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The Parisian atrocities were born in Libya /
Where Cameron, Sarkozy, and Obama /
Murdered twelve thousand Libyans between sips /
Of Downing Street and Oval Office coffee.
Read the complete poem here.
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Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude
It is interesting to read the Physicians for Social Responsibility’s estimate that the West has killed up to 4 million Muslims since 1990. PSR won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. We’re talking about numbers compiled by very serious and careful scholars. Their detailed and extensive report can be downloaded here:
http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf
One of the curious aspects of modern, industrial society is that it creates forms of social organization that make genocide relatively easy. It is possible, for example, to place an embargo on the chemicals needed for water treatment facilities and thus kill hundreds of thousands of people or more in a Third World country that can’t produce those chemicals themselves. The principle victims are children. UNICEF reports that 500,000 children died in Iraq due to the embargo and the collateral effects of war. The lack of chemicals for water treatment was one of the major causes. The medical journal Lancet put the number at 567,000 children.
In the spring of 2000 a U.S. Congressional letter demanding the lifting of the sanctions had 71 signatures. White House Democratic Whip David Bonior called the economic sanctions against Iraq “infanticide masquerading as policy.” Even with 71 members of congress pointing out the truth, American society continued to pretend it didn’t see anything. Like all genocides, of course, the numbers and their causes are denied even when the facts are substantive.
Impossibly difficult questions arise. When one’s government commits genocide, what are our moral responsibilities? How does one find the moral courage to openly accuse one’s own country of genocide? What should one do when one’s country is, or has, recently committed genocide? How do you face the inevitable ostracism, hatred, poverty and many other problems that a true moral commitment to such an accusation might bring upon you? It’s almost certainly not enough, and even a cowardly approach, to become an expatriate, which I did 36 years ago. Why is it that philosophy has never really answered what we should do in the face of genocide?
One concern I have is the cover art for your incredibly valuable blog entry. Does it address the absurdity of our genocidal society and the media that is, in part, an instrument of that genocide? Or does it make light of the problem in some way, as if such immense absurdity is a fate we can’t control, a fate so overwhelming that it relieves us of any concrete and deeply committed, non-violent actions to stop it? Or is it something like Boris Lurie’s “No Art,” an expression that most every manifestation of a genocidal society boils down to a vulgar hypocrisy, a lie, a façade over the unspeakable?
Thank you for taking the issue seriously — and not least for enlarging the matter — because it brings out the importance of Heathcote’s poem, something my blogpost, with such unseriously flip imagery, doesn’t do. I used the images to reflect the tenor of the Gonzo Today site, the rock ’em sock ’em style of which appeals to me. It’s true that the “No Art” vulgarity of Boris Lurie’s paintings and collages illustrates the way murder on an industrial scale has invaded our lives, but not having brought out that connection with the poem myself, I’m grateful that you have.
The irony is that earnestness, and especially an empty, intellectual earnestness without action of some sort, is probably less effective than a resort to expressing the absurdity of the situation…
PS: For anyone interested, here’s an item about Boris Lurie:
http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2008/01/boris_lurie_rip.html