Villains with Benefits
May 2nd, 2011 by pedestrian
My first real, vivid memories of this world took shape in a time and place where the universe had no grand villains.
Perhaps Stan Lee & Co. were on a short hiatus.
Adolf Hitler and the evils of WWII were decades and decades past, more like horrid fables than my reality. The end of the cold war had meant an end to the “communist” evil, Muslims had yet to leave their day jobs en masse to become full time terrorists, the Israelis and Palestinians were signing the Oslo accords, and while the land grab and brutalization continued, there was that glimmer of hope. The president of the United States was more notorious for his libido than his war mongering antics. Khomeini had died and I knew very little about his quiet, uncharismatic heir apparent. Rafasanjani, though certainly not as popular as his successor Khatami, was nowhere near as despised as Ahmadinejad. I vividly remember images of Yeltsin, Clinton, Rabin, Arafat, Rafsanjani, etc, etc, on the evening news. But there were no big, internationally acclaimed bogeymen on the world stage. No superstars, no spectacles. At least not that a six year old would recall.
Yes, that was also the age when Iranian and Iraqi corpses were still freshly rotting out on the fields, the blood gargling, ripe, moist. The Rwandan genocide was taking place before our eyes. But somehow so long as the savages are civil enough to remain in their own decrepit, miserable cage, far from view, it just never seems so bad.
Fast forward just a few years, and all that had changed. The world had become a full fledged comic book. The good guys with the fair(er) hair and the shiny, designer superhero capes and armor, the bad guys with the coarse ugly beards, barbaric tongue and no table manners.
And beneath all of that, the crumbling and crushing of bones and flesh.
All of this did not come about overnight of course. I was just too young and naive to predict or understand what was coming.
So today, as this saga continues, I fail to see the significance of yet another corpse. Even though it was a corpse saturated with all the hate and evil that there is in the world, the flesh and bone of fathers, the tears of children, the blood of mothers and sisters and wives. Even though it is a corpse that is long overdue. Even though it is a corpse that massacred thousands of innocent lives, and annihilated the possibility of many more. But I cringe to witness what he has left in his wake: in his rotting carcass, he has left a world in which there are too many of his clones roaming, killing, watching. In killing us, he has had the power to sliver in and replicate himself.
It was the ripening of this horror story, this endless replication, which allows the senseless slaughter to go on. One death will not change it. Except for those like Osbama, who would have us think that this really is a comic story with good vs. evil, with one grand opening and one majestic finale.
But what finale?
Will American troops be coming home now?
Will Afghans and Iraqis be left to live in peace (or war)?
Will the people who see fundamentalism as their only route to survival, decide to embrace a more tolerant worldview?
Will the hundreds of thousands of lives that were ruthlessly destroyed for this great “success” be redeemed at the cashier’s register?
Will the US suddenly cease to be a mighty military killing machine?
Will this seneless slaughter stop?
No.
So I fail to see why the absence of one life really carries any weight – except for a certain Osbama’s reelection.
Will this “better world” for which the terrorists – American and Middle Eastern – strive now finally become reality?
I pretty much doubt it. Whoever was writing the comic book has a sick sense of humor, or knows tragedy all too well. Unlike most superhero stories, you can no longer tell the good from the bad; the superhero from the villain; the damsel in distress from the evil sidekick. It all becomes one and the same.
“They’re savages, they celebrate our killing and death” is what I have heard so many times before.
Last night, the streets of Washington must have been an ironic site indeed.
But one thing this will do: it will serve the spectacle well. Journalists, analysts, experts, pundits, etc, etc will write and talk and bark and spew for months. It will be a marvelous addition to the comic book. Along with images of the airplanes crashing into the twin towers, along with the tears and blood of the dying, along with “mission accomplished” and one terrorist’s politician’s pompous victory video speech after another.
Osbama claims that the world is now a “safer” place. Just like that, like switching off a button or waving a magic wand. Who knew it was that easy? But will this “better, safer world” for which we non-terrorists strive go one step closer to becoming reality?
I pretty much doubt that too.
Especially because when we talk about building this “better world”, this vague notion that is the topic of discussion everywhere, this alternative reality with which we all flirt but for which few seem willing to sacrifice, there is a “hint” of a dilemma. The dilemma, of building this alternative world, or glimmers of it, is that we do not get to do so on a clean slate – we will build it on a canvas awash with the blood of children, with the tears and echoless screams of the innocent. “Certainly, the past never does pass in the commonsense meaning we give to the word pass”. Though in life their voices were never heard, in death, the echoes will live on. Their anguish will haunt us always, and they shall be reborn.
But for now, we celebrate. We celebrate, because as a nation, there’s nothing we can’t do.
Two wars, two trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands hurt and killed and brutalized, ten wasted years to get one man and he says you can do anything.
Spiderman would be proud.
Osbama? Not clever, Ped. Not at all.
Sorry it doesn’t amuse you Kellie. But I didn’t mean it to be amusing. I see them as part of a complementary, destructive narrative. Obama may be different in his domestic policies than his predecessor GWB, I wouldn’t know and I wouldn’t care since I’m not an American. But I don’t see how his policy towards the Middle East has been any different.
It wasn’t Obushma you called him.
“Spiderman would be proud” LOL Love you girl1
D
Love you right back :-*
You draw an equivalence between someone who operated outside the law in deliberately targeting civilians for mass murder on the one hand, and on the other a duly elected politician who is subject to legal and democratic oversight and who is charged with the defence of his nation’s population.
You draw an equivalence between those who celebrated the deliberate mass murder of civilians in their thousands, and those who cheered the death of a single mass murderer who resisted arrest with deadly force.
Can you really not see the differences, Pedestrian? Try, for your own sake.
Kellie, there’s lots of similarities here. Both men are responsible for the death of innocent civilians, both men are accepted as the leaders of their respective communities (sure, I have no way of “proving” that Al Qaeda members “accepted” Bin Laden as their leader, but I am assuming they do).
I think the biggest difference here is “terrorism” by a non-state entity and terrorism sponsored by a state. You can believe the latter to be “more legitimate” than the former. I can not do so. And since when is the Iraq war legal by any definition?
There’s also a lot of controversy regarding the method of killing as well, especially now that they have claimed he was not armed. You can find more debate on that issue here, here, and here amongst others. Even Eichmann was put to trial in Jerusalem. Why not Osama?
I’m also not the only person who sees this mass hysteria as revolting. You can find more of that here and here (the latter by someone who has lost her husband to the 9/11 terrorist attacks). I find this “collective orgy of national pride” quite nauseating. How many hundreds of thousands have been killed for this one death? In the grand scheme of things what will this change? Great leaders (in my definition) are not supposed to reinforce the joy of killing for public opinion polls. In this too I find O
sbama (or Obushma) share quite a bit.Naj has done an awesome experiment with the victory speech.
Similarity is not equivalence. I can point to lots of similarities between Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, both Iranian politicians, both presidential candidates, both with a following &c. &c. Only an idiot would think this makes them equivalent to one another.
Terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians to inspire fear. You can apply the term to area bombing by the Allies in the Second World War, but I don’t think you can honestly apply it to how the US generally conducts war now.
Beyond that, the difference between war conducted by a democratic state and a non-state entity is that the government of a democratic state is accountable both to law and to the electorate. The non-state entity submits to neither.
The New Yorker piece you link to confirms my understanding of the law on targeting hostile combatants. I note also that Martin Scheinin, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of human rights and fundamental freedoms, believes the US action was legal.
On Iraq there is legal opinion one way and the other. You may prefer to believe it is illegal, but certainly some very qualified lawyers believed it legal under existing UNSC resolutions.
I remember you liking George Orwell. He had some worthwhile words on the power of law as an idea, even where it is imperfect in reality, and also on drawing false equivalences. He was writing here of England for an English audience, but I think it’s more widely relevant:
Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong’, or ‘They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a ‘miscarriage of British justice’. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them.
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye
dear Ms. Pedestrian,
Ms. Naj IS in top form, but doesn’t deliver Obama the whacking he gets here. Your disappointment ( ?) with O is the inverse of my pleasant surprise at Obama, Commander in Chief.
Jingos accept that war is our natural state, and the aphorism that we give false praise to our race when we claim it ” de-humanizes ”
btl
Kellie, I never used mathematical equivalence, I didn’t say they were quantitatively the same thing. I said I think they complete a narrative. They don’t have to be “equals” to do so. If I was writing a computer program to model both men, I certainly wouldn’t be using “==” for the conditional statements.
The only reason I (might) prefer democracy to other forms of government, is that the system of checks and balances may, I hope, protect the system from totalitarian tendencies. But the US is also a superpower, which opens up a totally set of new equations, and those tendencies have long been practiced on citizens of other populations. “accountable both to law and to the electorate”? How about being accountable to the people whose bodies are torn to bits with your bombs? I wish we lived in a world where “international law” had more meaning, and more jurisdiction, and was applied semi-equally, semi-free of double standards, but it’s NOT. In the grand scheme of things, at least for a superpower, it has no meaning. Not any that I can tell.
And as for the electorate, when media empire is owned and operated by a powerful elite, when “fear” is the primary commodity sold on TV, in political rhetoric, etc and when 1,000,000,000 life factors translate into a “yes” or no” vote to a candidate at the ballot box, how is that going to be a viable measure?
The UN, and the General Assembly specifically may have a convention on “International Terrorism”, but as far as I know, there is no one agreed upon definition for the term. I am not a legal scholar and don’t claim to be but the killing of innocent civilians inspires fear, whether it’s in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iran or the US. What was the Iraq war video then? Just one, random incident?
I don’t know if there ever was a “just” war, but as far as I can see, the thousands and thousands of mutilated corpses all over the Middle East in the past 10 years have certainly not died for any “just” cause.
BTL, I guess we all awoke to very different feelings on the morning of May 2nd.
This particular event might not change that much in The Grand Scheme Of Things but it seems to be having a tremendous effect on America’s mood. It might even allow Obama to gather enough political good-will to pass more important measures to address budget and unemployment troubles that will in the end cripple the USA.
I was pretty much relieved by the new mostly because it’ll greatly help Obama to secure re-election next year. You might think whatever you want about his foreign policy and the least we can say is that he’s far from being soft-handed when it comes to use force.
However, compared to men such as Donald Trump, who, no pun intended, trumpet they would gladly annex and loot the countries invaded during war, Obama is a far lesser evil. Who by the way, didn’t choose to go to war in Middle-East and has to do the best he can to not leave those countries as failed-state and terrorists breeding grounds.
On the other hand, I don’t think Ossama’s assassination will do much to help counter-terrorism effort or undermine Al-Qaeda’s ideology. The Arab revolutions are doing a far better job on this matter.
Hi Jean.
I understand where you are coming from, and I also understand that politics is certainly not a realm of the absolute (if anything ever is at all): “absolute” justice, or “absolute” democracy, etc. Although this superhero narration would have us think so.
But I think we come from two different places, as we Iranians say: birooneh god & dakheleh god (outside the hole and inside the hole). I mourn forever the 3000 innocent lives lost on 9/11. As does the rest of the world. But I also mourn every single innocent life that has been lost in the ME in this mad, lunatic war, because they are my neighbors, because I’m the one who hears their screams. I guess it’s a form of immanent critique, I’m only judging the system based on its own standards, or those it claims to live up to.
There is something inherently wrong with the way we look at these equations, as if the loss of our lives is more “acceptable”, or at least ok for some greater good. I think the contrary, no matter who is holding the pistol or who it is pointing towards.
But of course if this death ever signals the semi-end to this mad war on terror (although there was another drone attack in Pakistan today), that is certainly welcoming.
You are great! So glad to have somehow randomly found your blog, I’ll be checking on it regularly. I think your analysis is rightly guided and pragmatic. As an American, I know many of my fellow citizens have become misguided in their understanding of what the heinous actions of our government in the middle-east are doing and who they’re carried out for. Big media and paper-liberals such as Barry Obama believe they own the copyrights to morality and context; both have been consolidated and assassinated, respectively, to control thought and action. This is the reason that there are people like kellie who have vastly misinterpreted International Law as well as fundamental principles of honesty and fairness and who believe there is a difference between the crimes ‘we commit’ and the crimes that others commit in response. I’ve enjoyed your writing, look forward to reading more!
http://counterpunch.org/
read the article ‘volcano of lies’ its a great summary of all the statements Obama has made and how virtually all of them have been walked back or recanted by the CIA. He’s just lying for his re-election, that’s obvious. Someday, we’ll finally wake up and take the bastards down.
Hi Bob. Thanks for writing, and thank you for the link! Always glad to meet a fellow counterpuncher