Mysteries: Wars and Rumors of War
Our second Forlani Saga novel, Spy Station, is essentially a mystery set on a background of possible interplanetary war. It owes much to the greater history of mystery novels and films that unfolded in recent centuries.
Lately, readers and thinkers have been placed in a puzzling situation where mystery plots may offer a pathway to achieving some measure of epistemological understanding. I refer to the multiple events produced by the conflict in the Ukraine.
I became aware of this while enjoying the classic Charlie Chan novel by Earl Derr Biggers entitled The Black Camel. As in many similar novels, Chan faces a bewildering profusion of possible suspects and motives for the murder of a movie star in Honolulu. He and his police colleagues remark again and again that the problem is not a paucity of information, but rather an overwhelming barrage of information that is always partial and distorted by self-interest from the sources, who are all simultaneously agents in the drama surrounding the murder.
This scenario is comparable to what we readers face in trying to make sense of the reports coming out of the mess in Ukraine. Blocking of news sources and echo effect from those still available have amplified the difficulty of making sense of all the "clues" or explanations that are offered by various still-functioning media sources. Evaluating the "news" (which is often, in reality, just a form of speculation or puff) places us in the position of a fictional detective trying to unfold the details of a mystery plot.
Just as in The Black Camel, accounts of events in Ukraine are distorted by self-interest in most circumstances, resulting in a plethora of counter-accusations and baffling inconsistencies. Red herring revelations abound, while key points of information are occulted. False lines of inquiry abound. It is the task of us to try to sift the true from what is seemingly true, patently false, or the product of illusion or misinterpretation.
I have found that the only way to solve this enigma is to follow the Chan method and consult a wide variety of sources of information in order to construct a picture not only of events themselves, but of the human heart that produces the often horrific and deadly results of conflict. This line of inquiry involves the widest possible array of source information.
Standard news sources, I have discovered, are not good witnesses. They are few and their modalities are defective. Almost all American newspaper or broadcast sources rely on three main sources for their information: CNN, AP, and Reuters. These wire services tend to create an echo effect by repeating and "re-evaluating" what the others have said, rather than adding pertinent facts. Their own reports often rely on writers who are not on the scene of events and who are often unable to master the intricacies of the Ukrainian and Russian languages, leaving them reliant on press releases by governments that form the discourse based on their own self-interest. It is like dealing with the accounts of Chan's murder suspects, who are primarily driven to find alibis for their own actions and to incriminate others.
I have found that consulting various other sources: Radio France Internationale, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera and Japanese NHK, for example, allows me to get a more satisfactory understanding of what is going on. Of course, all the above-mentioned sources are state information agencies that are not without their own prejudicial priorities and agendas. However, like Charlie Chan, we can balance one testimony against another and ferret out inconsistencies that often reveal interesting explanations. For instance, Deutsche Welle has a vested interest in a German government that is hook, line, and sinker devoted to a uniquely Ukrainian perspective on events. Nevertheless, their reports often reveal economic details (they are German above all!) of how German arms firms have a vested interest in deepening the Ukrainian conflict because they stand to gain billions of euros by providing Ukraine with tanks, anti-aircraft systems, and other war materials. These sorts of details have been totally lacking in reports from CNN, AP, and Reuters that make a point of hiding the involvement of American and British arms manufacturers in promoting a proxy war. Similarly, Al Jazeera (who woudda thunk it?) provides much better insight on how oil and gas manipulations are deeply involved in the outcomes of Ukraine, undoubtedly because their operations take place in a part of the world where energy is king.
Of course, there will always be gaps and holes in our ability to access reliable information. Unlike a Biggers murder mystery, which is constructed to produce in the end a coherent explanation, international politics does not promise to tie up all the loose ends. Quite the contrary! We know that relevant facts will be hidden for years. My own fascination with certain aspects of military history in World War II has shown me that it is almost impossible to reconstruct even the most outstanding elements of campaigns where the identities of whole units were classified as top secret for decades and human witnesses have now passed beyond this Earth. The creation of "embedded journalism" during our Middle Eastern Wars has not clarified this type of confusion, but may actually have deepened it, as reporters scrambled to ingratiate themselves to their hosts and superiors. We know much less about matters now than we did in the more open media coverage of Vietnam.
Like Charlie Chan, we are forced to admit that the black camel of Death has come to kneel in the Ukraine and that many hideous things cannot be undone. Yet there is still hope that the details of the violence will eventually come to light as a result of diligent information-gathering. Only by nourishing hope in the discovery of further data that could almost magically unlock the mystery and cause elements to fall into place could Honolulu's legendary sleuth look forward to solving his case. We modern history "detectives" must nourish this same hope, remain observant, avoid too hasty conclusions, and use all our senses to reconstruct the facts, if we are to reach an adequate understanding of the vast murder mysteries of our era.
