem entender, vendo os americanos –
Essa raça de humanos que preda outros humanos –
A correr e gritar e puxar os cabelos,
Vendo o inferno comendo o próprio satanás,
Não consegui dizer nada, porém meus olhos
Encheram-se de lágrimas e meu coração, trêmulo,
Santificou o aroma do caos em silêncio.

[Anonymous No.12546748]

>>12546734

In this speech Malalai, after noticing that many of the girls she is teaching are now able to read, advises them to proceed, to keep reading, for it is, in her opinion, one of the greatest pleasures and mental-activities humans can engage in. The speech is some kind of Ode to reading.

I apologizing in advance for the awkwardness of the English: I’m not very good with it. The original is in Portuguese, in 12-sylable line verses, but without rhyme ( it’s a blank-verse speech).

MALALAI: And now that you have learned how to read,
Read: this is one of the greatest pleasures in life.
By reading you get to know multitudes of minds,
You become other selves, taste the flavor of other souls,
You explore the brains of different epochs, races, dogmas,
Cultures, beliefs and countries.
Everything that humanity thought, felt, did,
Been, won and lost speaks to us in a clear voice
– In the midst of the stuttering of the ages ruins –
Through ink: it is the blood of human memory.
Opening a book is to open someone else's skull
Without using surgical saws and drills.
Whoever opens a book lends flesh to a ghost:
They are the souls of people long dead
Who are waiting for redemption, seated in the dark, alone,
Blind, deaf and dumb, but when you
Open the book, hands that have now been dust for centuries
Extend themselves towards you, still warm, to
Caress your heads with tender consolation,
Or even to slap the cheeks
And pull the ears out of your dormant minds
And shout to you: "Wake up, you who are alive!"
People who read live a thousand lives in one life,
As if a thousand eyes, a thousand mouths, a thousand ears
Sprout out of their pores. To read is to discover
What exists in the wrinkles of the forehead of a sage;
What is the fire that burns the eyes and what songs are sung
By the fairies that nest in the eyelashes of the poets;
It is to see the seraphim that live inside the philosopher
Playing the sharp and spiked violins of logic
And the great misty organ-pipe of metaphysics;
It is talking with kings, sultans and emperors
Towards which no mortal could approach,
Who lived surrounded by guards, but that now,
In the pages of a book, have their hearts
Cracked open, their pulsations confessing who they are.

cont.

[Anonymous No.12546756]

>>12546748

By reading the great authors we see language,
The medal and central aptitude of the human being,
Fusing itself to the greatest of inventions: writing.
To see this wedding being modeled
By the ablest of hands, by the hands of poets
It to see the impossible crown itself with the possible,
To see the cat of the common verb turn into a tiger.
The workaday language, who could only walk,
Now is a ballerina that dances, spins and jumps;
The idiom that, with effort, might be able to run,
Now flies, and it is as if it could drink coffee
With the constellations, hear their secrets,
And make their fire dress with human language.
Reading is the medicine and gymnastics of the spirit,
It is equip oneself with compass and GPS
For the voyage of living, it is the microscope
That eviscerates the cells of being, it is the telescope
That hunts for stars of truth in nights of ignorance.
Great books are diving equipment,
The scuba and flashlight with which we can
Submerge in the mysterious oceans of the soul.
To read is to fly in a balloon over the continents
Of human history and see its shores and landscapes
Become alive once more, it is like freeing
Antarctica from the ice specter that suffocates it,
For reading is to melt the white and mute crust
Of oblivion: the warm breath of life
Rises from this thaw and down below we see
Fates that have long since been completed
Waving their hands to us once again, their circles
Dissolved. Therefore read, my girls.
To live more, to know more, to be more and to feel more, read.

[Anonymous No.12546804]

>>12546710
Maybe he should just publish it as a screenplay in english and let people pick it up and stage it as they please.

[Anonymous No.12546865]

>>12543452
Can't really blame the terrorists tbqh, the west has been doing this for decades

[Anonymous No.12546938]

>>12546865
Think about the terrorist's game though and realize how fucking pathological it is. How does a healthy person manage an unstoppable force that is unquestionably going to change their life?
I mean you have to be completely delusional or hopped up on coke or raised on romantic literature to think your scraggly band of AK toting nomads can even do shit. It's incredibly self centered to do something like this.
Imagine some guy runs up to your girlfriend while you're walking down the street, cold clocks her in the face, and runs away. What's your first impulse?
1) Chase the guy down and beat him up
2) Sit down next to your girlfriend and make sure she's ok
OK now there's a healthy response and there's a delusional response. Even if you're 100% positive you can take this guy, you need to make sure what you care about is managed. What if she's seeing double or completely disoriented? You might need to get her to a doctor right now. right this second. Not to mention the emotional isolation and fear of getting punched by a stranger, and then your boyfriend runs off after the guy.
But if you're a teen (naturally narcissistic because of an undeveloped brain, I'm talking literally retarded) or a narcissistic adult, you might choose to chase the guy down. That's a move that casts you as the hero of one of your action films, places you rightly in your phony internal constructs of narrative.

[Anonymous No.12547217]

>>12544448
>It's difficult to write a truly comprehensive book on the war on terror since the GWOT only exists from the American perspective.

Well that and Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters tend to die in droves when fighting Americans because of the extreme disparity in firepower and training. Most of them don't get the chance to pen their experiences to paper. How the average terrorist lives, eats, sleeps, does for fun in spare time, and fights is largely learned after the fact by US soldiers rummaging through the remains of his hideout after he's killed or propaganda videos put out on the internet that largely focus on the glorification of their cause rather than their trials and hardships.

[Anonymous No.12547328]

>>12541024
I've long been meaning to spend more time on /k/ as there's interesting storytelling surrounding war, especially those contemporary to us. Anyone ever check out their /wfg/ general?
>/wfg/ sticky:
>https://pastebin.com/BpLSpmMN

one of their stories:
>Gun Spirits: Some one tell us about the emergence of the gun spirits
>https://pastebin.com/BpLSpmMN

Even the exploration of military aesthetics inevitably lend themselves to storytelling because there's a combat-logic dimension that implies a whole set of circumstances and narratives.

[Anonymous No.12547407]

>>12543562
There's this unspoken, barely acknowledged history of the "GWOT" where its accumulated skullduggeries and blunders combine to ascribe to America in many a future history book an absurd wastefulness that amounts to lighting ziggurats of cash on fire. And doing so for scarce and very nebulous "strategic" purposes. War as waged by the managerial and technocratic pencil necks of the late 20th and earth 21st century America will be recorded as a bungled, wasteful mess, spending American lives on policy experiments pursued by sociopathic and tribal DC think tanks and in service to whoever were deemed helpful clients to our leviathan security state. About the only thing successful would be all the product life cycles churned by our perennial global mandates, especially the product life cycles around urban pacification technologies. From biometrics to pain rays to the IT application layers required to manage a city and root out subversives, all these were tested by dutiful GI Joes who gave investors an invaluable space to develop these products and services, having opened for them several Arab countries in the midst of sectarian civil war.

I've lately been wondering if the measure of Trump Derangement Syndrome by the upper strata of America is partially transmuted shame and guilt from having scuttled America's military on several fruitless Asian adventures for worthless allies and partners, knowing full well the US could be an energy exporter, if not the most prominent energy exporting country on the planet, the binary opposite to the reluctant hegemon bashfully invading Asia for oil resources it wished earnestly to be free from.

[Anonymous No.12547432]

>>12547407
they're just doing isr*el's dirty geopolitical work. all of the benefits, none of the human, social, economic or political costs.

[Anonymous No.12547466]

>>12543562
Adding to this, I think its apparent to our own elites that history will record the "GWOT" as so far pursued as a spectacular neutering of US power, a subversive wastefulness that saw the US go from hunting Al Qaeda and killing them to handing out birth control and spreading the mellifluous music of feminism to stateless mountainous peasant cultures and Arab tribes. Adding to this is the measure of skullduggery apparent to most, whereby greedy US elites are lured into scheming with culturally distant foreigners under a metaphor like "green horse red rider." As the liberal communists who thought the Islamists would be the muscle and subjugated to the intellectuals and their "moral power" with history at their backs, our own elites have been screwed by their collaborations with Sunni terrorists for decades now, to an extent where its apparent its all just sick exercises of power and there is no core set of virtues were trying to settle and fortify somewhere in the chaos. The true scandal is how wanton and greedy our elites have been, spending our military to absurd lengths, creating a warrior class of Americans that while awesome and amazing in one narrow sense, are absurdist exercises in pointless adventurism, at one point in the not so distant past, training the same militants by one sand berm, where some short distance away behind another berm waited the expensive and highly trained Americans who would heroically slay those Frankenstein creations of other well meaning Americans whose only mistake was just wanting to make us so safe that we use all our largesse and influence to secure democracy by shipping pallets of cash, guns, drugs and god knows what else our resourceful partners in foreign policy experimentation may need.

[Anonymous No.12547487]

>>12547432
Israel is a pretty small fry, Mr. Israeli Social Influencer, especially in this context. Thanks for joining our thread, however. It is imperative to Israeli information operations that Israel be portrayed as a great power like Germany or Japan and not a vassal statelet of European powers in an important post-colonial frontier in southwest Asia. In a world dominated by energy, China's mandate from heaven and America's hegemonic obligations, its funny that someone would expect to be taken seriously by grown-ups while ascribing any centrality to Israel when Turkey, the Gulf States, the Houes of Saud, to say nothing of France and the UK, Russia and whomever else might take an interest in the various zones of Asian intrigue all have compelling if not existential interests in the outcomes of various territories.

[Anonymous No.12547531]

>>12546660
Yes, One Bullet Away, pretty good and talks about the invasion of Afghanistan too

[Anonymous No.12548296]

>>12546646
Yeah, the show seemed a little dick sucky but the book is better

[Anonymous No.12548299]

>>12548296
I've gotta read the book I guess

[Anonymous No.12548428]

>>12541634
idk bro but I'll send you my 1st year syllabus

[Anonymous No.12548656]

>>12546938
It's a zero sum game
> terrorist behead a guy
>US is horrified
>military is angry
> Spec Ops goes and commits crimes and brutalize the terrorists
>they get horrified
>rinse and repeat till we glass the planet
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-6/
Honestly i can't even point the finger at either party. Both are doing what they believe in and both are going about it violently.

[Anonymous No.12548844]

>>12543378
You're a funny guy

[Anonymous No.12548865]

>>12541024
Middle eastern author no

It will be an American

[Anonymous No.12548872]

>>12541024
I’m writing one now. It involves war on terror, Islamic terror, Narco states organized crime

[Anonymous No.12548924]

>>12544472
From deranged psychopath to servant of a deranged psychopath, it's like poetry

[Anonymous No.12548984]

>>12541024
>elite tier
Fuck off newfag

>>12545160
I saw the original thread. I still don't understand why /lit/ is so impressed by the writing. Is it because it's in verse? Is the text really meant to sound so ridiculous? I honestly don't get it.

>>12546710
>trying to get it staged
OK, this guy knows fucking NOTHING about theater if he thinks things will go like this.

[Anonymous No.12548987]

Reza will do it

[Anonymous No.12549012]

Has anyone here read Joseph McElroy’s “Cannonball”?

[Anonymous No.12549122]

>>12548299
You'll like it, all the things that make you think that the story isn't great from watching the show are fixed in the book

[Anonymous No.12549126]

>>12541634
>>12541673
Meme shit

[Anonymous No.12549179]

>>12548984
>I saw the original thread. I still don't understand why /lit/ is so impressed by the writing. Is it because it's in verse? Is the text really meant to sound so ridiculous? I honestly don't get it.

I know you guys will think I sound ridiculous but I liked it because my favorite writer is Shakespeare and this Anon's posts reminded me of him.

[Anonymous No.12549211]

>>12543452
>t's just like how during the iraq war there were literal kill teams that just murdered civillian

Proof?

[Anonymous No.12549220]

>>12543573
You don’t know what the fuck younare talking about. Where are theses “kill teams”? Americans that went on rampages have been held accountable and are in prison.

[Anonymous No.12549230]

>>12544989
Stupid

[Anonymous No.12549237]

>>12544448
You are talking bullshit

[Anonymous No.12549253]

>>12545990
Crap writing that’s why

[Anonymous No.12549261]

>>12546707
>Nick Turse

Yeah, no thanks. No garbage please.

[Anonymous No.12549264]

>>12549211
>>12549220
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-lists/the-kill-team-photos-10864/no-title-692-57120/
anon this is a literal case that happened, obviously they were sent to trial but the very fact that it happened is still a blight on US military history.

[Anonymous No.12549267]

>>12543378
>can't just have a nice clean title, author, and maybe an ilustration or choice photograph
Fuck autism covers.

[Anonymous No.12549269]

>>12549220
For every one prosecuted, 5 of us went free

[Anonymous No.12549303]

>>12549179
You don't sound ridiculous. In fact, that is literally what I expected. I wrote that the guy's writing looks like that of a typical /lit/izen who has read basically nothing beyond MUH GREEKS and muh Shakespeare, but I deleted that because I didn't want to sound like too much of an asshole right away.

[Anonymous No.12549308]

>>12547407
Started of interestingly then drove straight off a cliff.

[Anonymous No.12549312]

>>12541024
Everything is about terror, because terror, post 9/11, is the state of the Western world

[Anonymous No.12549326]

>>12545006
Came here to say this. Currently working on a script to try and sell it to Cronenberg it'll be great

[Anonymous No.12549335]

>>12547487
>turkey
>not mentioning Iran

Stop trying to sound smart.

[Anonymous No.12549364]

>>12543452
>fags first step outside of Infinite Jest and onto planet earth
>muh current century
lmfao

Even when we have the whole half-robotic civilizations across the solar system thing going, people will still be cutting heads off and putting them on spikes.

Mongolian horse-fuckers eviscerated babies in the steppes, US soldiers were torching them in Vietnam. You seen Vietnam interviews? Since that war is old there's a lot of candid stuff.
>We collected ears because the orders were just 'kill em all'. Didn't matter, just ordered to get as many monkeys dead as possible. Ears were good to show how many you were up to.
>Was it difficult to do such a thing? You're not struck with any remorse years later?
>No.

Doesn't matter what year it is lol murdermen will make a living.

[Anonymous No.12549632]

>>12541024
Breakfast with the Dirt Cult isn't top shelf writing, but it's good, and it expertly captures the mythic narrative cycle of the lower enlisted gwot soldier.

[Anonymous No.12549653]

>>12541024
Imagine if your country attacked itself to justify invading your country for oil drilling contracts.

[Anonymous No.12550025]

>>12544879
In short: combined arms, intelligence gathering and integration, and the increased lethality of all categories of weapons.

This isn't really a criticism. These things have changed, but other things (which Fick writes about re: young men with guns fighting together) don't.

[Anonymous No.12550047]

>>12546581
I did read that. It felt like an afterthought. Compare how much of the book is about hooning across Iraq in gun trucks vs botching an occupation, then compare how much of the GWOT involves hooning across the desert OOH-RAH compared to botching an occupation.

It's not Wright's fault, it's not even a problem *with the book*. It's a problem with the book *as a representation of the GWOT*.

[Anonymous No.12550222]

>>12547407
>>12547466
>>12547487


good posts

[Anonymous No.12550454]

>>12549264
And prosecuted. Your point?

[Anonymous No.12550460]

>>12549364
what is some good literature, preferably philosophical, that deals with man's desire for conflict?

[Anonymous No.12550470]

>>12549264
Seems like this guy was bad before the military, I’m not seeing how this is indicative of the army in general.

[Anonymous No.12550477]

I've read Black Flag by Joby Warrick which is a p good history of the formation of the Islamic State

[Anonymous No.12550481]

>>12550460
The ultimate lit favourite “blood meridian”

Actually that is one book that could be used as a template for a platoon in Iraq or Afghanistan.

[Anonymous No.12550493]

>>12550470
See >>12543207
The US isn't even willing to release the full informations about an event that we already know took place, it's only natural to assume that its hiding even more atrocities the public has no knowledge of.
There are only so many cases you can frame as "lone deranged soldier" before you lose credibility and they know this.

[Anonymous No.12550650]

>>12549335
Ottomans are far more significant than the Iranians. They have the precedent of a legitimate empire across the Arab world. Baghdad, Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus all administered under the Turks. I know the Iranians are significant but I think fortune favors the Turks in terms of inheriting the region from haphazard American or European intrigues.

[Anonymous No.12550654]

In case anyone cares: there is periodically a Writefag General /wfg/ on /k/ >>40448736

[Anonymous No.12550657]

>>12550460
The hurt locker dealt well with the idea that war is a drug

[Anonymous No.12550701]

>>12541948
Who would make a better "War on Terror" character?
>Islamist sleeper agent biding their time at a fancy new multinational training facility in Jordan
>Iraqi Special Forces
>Iraqi police (local or national)
>Ragtag gang of young Shiite lads who kidnap a prominent Sunni cleric to earn street cred with their NGO-donated power tools
>ISI officer terrified of rival Pakistan but even more disgusted by Americans operating in Pakistan's territory
>Iranian soldier fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq
>mechanized Turkish forces fighting scrappy Kurdish militias
>Egyptian intelligence field agent sent to coordinate response to US weapons smuggling and war mongering that's concentrated by Benghazi. No mention of the presence of a US ambassador is made until afterwards.
>A cleaner set to eliminate Turkish and British journalists who threaten to undermine NATO's top secret post-Surge Sunni power structure, colloquially referred to as ISIS

[Anonymous No.12550764]

>>12550701
Or simply a civilian who wakes up to find his city carpet bombed by the US in its shock and awe invasion, and it just chronicles the following events from a 1st person perspective, even better from a child's lenses.

[Anonymous No.12550803]

>>12550764
I remember when I was 8, eating my cereals in the room while the TVs were live covering those airstrikes on Baghdad, didn't think much about it then but as I grew up it felt like a really disturbing thing to broadcast, I was left picturing the average American sitting in their couch comfortably tuning up to the news with their face stuffed on a Pizza while their military was bombing a country, and contrasting it with how the Iraqis must've felt that night being woken up by that.
It became the instant image that pops into my head whenever I think of "shock and awe".

[Anonymous No.12550828]

>>12550803
I know that what I'm gonna say will sound pretty stupid but I think the hunger games depicted well how the world sees american broadcast on wars.

[Anonymous No.12550893]

>>12544448
This. It is a great explanation as to why there are very few great Vietnam or Korean War books besides the usual historic accounts: these smaller conflicts are all (Korea least of all) plagued with lack of direction or pointed focus, which translates most memoirs into variants on "well today we actually did something but I'm still not sure entirely why". Any great stories ripped from these conflicts will more often than not be a quite contained instance which plays no greater bearing over the conflict in whole except for forming the basis behind hostile action. Most of the few Iraq war books I read years ago focus on these things, especially the psychological ramifications of traumatic action like shooting a kid by mistake or calling a strike on civilians

[Anonymous No.12550916]

>>12550493
Come on, they couldn’t keep Abu Ghraib secret. In the age of wikileaks all things would come out. Would it shock you to think that maybe actually there aren’t that many atrocities taking place?

[Anonymous No.12550918]

>>12550493
Abu Ghraib isn’t even an atrocity. Worse things happen in normal prisons daily.

[Anonymous No.12550923]

>>12550650
The Turks are hated in the Arab world.

[Anonymous No.12550934]

>>12550764
>Carpet bombed
>shock and awe

I guess you don’t know anything about that campaign

[Anonymous No.12550937]

>>12550701
>ISI agent disgusted by the hypocrisy of the taliban selling drugs and the state cooperation giving them free passage in Pakistan

[Anonymous No.12550943]

>>12550803
Any Iraqis still in Baghdad were stupid and they weren’t hitting civilians anyway. Let me guess you think Americans killed 1 million Iraqis

[Anonymous No.12550970]

>>12550918
Not in the west, and if so it's certainly not done by guards with impunity

[Anonymous No.12551034]

>>12550701
The Iranian one mostly because Iran is a fascinating country to me. But really you should try to put all these character in one Epic of the War on Terror

[Anonymous No.12551055]

>>12541024

No, because all of the people who have anything to do with that thing are incapable of great literature. Dumb cousin-marriage-product muslim, welfare-queen American army man, and their respective state apparatchiks: they all of them are united in their incapacity for literature.

[Anonymous No.12551126]

>>12550970
Hahah HA look up some Canadian Prisons. It was only recently discovered that guard at the Edmonton Insitution would set up fight clubs and gamble by putting opposing gang memebers on the same range and having them fight. The guards are corrupt in every jail. You’re pretty naive to think this doesn’t happen in western prisons.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/edmonton-inmates-were-forced-into-prison-fight-club-lawsuit-alleges/article14736533/

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/crime/something-isnt-healthy-corrections-investigator-slams-edmonton-institution-in-wake-of-report
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/johnny-sharp-hamilton-jail-death-comments-1.4822501

“Who cares?' asks corrections worker after inmate dies inside Hamilton jail“

This is just one and it’s even worse in the states.

[Anonymous No.12551816]

>>12543586
Are you thinking of Rifāʿ Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī's Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz? Or maybe Fāris Shidyāq al-Sāq ʿalā al-Sāq? Those are both classics that fit the bill.

[Anonymous No.12551832]

>>12547217
If you want that information, you will have to learn Arabic. Unfortunately for you, most people who know Arabic and English to the degree necessary for understanding and translating such literature are hardcore leftists.

[Anonymous No.12551847]

>>12550943
Wait, no one died?
What a relief.

[Anonymous No.12551855]

>>12550803
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Place
>>12550943
>heh we just poisoned the well if they drink the water it's their own fault

[Anonymous No.12552279]

>>12550923
Are you sure perhaps "everyone" isn't "hated" in the Arab world? Because that would be a measure closer to reality, although I'd also mention this saying that has likely been internalized or at least long pondered by many confused Americans:

>I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.

The notion of the Hatfields hating the McCoys in a territory and blood-defined feud seems more European to me. Prior to the US's post 9/11 response, the diffuse peoples of the Arab world were not at eachother's throats to a genocidal extent and conducted affairs via norms of hospitality and personal pride. The foreigner was a guest, per ancient codes that pre-dated all the religions we associate with those territories now.

[Anonymous No.12552434]

>>12551855
How did he get away with such a clickbait title

[Anonymous No.12552442]

>>12541073
Love to see Generation Kill mentioned. I loved that there was no Oval Office or girlfriends and kids back home, no departures but the boredom and terror of combat. The beauty of the Marines presents one of the paradoxes of the US response to 9/11: its soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, spies, unnamed all went to work spiritedly, perhaps no more than the infantrymen who were sent into these absurd situations. These plucky yankee doodle ripfuel-fevered corn pone monsters sent into a foreign land, Asia no less, on an endless series of foolish errands as a nationalist favor to the political class they haven't the faintest sense of, only an abstract idea of people who just happen to geographically dwell in the nicer parts of the country and are otherwise obscure, opaque and inaccessible.

>unrelated to thread
Evan Wright also wrote American Desperado, a biography of one of the Cocaine Cowboys

[Anonymous No.12552658]

>>12541024
Seen from the perspective of someone familial to JSOC, the war on terror has been an ongoing series of exercises in organizational subversion, network destruction, HVT takedowns and blistering tempos of helicopter cavalry raids into innumerable countries and many places that were state-claimed only in formal cartographic terms. They'd be tasked with handling all manner of exotic and macabre duties to help the rest of the cumbersome military apparatus, hunting the bomb-makers, the financiers and their hawala bacha bazi, the odd engineering professor or surgeon-turned-terrorist maniac. To JSOC and whatever equivalent organizations are not publicly acknowledged, the world is merely a battlespace, a gymnasium for the military athlete, a testing ground for the next generation of military products and services. From the perspective of the martially-minded Illuminatus, sending the US military into these Arab and Islamic conundra would help forge its institutions for the 21st Century, and that you get to create a trillion dollar market for new military equipment, that's a welcome result of your faithful stewardship of this great resource, the US military. Pacification of urban spaces and the rooting out of insurgents, subversives and terrorists are thought to be the chief task of the 21st Century's surviving states. The megacities they will preside over will use architectures of technologies tested and developed and optimized in the midst of America's post 9/11 response. When state leaders meet in private and discuss what worries them, its likely the thought that any of the social strata that have been grist for globalization might up and do to them what they feel in their very bones they know is their natural and moral due, but through all the accumulated injustices of the universe, and their own cunning and shrewdness and pedigree, they'd admit, they're here in the role of keeping the state together and you cannot promise much to investors if you have militia running ripshod over your rule.

[Anonymous No.12552687]

Germane to this thread is Task Force Gotham, a thought experiment by the Modern War Institute at West Point:

>https://mwi.usma.edu/task-force-gotham-part-i/
>https://mwi.usma.edu/task-force-gotham-part-ii/

>The Joint Task Force commander was waiting for the “all clear” to come up from the clearance team in the last bunker. For Maj. Gen. Paul Thomas’s Task Force Gotham—the US Army’s new unit purpose built to fight in urban areas—it would be the culminating point of a three-week-long joint and combined cordon, search, and secure mission. The other nine sites had been mostly uncontested . . . with two heartbreaking exceptions. The JTF had lost a full company’s worth of soldiers and equipment on bunkers three and seven when the Lashkar-e-Fatah operatives detonated their radiological dispersal bombs rather than be captured with them. Most of the soldiers had received lethal doses of radiation from contaminated shrapnel before they hit the ground. Thomas wrestled with the logistics of his decision to reallocate some of his automated airframes and delay cleanup in order to facilitate his MEDEVAC. The ground drones’ ability to autonomously re-task from their cesium detection mission to evacuating their incapacitated human teammates had saved some, but not all.

[Anonymous No.12552850]

>>12552658
I wish you'd learn to use paragraph breaks, but you're right.

[Anonymous No.12553312]

>>12548984
>>12549179
>>12549303
>You don't sound ridiculous. In fact, that is literally what I expected. I wrote that the guy's writing looks like that of a typical /lit/izen who has read basically nothing beyond MUH GREEKS and muh Shakespeare


But isn't being compared to Shakespeare one of the greatest compliments that anyone who writes poetry can receive? I've never seen anyone write with the same wealth of metaphors as Shakespeare until I found this guy. But then again, I didn't read that much, I'm just a pleb, so who knows.

[Anonymous No.12553651]

>>12551847
Not many

[Anonymous No.12553666]

>>12552279
> Prior to the US's post 9/11 response, the diffuse peoples of the Arab world were not at eachother's throats to a genocidal extent and conducted affairs via norms of hospitality and personal pride.

Absolute bullshit, even reading 7 pillars of wisdom will prove this wrong.

[Anonymous No.12553679]

>>12552850
Paragraph breaks are reddit

[Anonymous No.12553686]

>>12552442
>These plucky yankee doodle ripfuel-fevered corn pone monsters sent into a foreign land, Asia no less, on an endless series of foolish errands as a nationalist favor to the political class.

You’re such a fool. Obviously not American either.

[Anonymous No.12553697]

>>12552442
You claim the marines “haven’t the faintest sense” of their masters, the irony is you haven’t the faintest sense of the Marines.

[Anonymous No.12553724]

I could kill everyone in this thread with my bare hands

[Anonymous No.12553726]

>>12553666
Its different when there's great powers giving their proxies pallets of weapons, cash and clandestine services. That is a unique feature of our time. Its the technocrats convinced to use the tools former to colonial empires to administer the corporate multinationals today, and doing so under the auspices of something like "Right to Protect" gives them pretext to keep all the skullduggery going until suddenly there's no more Libya, Iraq or Syria.

[Anonymous No.12553750]

>>12553666
I think what I meant is that being "hated" by the Arabs wasn't really the clearest notation of the emotive content of their spirit. They regard us as foreigners and we have a culturally alloying effect, perhaps, whereby their other petty divisions are obfuscated by how much they loath us. Now they can organize and unify around an amended firmware and there's a different side of them. Now its no longer the petty, goofy Arabs. Its brothers in arms. I think that matters.

[Anonymous No.12553767]

>>12553686
They were pretty foolish errands, anon. Are we disagreeing about that?

[Anonymous No.12553853]

>>12553697
This was meant more as a commentary of how divorced our elite strata are from the Marines. The Marines would be happy to know these elites but latter want scant nothing to do with the former.

[Anonymous No.12554025]

>>12552442
>>12553853
>These plucky yankee doodle ripfuel-fevered corn pone monsters sent into a foreign land, Asia no less, on an endless series of foolish errands as a nationalist favor to the political class they haven't the faintest sense of, only an abstract idea of people who just happen to geographically dwell in the nicer parts of the country and are otherwise obscure, opaque and inaccessible.
Marines are just as cognizant of the nation's "political class" as any pseud posting on 4chan.

[Anonymous No.12554034]

>>12553750
> being "hated" by the Arabs wasn't really the clearest notation of the emotive content of their spirit.
See someone to cure yourself of faggotry. Not only are you wrong and not saying much, but you write like a faggot as well.

[Anonymous No.12554106]

>>12554025
How much butt stuff did they do to you during SERE?

[Anonymous No.12554137]

>>12553724
I'm going to make you my next dancing boy, inshallah. I like the temperamental ones.

[Anonymous No.12554162]

>>12541073
It's kind of mind-bending to watch Band of Brothers and Generation Kill back to back.

[Anonymous No.12554200]

Breakfast with the dirt club is good

[Anonymous No.12554201]

>>12554162

Generation Kill is vastly superior desu. It doesn't rely on any of this sentimentality crap that's the bread and butter of most WWII films and books. In fact, it deliberately avoids it.

The only WWII films or series I can think of that go out of their way to try and avoid that same pitfall are Thin Red Line and Fury (at least the first half of it).

[Anonymous No.12554321]

>>12551832
>Unfortunately for you, most people who know Arabic and English to the degree necessary for understanding and translating such literature are hardcore leftists.

I don't even think the problem is that. It's mainly that most Islamic militants are

A. Illiterate (at least in Afghanistan they are)

B. Don't have a very high life expectancy fighting the United States and its allies (during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan alone, 2,414 US military personnel were killed was opposed to the 72,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, or a casualty ratio of 29.53 to 1). Many don't even survive minor raids or firefights. Let alone big battles like Operation Anaconda which aside from the unexpected fighting on Takur Ghar, was a one-sided massacre.

C. Whatever personal diaries Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters do keep often wind up being seized by US or Afghan authorities for any intelligence that can be gleaned from them. The chances of said personal accounts ever being published is nearly zero.

Even more accessible medias like photography and video are overwhelmingly dominated by the United States. The only scant views we get of life on the frontlines as a Taliban or Al Qaeda fighter comes from propaganda videos uploaded to the internet or journalists who brave potentially being taken and held for ransom to get interviews with said groups (who naturally only grant interviews for the opportunity to present their cause as just and winnable).

[Anonymous No.12554328]

any recommendations for non-fiction regarding iraq/afghanistan during this period?

[Anonymous No.12554352]

>>12553767
Yes we are

[Anonymous No.12554366]

>>12553726
Talking nonsense, did you learn the word skullduggery recently? You use it in every other post.

[Anonymous No.12554378]

>>12553853
>elite strata

Anyone who uses terms like this are the ones really divorced from reality.
You do know there are members of “the elite” that were Marines right?

[Anonymous No.12555250]

>>12554366
>American adventurism is a feature of the local ecology
if you say so

[Anonymous No.12555265]

>>12554378
Sure thing Mrs. Marine Recruiter who considers physicians and attorneys "elite," but I was referring to older and more powerful elites. The ones who direct politicians the same as industries with capital.

[Anonymous No.12555467]

>>12555265
You don’t even know “older and powerful elites”. Your ignorance is glaring now.

[Anonymous No.12555471]

>>12555250
That sentence is not coherent. “Skullduggery” lol, go back to reading the intercept.

[Anonymous No.12555479]

>>12553726
> That is a unique feature of our time. Its the technocrats convinced to use the tools former to colonial empires to administer the corporate multinationals today,

Is English your second language?

[Anonymous No.12555490]

good books on war crimes? i'm a sick fuck but i also like to moralize

[Anonymous No.12555557]

>>12555471
Who types "lol" but some sad sack Boomer wagie tasked with millennial influence IO he's more than gracious to support because it keeps him under the federal umbrella and pays into his pension. And you found a source of discontent you are "engaging" and documenting for further investigation to try and get a leg-up on those frizzy-haired quadroon analysts who are racking up the social media influence scores while you're stuck administering the porn folders of the bot nets, which had been your only big responsibility for several months now. The Asian asexual was just promoted to Direct Actions and xey started two weeks ago. You arent just upset about these millennials shit talking the Marines, a hallowed institution. You're really upset about being "the toilet" of the shill squad, the one who has to flush the subversives with your stock-in-trade: shit.

[Anonymous No.12555654]

>>12555557
This post is incoherent, yet again. ESL?

[Anonymous No.12556176]

>>12551816
I don't think so. I think it was a more mainstream english text

[Anonymous No.12556289]

>>12550493
It's supposed to be a tell-all but doesn't reveal anything, proving your point.

[Anonymous No.12556310]

>>12555654
get a subpoena you glow in the dark boomer windbag

[Anonymous No.12556341]

>>12541073
Generation Kill is good, on that note I just watched Restrepo and Korengal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h83VrE-nC-8

man Doc really sounded like a chill guy

[Anonymous No.12556729]

>>12553312
>isn't being compared to Shakespeare one of the greatest compliments that anyone who writes poetry can receive
No. Parroting Shakespeare's style, without any sensitivity to the various aspects of the art, its effects, history and (in this) realization in performance, is not a great accomplishment in any way.

>I've never seen anyone write with the same wealth of metaphors as Shakespeare until I found this guy. But then again, I didn't read that much, I'm just a pleb, so who knows.
Again, not surprising. (As if throwing metaphors at the paper is some great skill in itself.) There was a whole period in literature that was almost obsessed with piling dazzling metaphors upon metaphors - the baroque. Look up metaphysical poets, if you're English.

[Anonymous No.12556741]

>>12556729
(in this case)*

[Anonymous No.12556928]

>>12550701
>Ragtag gang of young Shiite lads who kidnap a prominent Sunni cleric to earn street cred with their NGO-donated power tools

I could see this as a great tragicomedy.

[Anonymous No.12558380]

>>12556928

Not exactly that idea but similar concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tere_Bin_Laden

[Anonymous No.12558402]

>>12541024
>Francis Ford Coppola will never direct an adaptation of blood meridian in the Iraq war

[Anonymous No.12558808]

>>12556729

That makes me sad, man. You seem to be saying: "This is not good because it goes against the zeitgeist; people do not write like this anymore and to write today like people wrote in the past is wrong, it's bad art"

This frustrates me because my own writing seems out of fashion nowadays, but I do not want to have to settle for postmodernism and realism. I like this style you mentioned, the baroque.

[Anonymous No.12559253]

>>12546938
>>12548656
halifax 1750.

[Anonymous No.12559656]

>>12558808
>You seem to be saying: "This is not good because it goes against the zeitgeist; people do not write like this anymore and to write today like people wrote in the past is wrong, it's bad art"
Yet I didn't say that. I complained about _parroting_ Shakespeare's style - parrots usually remember just several words that they will repeat at every occasion, without any awareness if appropriate or not. That is happening here. We absolutely do live within a particular Zeitgeist, with a history, culture and worldview different from Shakespeare's. Being ignorant of that (most painfully obvious in the fact that the guy is searching for and expecting a theater to stage his text) is the problem. This ignorance results in contradictory writing. I frequently find it ridiculous to read, in a way that clearly wasn't intended by the author and that has no positive, constructive consequences in the work. There would be further contradictions becoming apparent if the text were realized on stage.

I'm not saying you cannot write like a Shakespeare and baroque writers. You only have to be aware of the fact that we don't live in that time anymore. I'd provide one positive example here - Prokofiev's "Classical" 1st symphony. In the height of modernism he appeared with this deliberately classicist work, built mainly off Haydn's style. Here's a potential problem - why would anyone care about an imitation of Haydn when Haydn has around a hundred symphonies of his own already? Fortunately, Prokofiev was a great artist in his own right, and he wrote a symphony that "Haydn would write if he lived today", he infused his model with the techniques that would be foreign to Haydn but were contemporary to Prokofiev - he modulates more freely, the third movement is a gavotte instead of a menuet, the melodies and harmonies are more "adventurous", etc. In the end the symphony really did become "classical" (a classic), because it contributed something of its own to the history of the art. Other examples may be Melville's recreation of Shakespearean tragedy as a novel, Eco's layering of texts from the Bible to Sherlock Holmes in "The Name of the Rose"
I believe that if you continue reading and developing your taste and ways of reading you won't be so easily impressed by the mere sensuality of the rhetoric (mainly the sort canonized in the older Western literature).

> I do not want to have to settle for postmodernism
Postmodernism absolutely does open up the space for "re-digestion" of the classics. (The myopic iconoclasm of modernism is, or at least should be, bygone.) It only has to - it is my belief - be true to the age it was created in, discursive and open, in dialogue with itself, the world and history, rather than mechanical and blunt annexation of the paper for primarily hedonistic purposes.

[Anonymous No.12559680]

>>12558808
In Shakespeare's time, playwrights all worked according to a similar formula or format, but nowadays people are kind of obsessed with originality in artwork. You can use a Shakespearean style but you've gotta have some kind of gimmick or in-text artistic justification for it I think.

>>12559656 is right that postmodernism does open up room for re-introducing classic techniques and formats. It's just gotta be the right kind of artful. If you read Pynchon its pretty obvious that he could cite Shakespeare as an influence, and also that he has a pretty firm grasp on novels as a historic genre.

[Anonymous No.12560302]

>>12559656

Hello

I’m the man who wrote those lines from the Malalai play.

I appreciate your sincerity and brutal honesty. Indeed, I am a great admirer of Shakespeare and my deepest desire has been – for many years now – to be able to revive the poetic play. I don’t expect to be able to use poetic language in screenwriting or TV writing, and I am not very gifted for the novel form, so I have been trying to invest drama with my fervent love of poetry.

I have read in Robert Mkee’s “Story” something that made sense for me. It goes something like this:

>“The sole command and grace of the theater is the dramatization of personal conflict. This is what theater does best, and much better than both the novel and the movie. A good play is almost totally pure dialogue, maybe 80% is for the ear, only 20% for the eye. Non-verbal communication - gestures, looks, love, struggles - are important, but by far personal conflict evolves for good or bad through conversation. More than that, the playwright has a license that movies and TV writers do not have - he can write dialogue in a way that no human being has ever spoken before. He can write, not just poetic dialogue, but, like Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry, to use poetry itself as dialogue, raising the expressiveness of personal conflict to incredible heights. In addition, he has the living voice of the actor to add nuances of shading and pause to take the conflict even higher.”

(...)

>“To express personal conflict the TV or Cinema writer needs to use everyday dialogue. When we use theatrical language on screen the justified reaction of the audience is, "People do not talk like that." Except for the special case of Shakespeare's on film, writing for the movies or TV requires conversation with an natural air. Film, however, gains great power with non-verbal communication. With close-ups, the use of light and angle nuances, gestures and facial expressions become very eloquent. Even so, the film and TV writer cannot dramatize personal conflict with the poetic breadth the theater can do.”

What I have been trying to humbly do is to create on my language a series of poetic dramas. However it’s very difficult to go against the tide of the times, and many times I end up quite depressed with myself and my work, as I am right now.

[Anonymous No.12560338]

>>12559656

In addiction of your honesty, I would like to thank you for this lines you wrote to the other Anon:

>I'm not saying you cannot write like a Shakespeare and baroque writers. You only have to be aware of the fact that we don't live in that time anymore. I'd provide one positive example here - Prokofiev's "Classical" 1st symphony. In the height of modernism he appeared with this deliberately classicist work, built mainly off Haydn's style. Here's a potential problem - why would anyone care about an imitation of Haydn when Haydn has around a hundred symphonies of his own already? Fortunately, Prokofiev was a great artist in his own right, and he wrote a symphony that "Haydn would write if he lived today", he infused his model with the techniques that would be foreign to Haydn but were contemporary to Prokofiev - he modulates more freely, the third movement is a gavotte instead of a menuet, the melodies and harmonies are more "adventurous", etc. In the end the symphony really did become "classical" (a classic), because it contributed something of its own to the history of the art.

You somehow restored some of my hope. I did find a group that is willing to stage the play in a shorter version, which is great. I am, however, feeling extremely anxious with the thought that I might disappoint them, and that people will think I am pretentious, a bad poet, an anachronistic nonentity. I’m dissatisfied with myself, my career and don’t know how to proceed. I had a lot of plots and goals for future plays but I don’t know if people will be interested in them. And when I try to imagine plots for novels I simply fail to have any good idea.

I fear that I might be ending my days as a writer. But your words that I quoted above gave me some hope.

[Anonymous No.12560384]

>>12541073
my roommate and eventual friend was a Marine deployed multiple times. said Generation Kill was legit as fuck.

[Anonymous No.12560724]

>>12555557
what is this post parodying?

[Anonymous No.12560964]

These seam to be the Top 3 true to life that I see recommended over the years.

[Anonymous No.12560977]

>>12541024
not from an american writer because the only people who join the us military are braindead bootlickers who think they're protecting their country. officers are smart (or smarter) but they devote every moment of their lives to maintaining the military industrial complex

[Anonymous No.12561009]

Do you guys think we'll eve get a All Quiet on the Western Front or Storms of Steel types of book from the Arab perspective?

[Anonymous No.12562631]

>>12560302
Huh, wow. Didn't expect this.
(I'm a bit drunk right now, so maybe my response won't be ideal, but it's better than letting the thread 404.)
Regarding the quote by Mkee, I believe that this depends largely on the conventions. (why shouldn't you write wordy character dramas for the film medium? - look at Bergman's Autumn Sonata, for example; on the other hand the visuals and sound can be far, far more important than what he suggests, if the director is creative and not only literally transposing the text to stage) And the conventions for theater today favour a more natural, more filmic speech (at least in my country - I'm mostly judging things from that perspective, but I'm pretty sure the situation is the same in all western countries). Your writing - a combination of an archaic elevated style (created by a social system and culture that do not exist anymore and are half-forgotten) and the story and environment that we learned about through factual news reports - produces tonal contradictions and dissonances.
I believe it is a great danger to treat Shakespeare (or any other great book) as a work, rather than a text (both words in Barthes' sense - "De l'œuvre au texte"). Shakespeare wasn't deliberately writing classics that would be read in schools and analyzed in neat and tidy ways, he was writing with a keen sense of what would provoke a reaction from his viewers, he was opening up space for dialogue (in the widest sense of the word). Compare his two "revenge plays", Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, the mindless violence of the former and the deconstruction of the genre in the latter. Compare how many interpretations Titus produced, and how many did Hamlet.
Writing a play in verse actually opens up space for great provocation and exploration of our cultural signs, rules, and expectations. This is what Melville did in Moby-Dick, for example. This is the general direction that a modern verse play should go towards, I believe. Otherwise, it'll deviate from the norm just for the sake of deviation, imitate the classics just because they're "classics". The awkward contradictions that I felt in these verses
>as safe
>As in the diapers and comfort of your homes,
>Just as if you were playing video games,
>You launch your rockets, cauterizing the earth [etc.]
Is a Shakespearean monologue a place to mention diapers? Does a Shakespearean monologue with all of its "dazzling" metaphors and imagery really tell us fairly and sincerely about the horrors of war and disconnection of the West? (I find that it only obscures its emotional and empathic possibilities.) What is a tragedy, and why is this content tragic/deserves tragic treatment in the first place? And there's the simple danger of the passage ending up dull and monotonous when spoken by a typical modern actor.

The most poetic and touching performances that I've seen didn't need any special texts - they were based on everything but deliberately poetic writing.

[Anonymous No.12562644]

>>12562631
On the other hand, you did manage to have your play produced, which does undermine some of my complaints and is far more than what 95% of /lit/ has or will achieve (probably including your critic here). And the whole story is probably better than the snippets that I criticized.

[Anonymous No.12563275]

>>12556341
I literally joined the army as a medic because of Restrepo. More specifically because of the book War by Sebastian Junger that he made alongside the film

[Anonymous No.12563286]

Pic related will change your life.

[Anonymous No.12563464]

>>12549264
Lol who gives a fuck about this, soldiers posing with their kills. I doubt the American military, despite its technological novelty, was able to innovate when it comes to war "crimes". I oppose all the wars in the middle east, but also think Muslim heretic deserve death, especially when they are on our soil. If you want to have a war (which the military industrial complex always does) you really shouldn't hold back from total war. Is that immoral? I don't know, but sending some poor guys from the Midwest to die for no reason and then tying their hands behind their backs for some gay political reason is immoral.

[Anonymous No.12563943]

>>12550460
Passage from BM
>Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
>Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

[Anonymous No.12565405]

>>12541024

bump

[Anonymous No.12565500]

>>12560964
just about to finish dispatches. I don't know how anyone could look at vietnam as anything but a shitshow. Turning children in marauders, leaders into fools and reporters into scum. It's quite clear that he hated the war, but in all those who participated they also loved it in some perverse nature. We learned nothing from it, and we won't learn anything from the war in terror.

[Anonymous No.12565522]

>>12563943
This book is such an edge-fest but it's those moments that send a shiver down your spine.