roachboy

and so you see what happens when the notion of the Enemy or Adversary gets detached from the possibility that the enemy might also be a human being---and that the cause of being an enemy is a function of concrete actions, concrete policies, undertaken by the state--which folk who operate and think entirely within the ideological bubble that is the "american way of life" do not tend to see (think about the relation of cheap consumer products to patterns of exploitation exported under teh aegis of globalizing capitalism--at walmart, you have no idea of what goes into making the cheap products--so you can not consider the conditions that obtain in production when buying it--so for too many folk, these patterns do not exist. same model can be mapped into any number of areas)....

once the category of the enemy becomes an abstraction, then the type of brutality that can be justified as being visited upon them is limitless. given the size and power of the american military, this type of thinking as an ideology is of extraordinary potential danger--the implications of which are being visited upon lots of people today.

the reverse argument is typically that if you try to understand the political preconditions for "terrorism" you are de facto condoning the tactics--which is an argument that is thoroughly absurd, but many conservatives seem to like it for reasons that i will frankly never understand--mostly because i have not seen a single coherent argument for it.
it seems that folk will speak as though this exlcusion of politics from thinking "terror" is a given, and they move from there.
i sometimes wonder if there is something powerful for folk who argue in this way about the fantasies of unlimited violence visited upon others, particularly these days upon folk who happen to have the bad form to be muslim. given the level of ignorance about islam (witness the appalling posts from moosenose), you cannot expect fine distinctions like coherence to get in the way.

between april and june 1994, the hutu power movement in rwanda portrayed the tutsis as being less than human. on the basis of this, unlimited violence appeared to be justified. it continued to operate as a justification for nearly unlimited violence until it suddenly didnt. then the war crimes trials started.
i do not see much different AT THE LEVEL OF ARGUMENT in the right's vision of "terrorism"--except that folk who make these kinds of arguments seem to feel themselves justified because they are american--which then tips into a level of chauvinism that you would have thought the dark history of the 20th century---two world wars, a cold war, and various colonial adventures in between---would have ground to powder. but it is obviously possible to learn nothing from history.

the feeling that such arguments are justified does not in any way justify them.


here again the question of the effects of right ideology on the folk who subscribe to it raises its head: most of the conservatives i know are prefectly decent folk who have complex views on a range of issues--many of them are christian and they are more often than not quite compassionate in their everyday lives. some have devoted their lives to service to the poor no less---one very conservative friend of mine runs halfway houses and drug treatment programs adn works materially to help folk who are wrecked by the system that, in more abstract arguments, he tends to defend. while we might disagree, we can talk and/or argue more often than not--these folk actually worry in 3-d life about the fate suffered by actual human beings who are poor or ill in the context of american capitalism, and do something to try to help..
in 3-d life, confronted with the possibility of unlimited violence being visited upon others in their name, all of them balk.
but when it comes to this topic of "terrorism", all bets are off.

in a messageboard space, with nothing at stake and no social pressure to control the types or implications of their position, these same folk will morph into a kind of johnwayne cartoon, the implications of which would be--if they had power--massacres on an appalling scale. because once you adopt this way of thinking that the Enemy is an abstraction, an embodiment of evil, there are no limits to the violence. none.

the treatment of prisoners is a border condition: it is a confrontation between types of action in which rules obtain and matter and types of action that ignore the rules and treat human beings as things.
if the americans advance in the world behind their preferred monologue about "freedom" and "responsbility" and maybe--though too rarely from the macho right--human dignity--the mistreatment of prisoners is both an ethical and political disaster.

i frankly find it appalling that anyone would defend it, particularly on such flimsy and ridiculous grounds as "look at what they are doing"

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite