About
In October, 2001, I sent a few articles to some friends and colleagues who shared my concern about President Bush’s decision to engage in a “war on terrorism.” These were articles on some of the political and cultural issues whose consideration might have led to an appropriate response to 9/11. I bundled them into a rather long email, subject line: “The War in Context.” There seemed to be a hunger for the type of material I was able to trawl from the Web so I continued sending out emails. After gathering and distributing articles for a few months, I switched to a blog. Since then, my daily reading list has grown to include some 20,000 articles. Nowadays, with increasing frequency, I also toss into the mix my own ideas and observations.
After 9/11, the Middle East — seen through American eyes inflamed by fear and anger — took on an amorphous, undifferentiated otherness. The threat was called “terrorism” but really it was the unknown. And because we couldn’t isolate it, suddenly it seemed to be everywhere.
The tenor of the political moment was captured in a single sentence as President Bush said, “We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” With those words, as though wielding a scalpel, the president deftly lobotomized the nation. At a time when discrimination was in desperate need of refinement, instead, it was thrown away!
War in Context, from its inception, has been an effort to apply critical intelligence in an arena where political judgment has repeatedly been twisted by blind emotions. It presupposes that a world out of balance will inevitably be a world in conflict.
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The tagline, … with attention to the unseen, comes from my observation that in America we inhabit a culture marked by its inattention to the unseen. This is not a religious statement. The unseen to which I refer is the amalgam of non-material entities whose co-existence and interaction produces culture.
What makes culture work is shared meaning. This has an ephemeral life in a space of resonance that ties together individual human beings. The spark that animates that space is language — a vessel that circumscribes experience and makes it exchangeable and through the aggregation of that exchange gives rise to this amorphous entity that we call culture.
In a materialistic age we have come to confuse culture with its products; we have devolved from being creators to consumers and by so doing come to measure our wealth in terms of what we possess rather than what we share.
While I created War in Context with the vain hope of helping stem cultural divisions, I also wanted to explore the underpinnings of culture itself. At this point, the murmurings of that exploration are tucked between the lines of my occasional comments but as we race towards the post-Bush era, the “context” in this site will gradually expand.
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Who is Paul Woodward? I am by nature if not profession, a bricoleur. A dictionary of obscure words defines a bricoleur as “someone who continually invents his own strategies for comprehending reality.” In the process of doing just that I have at various times been an editor, designer, software knowledge architect, and Buddhist monk, while living in England (where I was born), France, India, and for the last twenty years the United States. The views I express here are my own.
I live frugally in the Southern Appalachians with my wife, Monica, two cats and a dog.
If you have questions or comments, please let me know by writing to editor[at]warincontext.org
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“a tremendously useful site, balanced but provocative, up-to-date and comprehensive”
Christopher Dickey, Middle East Editor, Newsweek
“…an essential daily diet of diverse opinion and reporting indispensable to anyone seeking a widely informed perspective on the U.S. confrontation with Iraq and the war on al-Qaeda. Keep up the great work!”
Tony Karon, Senior Editor, TIME.com, and Rootless Cosmopolitan
“Who is that masked man with the quick eye for the crucial read? My guess might be Paul Woodward, editor of the War in Context and one-man band. He rivets our eyes, provokes our mind, makes just the right amount of noise. He’s invaluable and his website is a daily treasure trove. Don’t miss it.”
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, the Nation Institute
“A truly great site!”
Daniel Ellsberg, activist and strategic analyst
“The best of the one-man-and-a-website efforts to emerge after 9/11.”
Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life
“a helluva resource”
James P. Pinkerton, columnist, Newsday
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