VIDEO REVIEWS

Vol. MC & I - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWM5DCI2y94
Vol. II - video forthcoming
Vol. III -
Vol. IV -
Vol. V -
Vol. VI -

(Note: I have NOT read this 3x as Goodreads for some reason indicates.)

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"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be."
-Judge Holden

Rising Up and Rising Down is a monolith.

Comprising some three thousand pages of dense philosophy, history, journalism and thought, compiled over some twenty years of wandering the far corners of the earth - R.U.R.D. stands, daring all others to challenge it. The sheer size and monomaniacal devotion of this work tempts one to make comparisons to other gargantuan studies - Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Campbell's Mythology, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Vollmann, however, lance in hand, charges towards the windmills of one of the most enduring and institutions of human nature - our propensity to commit violence and harm on one another. One recalls an epigraph from Blood Meridian - in an Ethiopian archaeological dig, a 30,000 year old skull was found to be scalped.

The first section of the book, comprising some 1500 pages, is the exposition of the 'Moral Calculus' - the theoretical justifications - it is no surprise that many of them are excuses. 'Proactive' and 'preventative' wars, expediency, punishment, invasions, the sweep of movements, ideologies, and invasions.

One interesting section is on the 'aesthetics of violence' - how power and weapons can be considered elegant, controlling, even having sex appeal. We see lovingly detailed sketches of his own weapons, and their histories. Ceremonial daggers and pistols.

The majority of these case studies are historical. Here we see Lincoln, agonizing over federalism and authority, but fighting the great crime of slavery. And here we see Trotsky, devoting his life, sacrificing one man in ten on the altar of a new world, and a system which would ultimately consume him.

We see long strings of quotes, a continuum of ideologies. From full pacifism and non-violence to extermination and genocide. We see old eternal justifications of homeland and self-defense, and newer ones, of environment, gender role discussion, and animals.

Vollmann's moral code, which I have transcribed and posted here, is an unusual one. It is both extremely prescriptive, yet granting many exceptions to the principles of 'imminence', 'proportionality', and 'discrimination', all of which are unfortunately extremely subjective. - What is the underlying purpose of it? To serve as a grasping incomplete answer to the most fearsome and eternal of questions?

The second segment of the book moves from the theoretical to the practical.

In his typical self-effacing modesty, he apologizes for choosing areas which will no doubt be obsolete in a few years time - but in that aspect, he is completely wrong. Nearly every single one of these proved to still be violent in ten years time, and will be worthy of further, more complete study in a hundred. Yemen still bleeds under drone strikes. Afghanistan, Burma, Iraq. Even, in an uncanny coincidence, Colorado, which 12 years after Columbine is victim to anoter senseless attack, of madmen with automatic weapons.

Speaking of the latter, his essay on it a masterpiece of venom, where 'vultures' come in, package tragedy, and broadcast it. But they are selectively sympathetic, taking pictures of a few sobbing photogenic Aryan children, then moving onto the next tragedy, ignoring that a few hundred may have died in Colombia in the same period, for example.

Perhaps the most admirable trait of Vollmann's, and the one which very few will dare to imitate, even in praise, is his almost-suicidal will to research and immerse himself within the environments and settings of his study. He goes to war zones, gets his car blown up by mines, cowers for a few hours while his friends bleed and gasp and snipers peck at him. He sees cavernous brothels and rescues a prepubescent girl sold to them. Interviewing Yakuza men, terrorists, warlords, Afghans, Arabs during the hated Iraq-II invasion. Well aware of death around him, but perhaps accepting of it. Meditates upon it. Death is ordinary.

But here, the intricate crystalline calculus shatters. Almost all of the propositions and axioms require personal information, thoughts, motivations. These can be speculated from history, but in modern times, the final judgment remains wholly uncertain. The sheer complexity of situations, which can easily escape even the best and most well-equipped journalists, still eludes Vollmann with his history and psychology. When Vollmann asks questions, many of those asked lie, or evade the question. Warlords and terrorists and freedom fighters are all, in their minds, very justified in what they do. What we can get is a sense of the 'fog of war', of how difficult is to embark upon a search for truth.

What sort of things does Vollmann try and teach us? He is first skeptical of creeds, of authorities, ideologies and dogmas. Most often they are pleasing lies of futures yet to come, in order for tyrants to make their own ends.

He is a firm advocate of self-defense and the rights of the individual, which is naturally quite justified in the warzones he visits- but, in the interest of objectivity, he shows us other people who believe these things. And again we see how noble ideas become twisted. The second amendment, personal independence and federalism? Now we see Christian militias in the Northwest, and the war-mongering draft-dodger Ted Nugent.

So what does this leave us?

As an expose or grand revelation of human violence, this book is a failure, at least for now. We know violence is.

The calculus, broadly reaching in principle, is tangled in exceptions and rules and caveats. In some distant future it might be more applicable. But Vollmann deserves credit for such a study - for glimpsing the momentum and force of violence throughout human history, and at characterizing it for those of us who, in the peaceful comfort of the industrialized world, try to hide it or separate ourselves from it, or worry about it only on the comforting glow of modern conveniences, and can never really experience it, thankfully enough.

This work has the odd combination of being both necessary and inaccessible. Necessary because it informs, to a startling degree, what violence is and its reverberations, and what sort of lies people will say to justify it. Inaccessible because violence is not a pleasant subject, and one which most would prefer to ignore or distort into a noble lie or a myth.

I speak entirely in grandiose terms in this mere review, but it is impossible to speak otherwise. Violence will continue, and violence will not solve it. Violence is easy. Peace is hard. ( )