War and its Mediation

Today I want to talk about viewpoint, mediation, and manipulation. 

When it comes to War, not many of us are there in person to witness and experience all that happens in a war zone or the surrounding areas of the said war zone. For information of this kind we rely on the media. 

When I say "media" I mean journalists, reporters, newspapers, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. And the media, being the media, has a tendency to mediate events or stories in order to draw out a certain reaction or nudge the general public into a certain kind of action. However, I would like to claim that the act of mediation is not just committed by those who work within the media. 

We as humans have a innate talent in mediating what we see or hear to convey our viewpoints onto others. I know we do this, because I myself can recall multiple times in which I have mediated things said to me. The instance that I can immediately recall is when I worked as a translator for my father's business. 

My father owns a landscaping business. While he can understand the English language when spoken, he himself is limited in conversing in English. This is where I come in: when it came to talking to clients both my father, the client, and I would set up an appointment in which I translated for both client and service provider. My father's mode of speaking becomes very repetitive when he is trying to make a point, because of this I often mediated his speech to the client so that my father's side of the conversation was more straight to the point and clear cut. 

Because of my own experiences in mediating conversations, I understand how easy it really is to manipulate other's words, images, videos, etc. And war is a huge issue that is often mediated.

At the beginning of this post there is a picture in which the original whole picture is in the middle with cropped versions of it flanking its sides. On the left there is a soldier held at gunpoint. This version of the image shows the violence of war and the lack of mercy. The version on the right is its counterpart. Here a soldier is giving another exhausted soldier water. Here the image connotes comradery and care. What the whole image essentially shows is how war images and videos can be manipulated by those who present them. This then brings me to viewpoint. 

Images, videos, an the news are presented to us in certain ways. They are either meant to call us to action, contemplate the actions of our leaders, criticize a course of action, etc. 

In war time, the most common form of media in circulation is propaganda. Propaganda is most commonly presented by the government at war or the military. Since the government and military are the source of this type of media, they present war in a light were it is necessary, heroic, and honorable. 

This viewpoint is quite different than that of those under siege. 

This poster was in circulation during
the time of Soviet Russia. Its aim was to
show the unification of man, woman, state,
and military under Communism.

Critique on how the United States may be
causing more harm than good with all
the "foreign" wars it has participated in. 

Here there is no majesty of war. Presented is the devastation that war can cause. 

The media is great at delivering only part of a story. They take a whole issue and present only facets of it. They may choose to show the horrific, the patriotic, the redeemable. It is up to us as the viewers and the audience to question and think critically; to seek out as much of the story as possible and decide for ourselves how to feel and how to act. 

Sources

• Media Manipulation  https://comm2302metafiction.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/media_manipulation.jpg

Homeric Women: Powerful or Not?

 In the text The Iliad, women are seen to have little free will (unless they are goddesses). They are objectified into prizes. This objectification is seen early on in the epic, as early as Book One when king Agamemnon professes to Achilles "I will be there in person at your tents/ to take Briseis in all her beauty, your own prize"( 1. 217-18). Thus far The Iliad seems to represent the accepted universal truth of early civilization: women are second in respect to man. 

This past Friday, a forum presented by Professor Karanika of the Department of Classics, revealed to me that Homeric women had much more power  than I initially perceived. 

 Marvel's Illustrated: The Iliad issue #1

While it is true that Homeric women are seen as prizes, as status symbols for the man whom she belongs to, they also wield a tremendous amount of power that even they may not have been aware of. 

Two women that must be mentioned first include Helen, wife of Greek king Menelaus now coupling with Paris of Troy, and Briseis, Achilles' won consort taken by king Agamemnon. The power these two women wield is the power endowed to them by beauty (Karanika). 

Helen is acclaimed to be the most beautiful mortal woman alive for whom "the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered / years of agony for her" (3. 188-9). Her beauty gave her the power to initiate a ten year long war in which countless people, young and old, found their lives forfeited to the God of Death. 

Similarly, Briseis' power also relies upon woman's beauty. Her power was the brief relief the Trojans see in battle since Achilles became enraged with Agamemnon and refused to aid the Achaean war effort. Briseis, even though she is a spoil of war, was a trigger in the major losses of Achaean life. 

Ordinary women also wielded a power the ancient heroes did not possess.  Homeric women had the power to immortalize a hero. 

Professor Karanika made evident, through contextual evidence, that Homeric women have a voice only when working, praying, performing a ritual, or lamenting. These acts is what make male glory.

When a hero dies, it is a woman's lamentation that memorializes their heroic deeds. Lamentation can even be seen before a hero's death as Thetis demonstrates, " O my child!/ Yes, I gave birth to a flawless, mighty son.../the splendor of heroes" (18. 63-5). Henceforth, Achilles, the son spoken about in the outburst, will be known and attributed with characteristics of splendor and might. 

Homeric women also exhibited power in the circles of prayer and rituals for prayer. The right offering and profusion of adequate words given by a woman or group of women could save a life, a city, a culture, or it could foretell doom.  An instance such as this seen in The Iliad is the gathering of Troy women who pray to the Goddess Athena:

"lifting the [Sidonian] robe on high/ ... [they] prayed to the daughter of mighty Father Zeus:/ "Queen Athena- shield of our city- glory of goddesses!/ Now shatter the spear of Diomedes!...." (6. 357-361). 

The collective prayer of the women above is an instance were their power and their lack of correct use sealed the fate of Troy. While the prayer itself might have been pleasing to the goddess Athena, the improper ritualistic rite was not. While ritual in prayer dictated an offering (which these women certainly provided- i.e. the robe) they were incorrect in using that specific offering since it was not made by Trojan hands but by Sidonian enslaved hands. This technicality was what  invalidated the women's prayer and in the long run cost them their freedom and their husbands and sons' lives (Karanika). 

Most modern women today continue to pursue gender equality since they believe their predecessors lacked it. While most women of the past may not have enjoyed many of the freedoms today's women enjoy, I would not count them out in terms of influence and power. They certainly had their share of it if The Iliad is believed to be a historical reference to actual past events. 

Works Cited

Fagles, Robert, trans. The Iliad. By Homer. Penguins Books: New York, 1990

Comxicology. 9 October 2015. Gamma Radiation. 9 October 2015. 

https://pulllist.comixology.com/previews/OCT072066/0/

Karanika, Andromache. "Friday Forum." The War Prayer: Women's Rituals in the Iliad. Biological Sciences III, Lecture Hall 1200, University of California, Irvine. 2 October 2015. 

An Introduction to the Humanities and Homer's Iliad

Hello Fellow Humans, 

Welcome to my blog. To find out more about who I am and what perspective I am tackling the topic of War CLICK HERE or look to the right side of the blog, look under "Pages," and click the page titled "About Me and this Blog." 


An Introduction to the Humanities  

 Humanities is the study of how humans "[create] meaning through their thoughts, their actions, and their creations" ( Handbook, Pan, pg 5). This definition , as you can see, is a by-the-book definition and when I first read it had little meaning for me. This was troublesome for me at the time since at this point in my collegiate career I was only a Criminology major and considering the addition of another  major (English) which fell under the School of Humanities. 

Soon afterwards, the Humanities was explained to me by discussion leader as "the study of qualitative date versus the compilation of quantitative data" ( Dickmeyer). In other words: the Humanities concerns itself less with compilation of numbers and instead focus the brunt of its powers to the interpretation of texts and artifacts that allows us to peer into a culture, or time period that is or has existed at a different time than ours and allows to extract what is relevant to our society, culture, time period.   

With this idea of the Humanities in mind, I knew had made a good choice for myself in signing up for the Humanities Core Course. 

An Introduction Into the Iliad 

Cover design above is credited

 to Gail Belenson.  This translation

of the Iliad is by Robert Fagles. 

The first work assigned in this Humanities course was Homer's The Iliad. Having read one of Homer's other works, The Odyssey, I was excited and had an idea of what to expect concerning language and form.  

For those of you who are not acquainted with Homer, his poems fall under the genre of the Epic.

Elements that identify an epic poem  include:

1. "a long narrative poem of heroic action
2. written with the use of elevated language 
3. has foundational significance for the culture in which it originates from " ( Izenberg). 

The Iliad is a text that is over three thousand years old. Its original language, Ancient Homeric Greek, is now identified as a "dead language." 

Homer's Iliad, as it has been handed down to us in its current form through many translations, is an epic about the ninth year of a ten year war between the Trojans and the Greeks. The spark that ignited such a costly war was the Trojan Prince Paris' abduction of a Greek woman named Helen. Helen was a lavishly beautiful woman who was the wife of Menelaus , "the younger king of Mycenaean Sparta" (Wikipedia). The main story of The Iliad, however, is not the start of the war but rather nearer to its finish and the conflict that arises between two Greeks, Achilles and Agamemnon, and how their actions or lack of action affect the war effort. 

My own thoughts into the work are as follows:

• How much content was lost or retained during all of the many translation there are for the Iliad?
• Why focus on the spat between two Greek warriors when the war is between the Greek and Trojan people?

Until next time, think like a Humanist! 

Works Cited

Fagles, Robert, trans. The Iliad. By Homer. Penguins Books: New York, 1990

Pan, David. "What are the Humanities?" Ed. Larisa Castillo. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2014. 

Izenberg, Oren. "Humanities Core Lecture" The Iliad and the Meaning of the Humanities. Biological Sciences III, Lectural Hall 1200, University of California, Irvine. 28 September 2015.  

Dickmeyer, Laurie. "Humanities Core Seminar". Donald Bren Hall, Room 1429, University of California, Irvine. 28 September 2015.