My face is wet with tears ...
My LOVE
to all and sundry
Árni
--
Árni Ibsen
Stekkjarkinn 19,
220 Hafnarfjördur,
Iceland
tel.: +354-555-3991
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/
on 3/21/03 1:33 AM, Christopher Walker at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> <snip>
> "The adiaphorisation of moral action" - Zygmunt Bauman's phrase, originally
> concerned with the Shoah. War brings the consequences of policy nearer to
> home: a decision is made, missiles are launched, people die. The policy
> enacted prior to war also entailed the deaths of untold thousands, but over
> a longer period of time and by a much longer series of indirections.
> Responsibility is deferred; the multitudes who died under a policy of
> containment and isolation of a dictator apparently were not killed "in our
> name".
> <snip>
>
> I'd see Bauman's adiaphorisation rather differently: the whiting out of
> moral responsibility for fire from the skies, blood running in the gutters,
> retreating conscripts incinerated ('Say hallo to Allah', unless that was
> purely myth), an act for which no one was ever charged, precisely through
> the *smartness* of the weaponry, the *embedding* of the journalists and so
> forth.
>
> And so, it seems, would Bauman: 'The new tactics of striking and killing at
> a distance, coupled with the shift of the task of target-selection onto
> inhuman (unfeeling and morally blind) parts of the war-machine, has also
> stretched to an unprecedented length the technique of adiaphorisation of
> military action, stripping the action-on-command from ethical evaluation and
> moral inhibitions.'
>
> But in any case here we are, on the 17th day of Muharram, the month of
> martyrdom, 1424, 'bombing the niggers again' (a phrase which Chomsky blames
> on Lloyd George) intervening under the logo Shock & Awe, ostensibly on
> behalf of the *oppressed Iraqi people*, ostensibly also for fear of mustard
> gas, great quantities of which the US still stores (I believe) in Oregon,
> and weaponised anthrax, held in various US locations, an enterprise in which
> we are joined by Uzbekistan, a country whose human rights record may rival
> that of Iraq, and Afghanistan, an ally we are currently bombing as it
> happens; and not, I think, out of charity.
>
> Do *we* then act more in my name, in yours, in visiting death upon the
> 'niggers', in 'worlding' (Gayatri Spivak's term) silent, invisible Arabs,
> Kurds, Turkmen, Shia, Sunni and Christian believers and non believers and
> others into top-down 'democracy', just as the imposition of a minority Sunni
> regime upon the newly unified state was carried out in the names of the
> parents and/or grandparents of those of us who are British, than by _not_
> acting?
>
> I think *we* do.
>
> *We*, the British, bear a huge historical responsibility for setting this
> shambles up over the heads of the 'subalterns' (another Spivak term); we
> watched the Ba'ath party take power in 1968 and then SH take control of the
> Ba'ath in 1979; *we*, the Americans, the British, the French, the Germans
> and the Russians, had at various times fostered and supported SH; since 1991
> we have been 'containing' Iraq (but as opposed to what?) However, all of
> that is (in the moral accounting) a *sunk cost*: we cannot set it in the
> balance against more death now, at our hands, for people other than us.
>
> In that sense this war is a new and dreadful step.
>
> CW
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