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i continue to find it fascinating how right discourse manages to divet debate into strange, irrelevant areas.
the fixation of the moment is the footage of a marine killing what appears to be an unarmed iraqi.
the larger problem, of what the hell the americans are doing in iraq in general and in fallujah (now mosul) in particular goes unaddressed.
it is clear that the americans hoped to smash a central node in what they imagined to be the resistance. it is also clear that they did not manage it.
the assault on fallujah was marketed domestically as a precision attack. it is clear now that it was not.
it was marketed as an attempt to bolster the scheduled elections in iraq--there have been reports circulating from time to time of late saying that elections could well not happen as scheduled and would not be understood as legitimate if they did.
interesting situation, isnt it?
i still maintain that the americans are sliding well into a situation parallel to that france faced in algeria. same kind of assymetries in organization (vertical military vs. horizontal resistance)...same kind of tactics (declare war on an entire people, systematic use of torture justified on exactly the same grounds the right is now using) incoherence on the ground coupled with a gradual erosion of political position.
one result of this was a drastic polarization of political opinon in france.
by the time the fourth republic fell in 1958, france was on the edge of civil war.
at the time, for the right there were no war crimes, there was no torture.
for the left, both were abhorrent.
the right tried to enforce views of the actions in algeria almost exactly parallel to what you are seeing now--how to question the motives of "our boys"?
one more parallel: le pen surfaced in part on the basis of a right revisionist "history" of algeria--he was himself a paratrooper who engaged in well-documented acts of torture at the time. for le pen, it was a patriotic struggle blah blah blah---sound familiar?
you would think people would take the rare occaisions when something can actually be learned from the past.
but no.
the french right slid dangerously close of fascism during this period--you know about poujadisme?
same thing seems to be happening in the states.
however, in neither case did recourse to hitler make any analytic sense.
in neither case did recourse to hitler make any sense politically.
all it does is spike consideration of a real problem.
so far as i am concerned, arguments about the relation to both positions to a variant of fascism is fair game.
but it should be obvious that prudence is in order if we are going to head toward that space. highly inflammatory area--and no conservative will want to hear any of it. but then again, the constituency to whom that ideology has appealed historically did not want to hear it either. they do not like their politics to be named.
so it would seem that any such argument would have to be made carefully and in an analytic register.
i think there is a strong argument to be made.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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