> Mosul Falls, Baghdad in Chaos
>
> By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
Horrifying as all this may be, I still get no end of joy from hearing headlines such "Looting, Anarchy and Ecstasy as Tyrant Falls." Or the apology for looting from some rightwing nutters, which sounds, incredibly, like the sort of stuff we get from autonomists. I just saw Rumsfeld having a tantrum because the media was so obsessed about the chaos, looting and murders - what did they think, he seemed to suggest, this is LIBERATION!!! According to one (BBC?) report it wasn't just looting - it was teaching the powerful a lesson! It was symbolic fury! It's like suddenly they have been transformed into apostles of W.F. Haug, "Critique of Commodity Aesthetics": the oppressed have been conditioned to see in the objects of wealth their own status of inferiority, so they redress this by pilfering stuff. Or more accurately Ranajit Guha in "Elementary forms of Peasant Insurgency": this is carefully selective looting, and the selectivity indicates the hitherto hidden subaltern political agency. An agency, of course, which the neo-cons see as their own, which has to be one of the most incredible identifications in the whole of human history. Though this identification is surely the first step towards erasing subaltern agency in Iraq, it is still remarkable. I am finding this whole circus absolutely amazing. I never thought the ultra-hawks would become apologists of righteous subaltern fury, but voila, that's what they are doing, though for nefarious ends all of their own. The party will end soon enogh though, and they will send in the Marines to help the armed shopkeepers.
Thiago Oppermann