This discussion has become fairly distorted and, frankly, condescending. I
think it's actually in bad taste to make this thread into a pissing
contest about who can be more sacrosanct, moral, etc. about the bombing,
the result of which is invariably to sustain the bombing above any more
concerted evaluation or context. In point of fact, this is why I have
argued that the denomination of "evil" has no place in the conversation.
Despite Robert Kohler's quotation from the dictionary, we all know that
"evil" constitutes the trump card in any argument, since once it's played,
no genuine disagreement seems plausible (and, worse, such disagreements
tend to seem immoral or in bad taste). The denotation of "evil" aside, the
connotation of "evil" is traditionally transcendental or transcendent, and
it makes analysis next to impossible. Indeed, I've always thought that
this was the reason that Claude Lanzmann, in Shoah, refused to merely
designate the final solution as simply evil; the Holocaust, he says, was
"unique but not aberrant," and his film is in some ways an analysis of the
chain of personal choices that allowed such an abomination to occur.
So I ask, not rhetorically but honestly, whether it is possible to
condemn and deplore what has happened without immediately consigning it to
a moral judgment that precludes understanding it. In two days of nearly
obsessive television watching, I have seen only one report that seriously
interrogates the motives for the bombing, that begins to question the
conditions of possibility (and I don't mean lax airport security) for what
happened. Please, this should not be taken to mean that, in Boris' words,
"the oppressed have more right to use excessive violence against civilians
than the oppressors." The violence is unjustifiable, but this does not
mean it must exist beyond our comprehension, as if it came from outer
space like the destruction in Independence Day, or as if it existed beyond
the sphere of our own policies...
Gregg Flaxman
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