Civil War 2024
(This is not about infrastructure - it is about the architecture of the body politic) :-)
I found this movie so uncomfortable, triggering and depressing. I regretted going. Not because it’s a bad movie - it isn’t. It was just too close for comfort and I struggled to see the “entertainment”.
About two election cycles back, I landed in Accra on voting day, and on my way to the hotel, the shuttle driver was playing a local FM station. I could only catch bits and pieces since the speakers spoke in mainly Twi, but sprinkle bits and pieces of English in between.
It was clear, however, that some people were so animated about the pending vote they were willing to go to war - or whatever fictive understanding of war they had. The driver was ambivalent - didn’t want war, but could “see where they were coming from.” I asked if he was ok with his country becoming like Liberia and he paused.
I thought about that conversation when I saw Civil War 2024. It was triggering because I have seen this. Especially the end. But all the stuff in between too - the IDP (internally displaced persons) camps, the families fleeing with what little they could take, small bands of men (mostly men) administering jungle justice (the life and death kind) for things like looting. Torture, mass killings and checkpoints, tracer fire and the steady rhythm of automatic gun fire piercing the night. The life and death question posed here is not “what ethnic group you belong to?”, but “what kind of American are you?”
There is something immediately recognizable and as American politics degenerates into a vitriolic side-picking, where there are no long simple disagreements of politics but questions about “real American”, those who have lived this before have reason to fear.
I don’t know if the movie will have the impact it should. There are already debates about the director’s choice of the constituent states in the Western Forces. I don’t know if that’s even important.
One of the outgrowths of the return to democratic governance in Liberia was the proliferation of newspapers and radio stations - where arguments about politics raged. It is noisy and sometimes rude. When I complained about it, a mentor reminded me that we tried shooting each other for more than a decade and that didn’t work - it’s ok to talk. I agreed.