Ian Murray wrote:
>
> I can't learn a thing from that because there are lot's of cultures
> inside the geographic boundaries that simply are *not* in any kind of
> harmony that he seeks, nor should they strive to be. Plus, the
> imperialists who use nationalism as a foil or even precisely because
> they do believe in it do need to be confronted with the long history
> of *their* behaviors that were partly responsible for the acts that
> took place, now more than ever, so that things don't become even more
> problematic for the world's peoples. We must not *be led* to believe
> those who took down the Towers and crashed into the Pentagon were
> insane in any way, for that would be to display irrationality on "our"
> own part.
"Madmen" and "insane" have frequently been used to describe the terrorists. This is a misuse of impairment. The men here were not insane, they were not mentally disabled yet they are being constructed that way. Here is why IMO. Those society identifies as "abnormal" inspire fears of moral collapse. Intellectual impairment has often wrongly been linked to criminal deviance. The easy way out is to use polarized conceptions of normal and abnormal, sane and insane, healthy and sick in order to demean and make the objects of scorn subhuman. Then it is OK to institutionalize them or kill them. Why I object to such use of this language is because it fosters the idea that disabled people are a social problem, here, even a menace to society. The hegemony of "normality" is a bourgeoise construct and we should recognize it as such.
Marta