WHO’S MORE CIVILIZED?
March 5, 2015
Today’s “Democracy Now!” segment
on the role of the British MI-5 in turning Mohammed Emwazi into the IS executioner,
aka Jihahi John, who has beheaded US citizens on video
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/5/jihadi_john_unmasked_did_uk_security,
carried me back to what I learned about differences I found between conceptions
of crime and violence in Tanzania and the US when I lived in and around Dar es
Salaam for five months in the first half of 1990 (as described in
http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/700/art%253A10.1007%252FBF00190170.pdf?auth66=1425572551_8dcb9ad796317f764f9ce7d28cf4a2a7&ext=.pdf),
as I was in my Feb. 23 post on “Violence from on High”—placing IS and US
violence side by side. In the segment,
we see Emwazi pronouncing sentence as he carries out an execution. He calls on President Obama to stop killing
people indiscriminately, and pronounces the knife he wields as the IS
instrument of payback of the “America” that President Obama represents. Emwazi does not identify himself, he is
hooded. Outwardly, and I’m sure inwardly,
he does his duty to his state, just as staff in execution chambers and drone
pilots do theirs in and for the US. It
is also a deterrent: If you hurt us with
your “superior” weapons, we will hurt you by the simpler, more direct means
available to us. This is not an
unreasonable calculation: The US public
has limited tolerance for war casualties; we will simply wear them down. And the seriousness of the victimization in
the IS by the US far exceeds the threat used by the US to justify that
victimization. They justify their
violence by what we DO. It is a mark of
economic and military privilege and domination that we justify ours by
caricaturing who they ARE, as we create the enmity we seek to destroy and
degrade. Love and peace, hal
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