Brecht has has a poem that goes somkething like this:
The roaring river is termed violent.
The banks that hem in its waters, men do not call violent
The wind that bends the branches of trees is called violent
What about the wind that bends the backs of the roadworkers?
For the Lukes and Brads of this world, the wind the backs of the roadworkers is insvisible and cannot be felt; the bankas that hem in the roaring river are simply the way things are. Luke's vaunted utilitarianism does not extend to assessing the costs of accepting as a baseline the existing conditions, only to critiquing departures from those conditions or assessing various ways of maintaining them (unilateral war versus slow strangulation). The possibility that people might become actors in their own lives, that the roadworkers might become a roaring river, is dismissed as absurd, naive, or unrealistric, except when it threatens to happen, when it evokes a horror that calls for violent repression.
I guess my seeing things this way is why Doug says that I am not really a liberal. jks
Luke also wrote:
> You're probably right. I wonder, though, if the Iraqis would've been better
> off after a successful internal revolution than they will end up during and
> after the current US occupation. I don't really know how to answer that
> question, and I suppose it doesn't have a single answer.
Oh yes it does - had there been a successful internal revolution twelve years ago, maybe we'd have a million less corpses on our hands. I can't believe that people think Iraqi liberation has come at such a 'cheap' cost in lives (the phrasing tells the story, really) What are people thinking? That ten years of sanctions and daily bombings wasn't war? What a cruel joke.
Thiago Oppermann
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