[lit-ideas] Re: the bombing blues
- From: Judy Evans <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 22:45:35 +0100
This really pissed me off, too, Robert. But even if it didn't; it has
been said at least a thousand times since these bombings but less
offensively (the "skin" and the "different God" speak of ignorance and
of a prejudice that verges on racism), so, Pitt Rivers is hardly
saying anything new (or profound)
RP> Has Pitt Rivers actually managed to look at the faces in the images from
RP> London, and seen nothing but 'skin' lighter than the 'skin' of Iraqis?
clearly not.
RP> And on what grounds does he irrelevantly say that the people in Iraq
RP> 'pray to a different God,' from 'their British counterparts'? This
RP> happened in London, not Salt Lake City, e.g.,
and might have happened in Cardiff where today, as every day, Muslims,
Sikhs, and even some Christians, shopped cheerfully alongside people
like me (the mosques are under police guard, just in case). But
particularly in London. The black and Asian Britons in those photos
had I think been in the Tube, but this, about London buses and in
particular ones on that route, is correct
>it is very possible that if a bomb exploded in any one of them,
>it would kill and maim at least
>one person from every continent and of every major faith. On any busy
>Hackney bus you'll hear a dozen different languages besides English:
>Albanian, Turkish, Polish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu,
>French or Yoruba.
Friday, July 8, 2005, 8:15:47 PM, Robert Paul wrote:
RP> 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.
RP> This the kind of bizarre reasoning one often encounters on the part of
RP> those for whom no vicious act is without its patronizing 'moral' lesson.
RP> Its premises are seldom stated but insofar as it has any, they would
RP> seem to be these: what happened in London, yesterday, isn't really worth
RP> getting upset about because similar things happen daily elsewhere and
RP> nobody gets very excited about them (except the people in those far away
RP> places about which we know little who are immediately effected). Such
RP> reasoning has exactly the same form as: You shouldn't carry on so about
RP> your child's having been killed by a drunk driver because it happens
RP> almost every day (somewhere), and the people in your family and
RP> neighborhood don't carry on about that, now do they?
RP> Has Pitt Rivers actually managed to look at the faces in the images from
RP> London, and seen nothing but 'skin' lighter than the 'skin' of Iraqis?
RP> And on what grounds does he irrelevantly say that the people in Iraq
RP> 'pray to a different God,' from 'their British counterparts'? This
RP> happened in London, not Salt Lake City, e.g., not that it would not have
RP> been equally terrible had it happened in that relatively 'pale' and
RP> religiously homogeneous city.
RP> What illogical, unfeeling crap.
RP> Robert Paul
RP> Reed College
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