Notes From the Third World

One should never make the mistake of dying in this country.
--Swami.

Basically, some of the farangi are inwardly like savages, like children with toys..was this not Ibn Khaldun's observation, his warning?

Not just 'inwardly'.
--Swami.

Why is it that one doesn't hear any maxims or proverbs spoken any more?

All of their words are expended on useless or petty things, not on the essential. Is it any wonder, then, that they are unable to grasp the thought behind those words? Is it so much of a surprise to find that there is a 'war against cliches'
--Ubo.

An article in this edition of Harper's poses the question:
Is the army, with its desire to "do something to be proud of," really the last bastion of altruism in a a society that is shorn of, or at least puzzled by, such sentiments? We must help them to be free...

If so, all one can hope for is: more self-interest! He who would play the angel ends up playing the beast...

Zizek: Welcome to the Desert of American Subculture:
Zizek asks the interesting question if Abu Ghraib isn't just an anomaly, the old and tired excuse of 'a few wrotten apples', but if it wasn't an expression of American subculture itself: initiation rites.


'Under Saddam, the accent was on direct infliction of pain, while the American soldiers focused on psychological humiliation. Further, recording the humiliation with a camera, with the perpetrators included in the picture, their faces stupidly smiling beside the twisted naked bodies of the prisoners, was an integral part of the process, in stark contrast with the secrecy of the Saddam tortures. The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a kind of tableau vivant, which brings to mind American performance art, “theatre of cruelty,” the photos of Mapplethorpe or the unnerving scenes in David Lynch’s films.

This theatricality leads us to the crux of the matter: To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture—say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard. Far too often we are treated to images of soldiers and students forced to assume humiliating poses, perform debasing gestures and suffer sadistic punishments.

The torture at Abu Ghraib was thus not simply a case of American arrogance toward a Third World people. In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture’s obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder, then, the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not an isolated case but part of a widespread practice. On May 6, Donald Rumsfeld had to admit that the photos rendered public are just the “tip of the iceberg,” and that there were much stronger things to come, including videos of rape and murder. This is the reality of Rumsfeld’s dismissive statement, a couple of months ago, that the Geneva Convention rules are “out of date” in regard to today’s warfare.

In the debate about the Guantanamo prisoners, one often hears arguments that their treatment is ethically and legally acceptable because “they are those who were missed by the bombs.” Since they were the targets of U.S. bombings and accidentally survived them, and since these bombings were part of a legitimate military operation, one cannot condemn their fate when they were taken prisoners after the combat—whatever their situation, it is better, less severe, than being dead. This reasoning tells more than it intends to say. It puts prisoners into a literal position of the “living dead,” those who are in a way already dead (their right to live forfeited by being legitimate targets of murderous bombings). Thus the prisoners are now what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, those who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, their lives no longer count. If the Guantanamo prisoners are located in the space “between the two deaths”—legally dead (deprived of a determinate legal status) while biologically still alive—then the U.S. authorities that treat them this way are in an in-between legal status that forms the counterpart of homo sacer. They act as a legal power, but their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law—they operate in an empty space that is nonetheless within the domain of the law. Hence, the recent disclosures about Abu Ghraib display the consequences of locating prisoners in this place “between the two deaths.” '

Zizek: Welcome to the Desert of the Real:

The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show.