Bloggered again. posted by Richard Seymour

More ass-kissing and air-kissing from the world of Blog.

First, go consult the British Bullblog , for he has a charming video to watch called "Keep Your Jesus Off My Penis". The Bullblog is not the bluff patriot that his name implies. He's a bit of a Kerry-crat and has expressed an alarming willingness to see Hilary Clinton in the Whitehouse. Hilary is the political equivalent of the ambulance-chasing lawyer. There is no cause she will not espouse then sell-out to advance her sordid career, and I would sooner paddle Karl Rove's balls with my tongue than see that slippery, sanctimonious twitch park her arse on the same seat that her husband used to get blow-jobs on. Does that seem harsh?

Charlotte Street has a link to an excellent acceptance speech made by John Berger when he received the Booker prize for his novel G. The author of Charlotte Street, Mark Kaplan, may well protest his innocence here, but if you scan his various posts there is often a veiled provocation or attack on some deserving victim. I have hours of fun working out who he's taking the piss out of this time, but perhaps that is because I have a hollow life and a job that could easily be performed by a trained lab rat.

Dead Men Left is on form, casually debunking the cherished myths of the pro-war Left while sprinkling some venom on its most embarrassingly red-faced progenitors. DML also has the advantage of being written by an educated Trotskyist who is not burdened by a tumescent ego, as I am. (Hey, it's not my fault I'm so great).

Pas Au Dela , a fine radical blogger who conjoins politics, philosophy and literature into a combustible stream of subversive thoughts, deserves a mention for linking to this interesting article :

Many people claim to be astonished by terrorists who blow themselves up in the process of attempting to kill their enemies. Many would also find the
Aztec ritual of heart extraction shocking and painful to contemplate. Yet we
barely reflect upon our own suicidal political rituals, for example the
First World War in which nine million people were killed and twenty-two
million wounded. The vast casualties were the result of millions of men
acting precisely like contemporary terrorists: allowing their bodies to be
blown to bits as they attempted to blow up the bodies of their enemies.

[...]

In the West, we disguise the sacrificial meaning of warfare by pretending that the other nation is responsible for killing soldiers.

Joanna Bourke, in her book Dismembering the Male, observes that the most
important point to be made about the male body during the First World War
was that it was "intended to be mutilated." We view war as a drive for
conquest and outlet for energetic activity even as its fundamental purpose
and inevitable consequence is injury and death. We encourage the soldier's
delusion of masculine virility and call him a hero-in order to lure him into
becoming a sacrificial victim.

A quick gia sou Mihalis mou to the author of Histologion , an excellent Athens based website which features an article by Engels on China and Persia, (more interesting than it probably sounds), as well as some fine essays on Kosovo, Cyprus & Turkey. He also has a nice little article on suicide bombing . (And yes, that 'gia sou' business is as far as my understanding of Greek extends, apart from some of the swear words and those funny little sounds my girlfriend makes during long-distance phone calls like "ne" and "eveve".)

And now a couple of articles. First, the editors of MediaLens link to this article from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:

In three recent reports about the military invasion of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, the New York Times has misreported the facts about the April 2004 invasion of the city and the toll it took on Iraqi civilians.

On November 8, the Times reported: "In April, American troops were closing in on the city center when popular uprisings broke out in cities across Iraq. The outrage, fed by mostly unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties, forced the Americans to withdraw. American commanders regarded the reports as inflated, but it was impossible to determine independently how many civilians had been killed."

The next day, the Times made the same point, reporting that the U.S. "had to withdraw during a previous fight for the city in April after unconfirmed reports of heavy civilian casualties sparked outrage among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis." And on November 15, the Times noted that the current operation "redressed a disastrous assault on Fallujah last April that was called off when unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties drove the political cost too high."

It's unclear why the Times considers those civilian deaths "unconfirmed." While there is some debate over precise figures, this wording leaves the impression that nothing can be reasonably known about deaths in Fallujah.

The head of Fallujah's hospital, Dr. Rafie al-Issawi, has consistently maintained that more than 600 people were killed in the initial U.S. siege of Fallujah in April 2004, a figure that rose to more than 800 as the siege was lifted and people pinned down by the fighting were able to register their families' deaths (Knight-Ridder, 5/9/04). More than 300 of the dead, according to al-Issawi, were women and children...

Jacqueline Rose related a nice little Freudian tale to a debate about the 'war on terror' organised by the London Review of Books in 2002. Freud, she said, pointed out that although most of us have great difficulty imagining our own deaths, we usually have no problem imagining the death of others, something he illustrates with the old joke where a man says to his wife, "When one of us dies, I'll move to Paris." She has written an excellent article on suicide bombing . I particularly like the closing passage:

For years, Israeli secret service analysts and social scientists have been trying to build up a typical profile of the suicide 'assassin', only to conclude that there isn't one. It may indeed be that your desire to solve the problem is creating it, that burrowing into the psyche of the enemy, far from being an attempt to dignify them with understanding, is a form of evasion that blinds you to your responsibility for the state they are in. There is one thing that nobody will disagree with: the story of suicide bombing is a story of people driven to extremes. 'Children who have seen so much inhumanity,' El-Sarraj states, 'inevitably come out with inhuman responses.' We need to find a language that will allow us to recognise why, in a world of inequality and injustice, people are driven to do things that we hate. Without claiming to know too much. Without condescension.

Read the whole thing, though. This article has drawn some puzzled, outraged responses. Do we really, as Rose suggests, need to refer to some psychoanalytical factor like the intimacy of killer and killed to explain the widespread revulsion against suicide bombing? Isn't it enough that civilians are brutally, deliberately murdered? Rose suggests that such outrage is never so vehemently expressed when states murder civilians - but is this really so?

The answer, of course, is yes. I won't bore anyone unless asked by dredging up all of the examples of slap-faced astonishment and horror at the latest explosion in a Tel Aviv cafe, which follows a previous few days or weeks of barely reported state murder of Palestinians, often quite deliberate - about which diddly-squat is said. But state violence carries with it legitimacy precisely because it is being carried out by an organisation claiming territorial rights and a monopoly of violence.

And there is a common psychological factor in war that is so widely understood that it feels pedantic discussing it. Nevertheless, here goes. Killing from a distance is not only less burdensome for the killer, it is also less painful to imagine. Killing someone from afar with a machine gun is ethically no better than killing up close with a bayonet, but if one had to choose between the two, there is probably little doubt which method of killing most would choose. (Wittgenstein, who served for Austria in the First World War, once remarked that if it came to hand-to-hand combat the only thing to do would be to let oneself be massacred rather than join in the medieval slaughter).

So, if these are factors influencing the perception of killing, as I claim they are, there can't be anything "rebarbative" about remembering them, discussing them. There are actually some baleful moral consequences of forgetting and allowing these factors to retain their hold on the imagination. Something to think about as we have two murders to be angry about: the shooting of an wounded, elderly, unarmed man by a US soldier (which can be justified in any number of sophisticated ways); and the killing of an innocent, unarmed woman by an Islamist group (which can never be justified and about which judgement is never pending).

That'll do for now. I'm taking the day off work because a) I'm terrifyingly sick and b) I have a horrendous toothache that even Codeine won't dissolve. So expect more ranting and rambling later.