List reaction to attack

[Jason Zanon]

I should think, Nathan, that you can recognize in
these posts you revile precisely that
anti-propagandistic impulse -- albeit, perhaps, more
or less successfully realized.  Because the reverse of
your argument is also true, that these uncounted dead
are already well along the road to becoming propaganda
for any number of unsavory policy options, and it will
be a tactic in enacting those policies to pay fatuous
homage to their memory.  It already reminds me of the
Gulf War, the way those of us who opposed it were
still called upon to avow "support for the troops." 
*That* is the propaganda which will deluge us in the
coming weeks and months, and supposed contempt for the
victims will be its Inquisitorial hammer.

Everyone here condemns the slaughter of civilians as
far as I can tell; many have been touched personally
by the event.  But this is a forum for critical
thought, not public grandstanding, so the newsfolk's
tinny acontextual adjectives need not detain us
overmuch, and I for one (admittedly as a lurker) would
appreciate the space to consider the manifold angles
of this story without the demand that every post be
prefaced by some sort of pro forma salute to the
victims.

---
Nathan Newman wrote:

The fact remains that many on this list have taken the
mass murder of
innocents at the WTC as a chance to repeat the same
litany of 
accusations
against the US government, and implying the
culpability of American 
citizens
in those actions, as they have any other day of the
week.  To do so in 
the
context of this mass murder is not to make an abstract
point but to de
facto, might I say semiotically, justify the attack,
for communication 
is
not just the supposed intent of a speaker (the refuge
of all 
propagandists)
but of how it will be received by audiences.

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