Just in case some people don't read the other forum (where I mistakenly asked this question), can anyone comment on the dig in Russia where Damien was shooting his documentary? I am wondering if any of it is based on a real event or place over there...

Actually, there are sooo many good avenues to discuss on this book. I wish I had known of this book and forum earlier!

I haven't heard or found any reference to the kind of excavation mentioned in PR in Russia but it is safe to assume that it happens. French locals recovered thousands of artifacts at places like the Normandy beaches over the years.

And let's not forget the Glacier Girl, a P-38 Lightning, lost July 15, 1942, recovered from under 300 feet of ice in Greenland, restored and flown for the first time in 60 years on Oct. 26, 2002.

There's been quite a lot of WW2 digs in Russia, mostly to uncover skeletal remains of soldiers and bury these in a proper and respectful way.
As far as I know it's an ongoing project but one with little or no funding from the state.
Hunting for "war treasures" is, the same way as in other countries, forbidden by law, but the "law" is probably a bit more tangible in Russia than in (say) France or Belgium...

/alfred

Before reading PR, I saw the following documentary on Danish TV.

Stalingrad

As described on the webpage above, "it addresses above all the viewer's heart, and not only his mind".

To hear the last survivors describing their hunger, following orders to burn their winter clothing to lighten their burden, shooting themselves to be able to be airlifted from the living hell they were placed into. The continous pack of lies told to the soldiers and their families. It really hits you hard.

It's war in its worst form. Awful.

When I read the digging scenes in PR, I really felt that the diggers had stooped to the lowest of low, to grave rob the poor blokes who were sent off to die in Stalingrad.

I actually think it IS a crime according to International Law, the same way it's a crime to dive near or on ship wrecks. I think they are considered to be sacred resting places...

/a

I saw a documentary on the CBC recently, called "The Remnants of War", and there was a section on this russian guy who has gotten good at finding old battlefields in in the Russian Steppe (or maybe it was the rather featureless plains on the way to Leningrad), and He now (after first doing this to dig up coins and such for resale) spends the time finding and trying to identify the bodies for reburrial. He was shown reading the fields like a map, "If I find russian shell casings here, I know that there will be german bodies 50 to 60 m away, probably over there".

Recognition of Patterns is one of the reasons humans have gone so far in the world.

Wow, I would love to be able to watch those documentaries. I wonder what event/idea/discussion influenced WG to write the Damien Character into doing such a documentary in PR?

As I have dabbled in a bit of writing for personal pleasure I am continually interested in what makes writers decide where their stories go and in what form. By reading PR and following his Blog, I can tell that William Gibson enjoys quite an eclectic personality in terms of interests and expression. It's very encouraging. I can't wait to read Neuromancer.

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When I read the digging scenes in PR, I really felt that the diggers had stooped to the lowest of low, to grave rob the poor blokes who were sent off to die in Stalingrad.

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Just to correct a little bit - I would guess there were no "poor blokes who were sent off" to Stalingrad. There were soldiers, true, and soldiers are generally sent somewhere, often to die, but it wasn't exactly like they had a lot of options. Not because of ruling regime, but because the country didn't like to fall before Germany. Perhaps it's considered pathetic in the West, but the WWII is called the Great Patriotic War here, and for good reasons.

/\/\ike

Dear /\/\ike,

I had promised myself to take a 5-day break from posting, but couldn't stop myself from responding to your post.

I agree that "poor blokes" was a poor choice of words. I tried to find words to express the social circumstances of soldiers, but my vocabulary was lacking. In Danish I was thinking of the word "stakler", but that wasn't right either.

I was thinking of the German soldiers, or Nazis if you prefer that term. It was clear to the German officers, clear to Hitler, that they were not going to win the battle of Stalingrad. Yet rather than retreating, the Nazis continued and their troops were left to starve and to freeze to death. As they died their slow painful deaths inflected upon them by their own 3rd Reich, letters were sent to their families telling them that they had died heroic deaths in battles.

When I wrote my post, I was thinking of the Iraqi soldiers, who had the choice of becoming a soldier or being executed, I was thinking of an American prisoner of war who is a single-mom who joined the army to support her family, and I was thinking of my best friend in college who joined the American army to pay for her college, and luckily got the hell out of there before she got sent off to anywhere.

There are of course patriots and warriors among soldiers, but there are also a whole heck of a lot of regular Joe's and Jane's (and Hassans and Igors) who really have no other choices than to join military services.

I'm still having a hard time getting over that Chris Stein had mentioned "how cool it would be to go there and shoot documentary video"

It is not cool....it is horrid....

[referring to Fashionpolice]

For whatever reason (lack of sleep, I'm sure) I decided you have been referring to Russian soldiers there. Otherwise, yours are quite nice points to make.

Have a nice break

/\/\ike

WG's 4-9 BLOG refers to a factual dig that he got data....... doesn't go very deep into how close he folowed it or if it was just apiece of insperation.............

there is no such thing as paranoid.... It's all real

So when exactly does it become OK to go thru peoples graves? Where is the event horizon that is crossed when ghoulishness becomes archeology?

Or is it just that we are OK with digging up "people not like us"?

Frankly the british Museum makes me nauseous, but for lots of reasons. All this said I don't have a problem with digging up the dead,it's more the hyposcrisiy that offends me.

www.inebriantia.org

Maybe it becomes okay because wars are essentially public events, groups of people dying in large numbers while engaged in very UNprivate activity... and hence not thought of as "sacred" in the usual sense.
A body buried with a ceremony in consecrated ground is accorded a very different kind of status to one that is part of a mass grave in a disaster or battlefield.

had thought about starting a thread about the dig having finished the book. but figure it relates to this thread to some degree.

it strikes me that the idea of digs into mass graves and the like has become increasingly common. the first i can think of i came across it was greg bear's radio darwin, the female character is drafted into looking into graves in eastern europe. one of the short stories in a.l. kennedy's indelible acts features characters who travel around mass graves trying to identify bodies. just picked up a thriller called "grave secrets" partly because it has that imagery associated with it and i was curious. i'm sure there are others, but those are the obvious ones that come to my mind.

there is something very bleak about the idea. the idea of the mass grave. the way it has become an icon to some degree in itself. the fact that it has become a norm of the modern world....
ptr

it's a re:mote world after all

I don't know about that modernity, remotepush. I should probably think about this a bit more and post a more considered spiel, but for now it occurs to me that [for instance] the British Museum has very many prized exhibits gathered from all over the world for the last 500 years, that are essentially nothing more than corpses exhumed from their resting places. Which are now displayed in cases or on stands thousands of miles from where they were buried.


This is a very interesting topic. More later.

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Originally posted by mbravo:

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When I read the digging scenes in PR, I really felt that the diggers had stooped to the lowest of low, to grave rob the poor blokes who were sent off to die in Stalingrad.

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Just to correct a little bit - I would guess there were no "poor blokes who were sent off" to Stalingrad. There were soldiers, true, and soldiers are generally sent somewhere, often to die, but it wasn't exactly like they had a lot of options. Not because of ruling regime, but because the country didn't like to fall before Germany. Perhaps it's considered pathetic in the West, but the WWII is called the Great Patriotic War here, and for good reasons.

/\/\ike

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Amen to that. Russia treated its own soldiers horribly, but if Russia hadn't done everything they did, the second world war might have gone in an entirely different direction. It's largely thanks to the Russian people and the Russian government (no matter what they're guilty of) that the world is what it is today, and if actual Russian people want to feel patriotic about that, then for goodness' sake, let them feel patriotic. They have the right.

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Originally posted by Sentinel400:
I don't know about that modernity, remotepush. I should probably think about this a bit more and post a more considered spiel, but for now it occurs to me that [for instance] the British Museum has very many prized exhibits gathered from all over the world for the last 500 years, that are essentially nothing more than corpses exhumed from their resting places. Which are now displayed in cases or on stands thousands of miles from where they were buried.


This is a very interesting topic. More later.

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A corpse on display, while gruesome, at least garners some honor and respect. Bodies decaying in the earth do not, because most of the time, nobody even thinks about them being there.

What about all the mummified cats that were dug up in Egypt while tombs were being looted to find "historical artifacts" ... So many mummified cats were exhumed that the museums found it would be more efficient to sell ground-up cat-mummies as fertilizer than to put them on display or even to store them anywhere. Now, to the ancient egyptians, wouldn't that have seemed like a travesty? Returning these bodies to the earth to enrich the soil and help things grow -- was NEVER on the agenda, because their religious customs -- their idea of what "sacred" means -- outlined that the bodies were to be preserved and honored.

Now, don't start telling me it's different because those are animals and we're supposed to be talking about humans. What's at issue is how one defines "sacred" and the deviations in the idea of the sacrosanct which occur from culture to culture.

What it really breaks down to is that the dead don't know if they're being robbed, or mutilated, or shown extra respect, or any disrespect. How we treat the dead is only meaningful because it's symbolic of how we feel towards the manner of their deaths and the dignity of their lives. If we honor the graves of those who died in wars or holocausts or tragedies, it means we're taking the idea of a war or a holocaust or a tragedy seriously. No person is actually being harmed when a grave is desecrated. So to make the desecration of a grave a crime is really to criminalize a perspective that people have -- it's declaring the disrespect of the circumstances of that death to be a thought-crime.

What it boils down to is a question of how you show respect for a particular death, or for the customs of a culture which has different standards from your own. The whole thing is much too complicated to boil down into a clear delineation of what is right for everybody and what is wrong for everybody.

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A corpse on display, while gruesome, at least garners some honor and respect.

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Arguable, wax. That depends on who's displaying it and why, I think. Some of the British Museum exhibits are just curiosities. Slightly more dignity than a circus, but about the same result.

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the dead don't know if they're being robbed, or mutilated, or shown extra respect, or any disrespect. How we treat the dead is only meaningful because it's symbolic of how we feel towards the manner of their deaths and the dignity of their lives.

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Absolutely. Of course, this is in itself the tip of an enormous angry iceberg because of all the differing religious and moral stances human societies take on death and the afterlife and the sanctity or not of the vacated shell.

I don't think one necessarily shows disrespect when disinterring bodies from mass graves if there is a good enough reason for it and not just prospecting, trophy hunting. The manner of their deaths often requires or deserves some thoughtful study and investigation and how else can you do that?

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... to make the desecration of a grave a crime is really to criminalize a perspective that people have -- it's declaring the disrespect of the circumstances of that death to be a thought-crime.

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I would say it's more to do with how they are buried than why or how they died that is the real issue.

But I think the notion of INTENTION is always the important part here. Saying you respect another culture is one thing - demonstrating that is frequently missed off the end of the equation.

With humble apols if someone has already covered this, but the WWII dig was indeed based on a real event which (ex Blondie member) Chris Stein brought to Gibson's attention; Gibson credits this with starting off the whole book. See Gibson's Blog on this site where he quotes the site ref - sorry, though, forgot which month in the Blog archives!! - the site has pics of the dig, which actually revealed an F-W 190 rather than a Stuka, sans pilot, too.