You're in a part of the world where everybody's got a case, a story, a pitch, an angle. All day you listen to them. What do you long for? Wikipedia. You can't wait to get back to your hotel room and call it up. Did those things really happen? In that way? Oooooh, they didn't. Well, I won't trust that person any more.
Who can you trust around here? The man or woman far away, speaking through your laptop. Why? Because he's got a lot of other people keeping watch on him, following rules, making him follow rules. First rule: maintain a neutral point of view. No advocacy. No slanting. Go partisan and we'll throw your piece out. Second rule: anticipate challenges. Be right there with back-up, a cited source your doubter can check. Third rule: talk it over with your fellow editors and writers — "in a respectful and civil manner, even when you disagree." No personal attacks. No sneering. That's the way differences get ironed out.
That, from the Wikipedia policy page, is cool. Academic cool. You don't realize how much it means to you until you can't tune in on it. Your browser's not compatible, the server's down, the hotel's screwed it up, the goddam computer doesn't work. You've gone a whole day, maybe two, maybe (once) three, without hearing a single cool voice — one, anyway, that could stay cool to the end. Then..ah, there it is. First, disambiguation. Then the layout. "Here's the way the subject is divided." Then the division. Nature sliced at her joints. Then the hard thought, the care, and finally, cash on the barrelhead, there it is. The anonymous scholar in the distance is there with the goods. Oh brother, I believe.
It's not that you get answers, the truth, from Wikipedia. It's that you get effort toward it. Strenuous effort. Testing, checking, doubting, discussing. And never saying, "That's it, wrap it up." The effort may fail but you know that your odds on it here are the best you can hope for.
Who gave us such a thing? I put the question to Wikipedia. Proposed in 1999 by Richard Stallman. There are the other names, with credit judiciously apportioned: Wales, Sanger, Cunningham. There's a picture, twelve of them, unidentified, in 2000. Not a gray hair in sight.
I see good students of English Composition. I have already explained what I take English Composition to be: an essential introduction to the values of the academic tradition, and specifically to those values as conceived in the Enlightenment and formulated in the scientific method (see Posts 45 and120). It's all pretty well packed into what my textbook told students in the argument section: "Cite evidence, anticipate objections, watch out for absolute generalizations, beware of catch-all explanations, don't evade the question, don't sneer."
So there they are, those twelve, some of them looking so young they could have been on the front row yesterday. Ah, man, they really took it in. Good students. Good kids. Way to go.
If you haven't noticed, many Wikipedia articles are incomplete, called "stubs", or very general summaries, and for certain things/people there's no Wikipedia entry at all. Yet, how about this: what if I use respected western sources which sometime give away that things aren't quite what the main hype is blanketing people to believe? For example, I will mention a bit about the enormous illegal weapons trafficking during the Balkan wars via Slovenia. There was a phony charity connected to Osama bin Laden called Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), but there is no Wikipedia entry for this.
ReplyDeleteHowever Wikipedia DOES mention it in an article about Hasan Čengić - Bosnian Muslim arms dealer here (see for yourself) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasan_%C4%8Cengi%C4%87
"Čengić was on the supervisory board of the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization connected to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network. Čengić's involvement was confirmed by the TWRA's director, Elfatih Hassanein"
So therefore, if you are going to trust wikipedia 100% then you have to admit that this guy was connecting into arms trade involving Osama bin Laden's network - IT'S THERE IN WIKIPEDIA. But did you ever hear/know about Hasan Cengic or TWRA? (I'll bet not, you have to go much DEEPER than the general news/propaganda for the sheeple IF you really want the truth (and you need an open mind to which you don't really seem to have).) But I'll try to use as much 100% western, non-Serb sources to prove many things I said, and things of which you probably aren't aware.
Here, for example, is The Guardian, from 2000, which headlines: "British deal fuelled Balkan war: Military sale to Slovenia flouted Tory foreign policy" & some extractions:
Britain flouted its own foreign policy by approving the sale of millions of pounds worth of military equipment to a former Yugoslav republic only days before the outbreak of the bloody Balkans war, The Observer has established.
The Observer has obtained details of the multi-million-pound contract between the Slovenian Defence Ministry and Racal, the British defence and communications group.
Misha Glenny, a Balkans expert, said: 'If the British Government was fully aware of this, it would imply that the Government was covertly operating in contradiction of its stated policy and aims. It would also shift some of the responsibility carried by Germany.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/may/28/balkans
A number of [b]American military veterans were recruited to train[/b] and fight with the Bosnian mujahideen in program linked to Al Qaeda and funded by TWRA. The details of that program were first reported in Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam.
http://news.intelwire.com/2011/11/bosnian-arms-un-wartime-embargo-defied.html
So did you know any of that: did you know about the Brit firm selling Slovenia multi-million pound military communications equipment at the same time they were claiming they wanted Yugoslavia to stay together. Actions speak louder than words, they were lying to hide their hands and their true agenda!
I'd like you to read this recent interview with 2 Slovenian journalists about a 3 part book they wrote on the arms trade during the war. They obtained their documents from the FOI act that you were mentioning earlier, but they themselves are astounded how for 20 years the main story of this was untold. And though their information is now out in their trilogy "In the Name of the State" I doubt wikipedia will have anything on it for quite awhile, if ever. If you are still in Slovenia, or next time you go, why don't you try to meet the authors Matej Šurc and Blaž Zgaga, so it will be real people and not someone just far away on the internet. Anyhow I just stumbled upon this while trying to dig up info for you to see and it promises to be a goldmine (their book) and what's more they finger Slovenia as the main hub. So you can't complain it's "Serbian propaganda" because it is NON-SERBS, fully named people who are stating all this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.wobbing.eu/news/untold-yugoslavian-arms-trade-scandal-updated-documents
Here is an extract in case you are too lazy to go to the link:
Many thousands of tons of arms and ammunition were illegally transported to the battlefields during the UN arms embargo. The major logistic hub was Slovenia, which sold huge amounts of arms confiscated in Yugoslav People's Army warehouses on its territory to Croatian and Bosnian Muslims. Additionally, more than 20 ships loaded with arms sailed to the Slovene port of Koper. These ships came from Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Ukraine, but many more countries were involved in the enormous UN embargo violation; such a huge logistics operation could only have been executed with the approval of the international community. The arms trade definitely changed the military balance in the region.
As shipments were illegal, many Slovene, Croatian and Bosnian intelligence officers and leaders were forced to buy weapons on the black market, controlled by military intelligence services of Eastern European countries operating outside of the law. They paid millions of Dollars and Deutschmarks in cash and thus cleared the way for corruption and theft. Cash money disappeared by the millions, leading the politicians, military and intelligence officers who had been involved to become rich members of the new elite. They managed to cover up their illicit activities for the next two decades to come and effectively corrupted the judicial system in their countries.