a a violent cartography by elin
o'Hara slavick.
Dugway
Proving Ground, Utah, Massive
firing range that for 50 years was the US
Army testing ground for some of the most
lethal, chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons ever made. A
slope of
mountains to the east is pockmarked with
hundreds of fortified bunkers storing
enough toxins to eradicate mankind.
Ground water is fouled with carcinogens.
This was where the cold war was waged,
not in battlefields in foreign lands, but
n factories, laboratories and testing
ranges." - Tony Freemantle, Houston
Chronicle
"Dugway
played a crucial role in the New deal's
last great public works project: the
incineration of cities in eastern Germany
and Japan
As the devil's own
laboratory for three
generations of U.S, chemical, incendiary,
and biological weapons, it has always
been shrouded in official secrecy and
Cold war myth." Mike Davis,
"Berlin's Skeleton in Utah's
Closet," Grand
Street 69.
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History is amoral:
events occurred. But memory is moral; what we
consciously remember is what our conscience
remembers. If one no longer has land but has
memory of land, then one can make a map. -
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Afghanistan
Originally the series was called Everywhere
the United States has Bombed, but as I learn
about covert actions, mis- and dis-information,
it would be irresponsible for me to call it that.
Sometimes I think the title should be The
United States has Bombed Everywhere.
These drawings are manifestations of
self-education on the subjects of U.S. military
interventions, geography, politics, history,
cartography, and the language of war. The
drawings are also a means to educate others. I
make them beautiful to seduce the viewer so that
she will take a closer look, read the
accompanying information that explains the horror
beneath the surface. I wish for the viewer to be
captured by the colors and lost in the
patternsas one would be if viewing an
Impressionist paintingand then have the
optical pleasure interrupted by the very real
dots, or bombs, that make up the drawing. Unlike
an Impressionist painting, there is no sense of
light in these drawings. And unlike typical
landscape paintings, these drawings are based on
surveillance, military, and aerial photography
and maps.
As Miles Harvey writes in The Island of Lost
Maps, In the seventeenth and eighteenth
century mapmakers were referred to as world
describers. In geometry, describe means
to draw or trace the outline of something; in
poetry, it means to get at the essence of
something, to bring it to life in a way
thats both startling and beautiful.
Youve got to do both kinds of description
and do it in a medium thats
partially visual, partially mathematical,
partially textual, a complicated miscellany of
scale, orientation, projection, grids, signs,
symbols, lines, colors, words.
I draw inspiration and information from many
sources, but especially from William Blums
book, Killing Hope U.S. Military and
CIA Interventions since W.W.II. Blum writes,
What might be the effect upon the American
psyche if we were compelled to witness the
consequences of U.S. foreign policy close up?
What if the Americans who dropped an infinite
tonnage of bombs, on a dozen different countries,
on people they knew nothing about, had to come
down to earth and look upon and smell the burning
flesh? I believe Americans have begun to
smell the burning flesh since
September 11. Do bombing campaigns make the world
safer or free from terrorism? Or do they just
increase the death toll, the already high levels
of fear and anger, the rage and endless grieving
in this world? Can any deadly bombs distinguish
between an innocent civilian and a terrorist, a
child or a soldier, a wedding party or an
ammunition facility?
Miles Harvey continues,
For early humans, mapping may have served
to achievewhat in modern
behavioral therapy is known as desensitization:
lessening fear by the repeated representation of
what is feared. Representing supposedly dangerous
terrae incognitae in map form as an extension of
familiar territory may well have served to lessen
fear of the peripheral world." I suppose I
want to instill fear back in to us, but not fear
of the peripheral world. We should be afraid of
ourselves. Maps are preeminently a language of
power, not protest. I offer these maps as
protests against each and every bombing.
..............................................Baghdad,
the First 24 Hours of the "Gulf War,"
1990
I have completed 60
drawings. Protesting Cartography or Places
the United States has Bombed has been
exhibited at: the North Carolina Museum of Art in
Raleigh; the Jose Marti National Library in
Havana, Cuba; the Southeastern Center for
Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC; Caldwell
Hall on the UNC, Chapel Hill campus; the Page
Walker Art and History Center in Cary, NC; The
Annex Gallery in New York City; the John Hope
Franklin Center at Duke University, Durham, NC;
Borofsky Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; Arti et
Amicitiae in Amsterdam, Holland; Studio 84, 5+5
Gallery and Office Ops in Williamsburg, Brooklyn;
Ashmore Gallery in Miami Beach, FL; Long Beach
Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in
Loveladies, NJ; Gallery 110 in Seattle; The Bemis
Center in Omaha, NE; Intersection for the Arts in
Oakland, CA; Rx Gallery in San Francisco;
Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, Ca;
Walker's Point Center for the Arts in Milwaukee,
WI and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North
Carolina.
Lebanon,
"the bombardment of Beirut in 1983 and 1984
"
from Rogue State, William Blum
http://www.unc.edu/~eoslavic/projects/bombsites/index.html
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A Violent Cartography
Bomb After Bomb
By Howard Zinn
This essay serves as the
introduction to Bomb After Bomb: a Violent
Cartography, a
collection of drawings illustrating the history
of bombing by elin o'Hara slavick. o'Hara slavick
is a professor of art at the University of North
Carolina. More of her visionary work can be
viewed on her website. AC / JSC |
12/17/07 "Counterpunch"
-- - Perhaps it is fitting that elin o'Hara slavick's
extraordinary evocation of bombings by the United States
government be preceded by some words from a bombardier
who flew bombing missions for the U.S. Air Corps in the
second World War. At least one of her drawings is based
on a bombing I participated in near the very end of the
war--the destruction of the French seaside resort of
Royan, on the Atlantic coast.
As I look at her drawings, I become painfully aware of
how ignorant I was, when I dropped those bombs on France
and on cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, of the
effects of those bombings on human beings. Not because
she shows us bloody corpses, amputated limbs, skin
shredded by napalm. She does not do that. But her
drawings, in ways that I cannot comprehend, compel me to
envision such scenes.
I am stunned by the thought that we, the
"civilized" nations, have bombed cities and
country sides and islands for a hundred years. Yet, here
in the United States, which is responsible for most of
that, the public, as was true of me, does not
understand--I mean really understand--what bombs do to
people. That failure of imagination, I believe, is
critical to explaining why we still have wars, why we
accept bombing as a common accompaniment to our foreign
policies, without horror or disgust.
We in this country, unlike people in Europe or Japan or
Africa or the Middle East, or the Caribbean, have not had
the experience of being bombed. That is why, when the
Twin Towers in New York exploded on September 11, there
was such shock and disbelief. This turned quickly, under
the impact of government propaganda, into a callous
approval of bombing Afghanistan, and a failure to see
that the corpses of Afghans were the counterparts of
those in Manhattan.
We might think that at least those individuals in the
U.S. Air Force who dropped bombs on civilian populations
were aware of what terror they were inflicting, but as
one of those I can testify that this is not so. Bombing
from five miles high, I and my fellow crew members could
not see what was happening on the ground. We could not
hear screams or see blood, could not see torn bodies,
crushed limbs. Is it any wonder we see fliers going out
on mission after mission, apparently unmoved by thoughts
of what they have wrought.
It was not until after the war, when I read John Hersey's
interviews with Japanese survivors of Hiroshima, who
described what they had endured, that I became aware, in
excruciating detail, of what my bombs had done. I then
looked further. I learned of the firebombing of Tokyo in
March of 1945, in which perhaps a hundred thousand people
died. I learned about the bombing of Dresden, and the
creation of a firestorm which cost the lives of 80,000 to
100,000 residents of that city. I learned of the bombing
of Hamburg and Frankfurt and other cities in Europe.
We know now that perhaps 600,000 civilians--men, women,
and children-died in the bombings of Europe. And an equal
number died in the bombings of Japan. What could possibly
justify such carnage? Winning the war against Fascism?
Yes, we "won". But what did we win? Was it a
new world? Had we done away with Fascism in the world,
with racism, with militarism, with hunger and disease?
Despite the noble words of the United Nations charter
about ending "the scourge of war" - had we done
away with war?
As horrifying as the loss of life was, the acceptance of
justifications for the killing of innocent people
continued after World War II. The United States bombed
Korea, with at least a million civilian deaths, and then
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, with another million or two
million lives taken. "Communism" was the
justification. But what did those millions of victims
know of "communism" or "capitalism"
or any of the abstractions which cover up mass murder?
We have had enough experience, with the Nuremberg trials
of the Nazi leaders, with the bombings carried out by the
Allies, with the torture stories coming out of Iraq, to
know that ordinary people with ordinary consciences will
allow their instincts for decency to be overcome by the
compulsion to obey authority. It is time therefore, to
educate the coming generation in disobedience to
authority, to help them understand that institutions like
governments and corporations are cold to anything but
self-interest, that the interests of powerful entities
run counter to the interests of most people.
This clash of interest between governments and citizens
is camouflaged by phrases that pretend that everyone in
the nation has a common interest, and so wars are waged
and bombs dropped for "national security",
"national defense", "and national
interest".
Patriotism is defined as obedience to government,
obscuring the difference between the government and the
people. Thus, soldiers are led to believe that "we
are fighting for our country" when in fact they are
fighting for the government - an artificial entity
different from the people of the country - and indeed are
following policies dangerous to its own people.
My own reflections on my experiences as a bombardier, and
my research on the wars of the United States have led me
to certain conclusions about war and the dropping of
bombs that accompany modern warfare.
One: The means of waging war (demolition bombs, cluster
bombs, white phosphorus, nuclear weapons, napalm) have
become so horrendous in their effects on human beings
that no political end-- however laudable, the existence
of no enemy -- however vicious, can justify war.
Two: The horrors of the means are certain, the
achievement of the ends always uncertain.
Three: When you bomb a country ruled by a tyrant, you
kill the victims of the tyrant.
Four: War poisons the soul of everyone who engages in it,
so that the most ordinary of people become capable of
terrible acts.
Five:Since the ratio of civilian deaths to military
deaths in war has risen sharply with each subsequent war
of the past century (10% civilian deaths in World War
I,50% in World War II, 70% in Vietnam, 80-90% in
Afghanistan and Iraq) and since a significant percentage
of these civilians are children, then war is inevitably a
war against children.
Six: We cannot claim that there is a moral distinction
between a government which bombs and kills innocent
people and a terrorist organization which does the same.
The argument is made that deaths in the first case are
accidental, while in the second case they are deliberate.
However, it does not matter that the pilot dropping the
bombs does not "intend" to kill innocent people
-- that he does so is inevitable, for it is the nature of
bombing to be indiscriminate. Even if the bombing
equipment is so sophisticated that the pilot can target a
house, a vehicle, there is never certainty about who is
in the house or who is in the vehicle.
Seven: War, and the bombing that accompanies war, are the
ultimate terrorism, for governments can command means of
destruction on a far greater scale than any terrorist
group.
These considerations lead me to conclude that if we care
about human life, about justice, about the equal right of
all children to exist, we must, in defiance of whatever
we are told by those in authority, pledge ourselves to
oppose all wars.
If the drawings of elin o'Hara slavick and the words that
accompany them cause us to think about war, perhaps in
ways we never did before, they will have made a powerful
contribution towards a peaceful world.
Howard Zinn's most recent book is A Power Government's
Cannot Suppress.
Haiti, 1959, (for
Aristide, Stan Goff, and my father), The
U.S. military mission in Haiti, to train the
troops of noted dictator Francois Duvalier, used
its air, sea and ground power to smash an attempt
to overthrow Duvalier by a small group of
Haitians aided by some Cubans and other Latin
Americans. - William Blum, Rogue
State
http://www.unc.edu/~eoslavic/projects/bombsites/index.html
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