[lit-ideas] Re: 21. century European anti-Semitism
- From: JulieReneB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:50:04 EDT
But isn't there a difference between individual violence and collective
violence? I mean, individuals who behave violently on behalf of a violent
community are not acting out of the subsuming rush you describe. Crusaders
killing
those who would not convert, Al Qaeda members flying planes into towers,
Palestinians blowing themselves up on buses -- they are not acting out of a
momentary
rage or an immediacy -- fight or flight. Collective violence is not as ....
immediate, as instintct-driven. Help me out here, someone...
Julie
========Original Message========
Subj:[lit-ideas] Re: 21. century European anti-Semitism
Date:4/20/2004 12:57:03 AM Central Daylight Time
From:Scribe1865@xxxxxxx
To:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent on:
In a message dated 4/20/2004 12:57:38 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
mccreery@xxxxxxx writes:
The more interesting question is why so often we
don't react with violence even when provoked and why the threshold
beyond which violence erupts varies as widely as it does.
_________________
A personal take. I've been violent twice; once in self-defense and another
time defending my dog (getting a pit bull to release its grip on my dog's
throat). Both times I defended successfully, was unharmed though covered in
sweat,
shaky, and prone to talk about the incidents for a couple weeks afterward.
Was
sick of hearing myself talk about them but still had to talk about them.
My sense of the violence was of being suddenly pulled into an event that
subsumed everything else and both compressed and expanded time enormously,
that
both ruled out thought and then swelled thought, or some sort of cognition
...
maybe thought is the wrong word. At the time, the most horrible thing was the
surprise, the sudden shift from calm everyday life to something very much
like
a storm. This followed by the recognition of how fragile I was, how limited
my
strength. And how much I would wish that such things never happened again.
I've never been an initiator of violence, though in the abstract I'd like to
see a lot more al-Qaeda killed or captured--don't particularly care
which--probably because of being in NYC during 9/11 and having friends
affected by it.
Though this theoretical bloodlust has made me hold extreme views and serve as
a
Bush-enabler in the past, there's not even a corner of my fantasies where an
Everest of dead al-Qaeda would bring back the WTC and the people who were in
it.
And theoretical blood lust ... is it bluster? Is it real? If Osama Bin Laden
were indisputably standing in front of me, would I subdue him? In this text,
I'll say yes, I'd instantly subdue him. But in real life and real time, would
I
act immediately? I don't know. Could anyone say they know for sure what they
would do?
Maybe that's why John's question is so interesting -- that the self in
violence is not the self at all. And we can only speculate about it. Or
perhaps this
is all an egocentric ramble beside the point.
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