hello, watch list.

Word count:
Project:

It's okay, I fancy myself some kind of (criminally unambitious) writer.


Is There A Good Terrorist?

Timothy Garton Ash is a magnificent writer. I'm really eager to get my hands on one of his latest collections of essays. Because for all that I dabble in all sorts of things, my first intellectual love is history. He is the kind of historian we should all aspire to be. Brilliant, vivid writing and unapologetic truth. "Speaking truth to power," to quote one of my favorite professors. (Who was teaching intel, not history, but come on, they're so bedmates. I have this on good authority.)

Anyway.

This is pertinent because of Novel. It needs that kind of calculus. I'm focusing more on the Lost Generation aspect: not the people forcing the move, but the generation that has grown up in that conflicted environment and knows nothing else. It needs more culture shock. It needs more moral violating. Garton Ash's four criteria at the end, his template, are practically handed to me on a gilded platter.

One of the other things I'm enjoying the exploration of, besides the freedom fighter/terrorist duality, is the notion that the winners write history (and history writes the winners, but that's another essay waiting to happen). This is becoming less of a hard and fast rule with technology--it's much harder now to totally erase something or someones from existence than it was 100 years ago--but it's implicit in the axiom that there are things Left Out. Like, for example, how a seemingly omnipotent and omnipresent empire might have had to deal with a shifting, fluid resistance about as crucifiable as Jell-O, in the form of a stubborn sub-culture that refuses to obediently disappear into the night. For the sake of glory and immortality, the chinks in the armor have to be glossed over.


tl;dr my 'terrorism' needs more 'terror' and I have a lot of international relations planning to do. I have the framework and the small-scale, micro-level plot down. Now the rest of the world has to come into play.