|
the-jazz: thanks. i was kinda waiting for someone to ask about comrade lenin---there's a story behind my using that particular photo (post-stroke) but i think writing it out here would be a threadjack. but in general, you're right about the genealogy of the term and the ways in which it has migrated, being used to designated particular enemies of the state s mostly because it makes them sound real bad. i guess as a direct response to your post, tho, i'd make a hard distinction between the reconfiguring of the term since, say, black september (1972 munich olympic games) and the previous history of the term. but it's one of those distinctions that could be argued against, and beyond a certain point, i'd just end up insisting on it and seeing what happened.
as for the israel/palestine turn the thread has taken---the "history" that makes this conflict "clear" is fine in the way that any narrative of a sufficiently high level of vagueness is--it serves the purpose of making things appear "clear" by simply ignoring everything that would complicate it.
in this case---well---my rejection of the arguments from powerclown et al regarding this conflict is so fundamental that it is hard to know where to start with it--and even more to know if there is any point in engaging in this debate--again---when the premises being put forward as the same as those put forward in the previous 20 versions of the same debate.
a couple points on what has been discussed a little directly above:
i think the question of how the balfour decision was taken are beside the point now. the conflict was set up, in its initial phase, by the decision to herd displaced palestinians into camps and to leave them there to rot. in this, there is blame aplenty to go around (please dont waste my time by talking about jordan and syria's actions in all this: i know about it--that's why i wrote what i did)--but i think the handling of the people who were expelled in 1948 is a good example of the ways in which this conflict has dehumanized *all* sides---the palestinians by way of the daily brutalization handed them in the camps--the israelis by the handing out of that brutalization.
but no-one in their right mind does not see that the present conflict derives much more from the aftermath of 1967 than it does from 1948.
and no-one who knows ANYTHING about the occupation itself argues that what has been happening can be reduced to the kind of "clarity" powerclown is claiming: of course you could generate "clarity" is you erase things--the problems that surround the right of return, the israeli settlement program (this is a HUGE factor in shaping the present incoherence and conflict--riddle me how anything is clear about this good guy/bad guy nonsense if you factor in the settlements...) the modalities of occupation itself, the sense of dehumanization that has resulted from it for BOTH the occupiers and occupied....i could go on and on about this....but i'll leave it here: if your "clarity" about the conflict does not involve an account of this kind of information, then your clarity comes at the expense of coherence.
and it is a sad comment on the state of affairs that obtains here that such incoherence can and does get folded into to an even greater incoherence in this abstract, goofball notion of "terrorism."
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|