The flyers fell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, “like snowflakes in December in Chicago.”
"There’s precedent for it,” Cheney had said. In fact, the history of the trial is inseparable from the histories of evidence, torture, and punishment. An ancient form of adjudication known as trial by ordeal became commonplace after 500 A.D.;...In the end, man is judged by God alone. Trial by ordeal was practiced throughout Latin Christendom. It was a favorite device for trying traitors, slaves, and foreigners. In medieval English law, the ordeal was an appropriate trial for “the foreigner or friendless man.”
Ex Parte Quirin.
The past is often figured as dark, a prison, a tomb; the future, bright, blue sky, a spaceship. This is an inheritance of the Enlightenment, with its faith in progress and reason and law. Part of the terror of September 11th was the gleaming skyscraper become a tomb, the seeming backward march of time, the horror of the unreasonable. What, then, of the assassin become an unmanned flying machine?
---Jill Lepore, The New Yorker.
This all makes for sombre reading. A lot is made of religious violence-and rightly so, in my opinion. It goes without saying that religion, as it now exists, is one of the chief ways in which barbarism and backwardness is furthered in our world (which is not to say that that has always been the case or, indeed, that that is what religion is).
But the big question that never gets asked, the elephant in the room...most of the horrific violence of the 20th century was perpetuated by state powers (think: the Bomb, the Gulags, the Trenches, the Camps). Foucault was on the money: Nazism = state racism.
"Terror", it has to be remembered, was first used in relation to state power. The structure of dominance both supports and is reinforced by economic inequalities. An old question (Dahrendorf): how can there be political democracy without economic democracy?
'Like snowflakes in December in Chicago' is a great title for a book!
"There’s precedent for it,” Cheney had said. In fact, the history of the trial is inseparable from the histories of evidence, torture, and punishment. An ancient form of adjudication known as trial by ordeal became commonplace after 500 A.D.;...In the end, man is judged by God alone. Trial by ordeal was practiced throughout Latin Christendom. It was a favorite device for trying traitors, slaves, and foreigners. In medieval English law, the ordeal was an appropriate trial for “the foreigner or friendless man.”
Ex Parte Quirin.
The past is often figured as dark, a prison, a tomb; the future, bright, blue sky, a spaceship. This is an inheritance of the Enlightenment, with its faith in progress and reason and law. Part of the terror of September 11th was the gleaming skyscraper become a tomb, the seeming backward march of time, the horror of the unreasonable. What, then, of the assassin become an unmanned flying machine?
---Jill Lepore, The New Yorker.
This all makes for sombre reading. A lot is made of religious violence-and rightly so, in my opinion. It goes without saying that religion, as it now exists, is one of the chief ways in which barbarism and backwardness is furthered in our world (which is not to say that that has always been the case or, indeed, that that is what religion is).
But the big question that never gets asked, the elephant in the room...most of the horrific violence of the 20th century was perpetuated by state powers (think: the Bomb, the Gulags, the Trenches, the Camps). Foucault was on the money: Nazism = state racism.
"Terror", it has to be remembered, was first used in relation to state power. The structure of dominance both supports and is reinforced by economic inequalities. An old question (Dahrendorf): how can there be political democracy without economic democracy?
'Like snowflakes in December in Chicago' is a great title for a book!
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