[lit-ideas] Iraq : an improvement?
- From: Michael Chase <goya@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 10:31:49 +0100
D=E9but du message r=E9exp=E9di=E9 :
> =46rom another list :
>
> Taking a break from grading, I glance out my office window toward the
> northern hills where Fuji-san hangs like a pale ghost in the sky,
> "milchig und matt hinter Wolkenschichten" as someone once wrote about
> another world a long time ago. For 60 years Japan has been at peace
> with itself and with the world, but in the same period the United
> States has been interfering in other countries, often illegally and
> almost always mendaciously, at the price of many hundreds of thousands
> dead. Those lives, mostly civilian, do not weigh on the conscience of
> very many Americans, who are fatally ignorant of the world and of
> their own government that has bloodied its hands in their name.
>
> But recently I saw an image that ought to weigh heavily on their
> collective heart. In Dublin on Inauguration Day, the television
> networks only carried a few sound bites of the president's speech.
> The lead story was a picture of a little girl splattered with blood.
> Here are the words of Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Sister of Erie,
> describing the situation:
>
> "Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering,
> screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread
> hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the
> blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal
> Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car,
> her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.
>
> "A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as
> well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out
> of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a
> soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on
> the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide
> bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the
> back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her
> parent's blood.
>
> No promise of 'freedom' rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy
> of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here."
>
> For those who have the courage to actually see and not merely look, as
> Jose Saramago likes to say, here is the BBC URL with the pictures:
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/middle_east_s
> hooting_in_tal_afar/html/3.stm
>
> Doubtless the criminals who started the second Iraq war and their
> neo-Jacobin--or more precisely, neo-Trotskyite--supporters would say,
> "Stuff happens." They promise us endless war, and if they get their
> way, a great deal of stuff will indeed happen. Some of it, unlike the
> little girl who for them is merely a thing buffeted by happenings, may
> not be to their liking. It took decades, but General Pinochet is
> finally under arrest and will stand trial for his crimes. Yesterday
> one of his generals was also arrested. Others will follow them into
> the court. One can hope that in the fullness of time the architects
> of this war will also face justice. In the meantime, I always
> remember Horace:
>
> audire foedos iam videor duces,
> non innocenti pulvere sordidos,
> et cuncta terrarum subacta
> praeter atrocem animum Catonis.
>
> But then, stuff happened to Cato and the Republic died. That also is
> a happening that may, like an Ate, be waiting for us just as 1914 was
> waiting not long after Tonio Kroeger. Meanwhile I will return to
> grading in a land that knows the value of peace after its own
> bloodstained history.
>
>
>
>
Michael Chase
(goya@xxxxxxxxxxx)
CNRS UPR 76
7, rue Guy Moquet
Villejuif 94801
France
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