Evil that Men do
I had a kid stick a 38 in my face once, and say: "give me your money or I'll blow your f**king head off." At the point where he actually pulled the trigger and tried to make the gun go off, I figured he was closing in on realizing the casual definition of evil I carried around at the time. Well this was eight or so years ago and it was in Washington DC and that sort of thing is fairly commonplace in Washington. Too commonplace to be evil. Two to three years in Lorton depending on the case they could make; so the police told me. I knew what the two who confronted me wanted, taking them at face value, they wanted the twenty-one bucks I had in my wallet. I knew what I wanted too: I wanted to crack their skulls open on the sidewalk with my bare hands.
What did the the people who planted and set off those bombs in Madrid want? Even asking that question makes me feel dirty, complicate. Maybe it's easier to decide they don't want anything, except to kill and cause suffering. Within the individual, pathology is a bottomless morass. A twisted junkyard of broken desires and unfilled needs, for which life and limb will be extracted from the material world with a terrible vengeance. Its very close to not being understandable, yet the yearnings and hunger that feed it is present in all of us. I become confused when I look at the public works of terrorist organizations. This is not the work of a madman; it required planning, cooperation, it required being communicated, understood by others. Can its logic; however impure, be as relentlessly delusional as criminal insanity? Certainly with cults there is a mass subjection of wills under one pathology. Whatever became of the one hundred nineteen year olds who accompanied novelist Yukio Mishima on his quest to overthrow Japan in November of 1970. Who waited while he disemboweled himself, then cut off his head. Political Scientist Fareed Zakaria writing in todays Washington Post, All that's left is Violence , repeats a claim that many believe that the active membership of Al Qaida at this point may be only in the hundreds and that of ETA, the Basque separatists only a hundred or so. No more are needed. Zakaria also passes along the line said of terrorists that what they want is only a few dead and a lot of people watching - and hearing about their cause.
Are the sponsors of this destruction seen as being different whether ETA or al Qaida. Different in motavation or purpose? Did the outcome of the election Sunday, and the strange steering around of blame during the days running up to the election (which may have been the real locus of Spanish reaction), did this show a willingness to read evil like a western union telegram. Evil with a specific message for political action. Is this terrorism or is it something else. On Friday Jim Lehrer interviewed the Spanish Ambassador Javier Ruperez (
Online NewsHour: Conversation: Spanish Ambassador Javier Ruperez -- March 12, 2004)
, this was still at a time when primary suspicion was directed towards the Basque separatists.
Jim Lehrer asks: Now, what would be their point? What is the message that they want to get over by killing these 200 people yesterday?
Amb. Ruperez responds at length but finally arrives at this The object of terror is to subvert the working of the system just to give them power. That's the only thing they're looking for, power, power for themselves. Power is what they want. A street to walk down and a big house at the end. A thin wholly modern despotic exercise in their privilege and rules. It is globalized civil war. Al Qaida wants the arab street, they'll start with any street, eventually they want it all. Their message is not for attention. They want the west to leave their little patch of ground, so that they may take the place of its current rulers. They are pushing rather than talking.
Does this malignant expediency justify their cause? That if they push, and we step back - their effort is comprehensible and efficient. How do you call this evil? If it obtains. If we hold out against it foremost our purported material (military) superiority. The hidden rules of real world justice revealed, conforming solely to a calculating rationality. This is a world without legitimacy or morality. It is simply force and reaction, an endless destruction, incapable of evolving. A world where evil can never be more than a tautalogical statement of material condition. As Flannery O'Conner recalled: ...the kingdom of heaven suffereth the violent, and the violent bear it away.
[T]he shoah must be treated as a rare yet significant and reliable test of the hidden possiblities of modern society. (Zygmunt Bauman quoted by Ronit Lentin (ed)introduction: Re-presenting the Shoah for the 21rst century, 2004)
10:50:17 PM  ;;
|
|
