[lit-ideas] Re: the bombing blues
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2005 12:15:47 -0700
John McCreery sent us a piece by W. Pitt Rivers, from Truthout:
William Rivers Pitt writes on Truthout (www.truthout.com)
In Iraq, they call events like this "Tuesday."
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and wounded in Iraq by
way of deadly bombings that have been taking place every single day.
These Iraqi people are no different from the Londoners who perished
today. Their skin is darker perhaps, and they pray to a different
God, but they have families and children and dreams and they die just
as horribly as their British counterparts. Yet they earn perhaps a
few sentences on the back page of the paper, and virtually no comment
from the members of the international community which ginned up the
invasion of Iraq in the first place.
This the kind of bizarre reasoning one often encounters on the part of
those for whom no vicious act is without its patronizing 'moral' lesson.
Its premises are seldom stated but insofar as it has any, they would
seem to be these: what happened in London, yesterday, isn't really worth
getting upset about because similar things happen daily elsewhere and
nobody gets very excited about them (except the people in those far away
places about which we know little who are immediately effected). Such
reasoning has exactly the same form as: You shouldn't carry on so about
your child's having been killed by a drunk driver because it happens
almost every day (somewhere), and the people in your family and
neighborhood don't carry on about that, now do they?
Has Pitt Rivers actually managed to look at the faces in the images from
London, and seen nothing but 'skin' lighter than the 'skin' of Iraqis?
And on what grounds does he irrelevantly say that the people in Iraq
'pray to a different God,' from 'their British counterparts'? This
happened in London, not Salt Lake City, e.g., not that it would not have
been equally terrible had it happened in that relatively 'pale' and
religiously homogeneous city.
What illogical, unfeeling crap.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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