Shrub talks, Cheney watches on TV: Operation Infinite Patriarchy?

[Randy Earnest]

Good points, Ian, especially with regard to the immense reification involved
in terror'ism,' which can lead directly into talk of  "Evil" and "death
cultures."
In terms of popular images, I've been drawn to thinking about the film --
can't recall the name of it -- with Clooney and Kidman about a Bosnian's
attempt to detonate a mirv warhead component in New York.  In the film, he's
portrayed as a sensitive man of culture who is driven more or less mad with
grief over the death of his wife and daughter in a sniper attack.  He and
his associates formulate the plot because they feel that the world must no
longer ignore what is happening in his country.  The portrayal, as I recall,
made some empathy with the guy inescapable, he wasn't a 'bad guy,' he just
had to be stopped, and at the same time he could be understood.  Of course,
the last shot in the film has Clooney looking at Kidman in the national
security agency pool, and the two of them aren't talking about what must be
done in Bosnia.
Randy Earnest


> Thank you, Randy.
>
> One question I do have is whether, because too much of our info is
> filtered through western media, patterns of behavior that are
> intelligible to radicals in the ME, are made to seem unintelligible to
> us for obvious reasons. Clearly the assassination of Sadat was not
> terrorism, and the case of Algeria should provide us with a strong
> counterfactual in at least a few analytical contexts. Because we
> usually think of revolutionary activity in terms of the state, perhaps
> we're missing something that is potentially important. The civilian
> dead that result from the attacks in that part of the planet, while
> they're no one in particular to "us", may be considered important
> enough to merit targeting in the eyes of those who carry out the
> attacks. In that sense, the constructing of a sense of randomness by
> media ideologues serves a purpose; under no circumstances is the
> behavior of theologically motivated anti-imperialism and other
> indirect and direct strategies of political destabilization to be seen
> as intelligible or rational. I just wonder how many people in DC and
> tv land have Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" on their nightstand
> because "containing" Islamic radicalism is going to be *very*
> expensive, the use of the word infinite, in this context, being
> totally scary. Good thing they didn't call it operation "eternal
> justice". I'm not for one second denying terror, I just don't think
> it's an ism--that it's an end in and of itself either in the Mid East
> or Central Asia. Perhaps we need to look more closely how the term is
> used for places like India and Pakistan etc. in order to unbundle the
> contexts in which the term is bandied about and manipulated.
>
> Ian
>
>