04 August 2005
death side by side with suicide
So today I'm writing more posts than the previous 6 months put together, but had a thing to say re k-punk's newest suicide bombs and myths piece.
He writes: "The abhorrence produced by suicide bombing is fascinating and, prima facie, puzzling: as if the annihilation of the terrorists by their own hand somehow made the atrocity worse...isn't this willingness to die - and to die for a Cause - one of the most disturbing features of what Blair calls 'these people'?"
Whilst I concur that a pathological inability to contemplate self-extinction lies at the heart of capitalist (individualistic) bio-worship, I'm not sure that, beyond a certain predictable kneejerk media portraiture of suicide bombers as 'inherently and incomprehensibly other', the slaughter of civilians isn't what's at the heart of the condemnation for the most part. In a way, it surprises me, given that these were the first suicide bombers in Britain and perhaps Western Europe (at least for a very long time), that more hasn't been made of their 'fundamentalism', their 'pathologies', the 'what could drive a person to do this'-type rhetoric. Instead we have even the Daily Mail (according to Ken Livingstone) arguing that the war in Iraq was likely to result in attacks (suicide or otherwise) on Britain. In other words, there is a semblance of an attempt to try and 'understand' how and why blowing oneself up might be politically, and not theologically motivated (the latter as an explanation, perhaps perversely, the far too easy option).
And after all, and this is the main point, contemporary global capitalism is arguably far more suicidal than a bunch of teenagers with bombs made of nail-polish - and isn't this the unspeakable truth at the heart of all rich countries' desperate attempts to cling onto 'our way of life'? Historically we might argue about whether the Nazis were on a one-way mission to auto-extinction, but everybody today knows that the current material order is absolutely and pathologically unsustainable - why do we tell ourselves all the time, for example, how if everybody in China lived same way "we" do, the world would be kaput in a matter of weeks? Conspicuous consumption, planes, cars, fags, guns, obesity, choked with 'rights' and whining = death to everyone.
He writes: "The abhorrence produced by suicide bombing is fascinating and, prima facie, puzzling: as if the annihilation of the terrorists by their own hand somehow made the atrocity worse...isn't this willingness to die - and to die for a Cause - one of the most disturbing features of what Blair calls 'these people'?"
Whilst I concur that a pathological inability to contemplate self-extinction lies at the heart of capitalist (individualistic) bio-worship, I'm not sure that, beyond a certain predictable kneejerk media portraiture of suicide bombers as 'inherently and incomprehensibly other', the slaughter of civilians isn't what's at the heart of the condemnation for the most part. In a way, it surprises me, given that these were the first suicide bombers in Britain and perhaps Western Europe (at least for a very long time), that more hasn't been made of their 'fundamentalism', their 'pathologies', the 'what could drive a person to do this'-type rhetoric. Instead we have even the Daily Mail (according to Ken Livingstone) arguing that the war in Iraq was likely to result in attacks (suicide or otherwise) on Britain. In other words, there is a semblance of an attempt to try and 'understand' how and why blowing oneself up might be politically, and not theologically motivated (the latter as an explanation, perhaps perversely, the far too easy option).
And after all, and this is the main point, contemporary global capitalism is arguably far more suicidal than a bunch of teenagers with bombs made of nail-polish - and isn't this the unspeakable truth at the heart of all rich countries' desperate attempts to cling onto 'our way of life'? Historically we might argue about whether the Nazis were on a one-way mission to auto-extinction, but everybody today knows that the current material order is absolutely and pathologically unsustainable - why do we tell ourselves all the time, for example, how if everybody in China lived same way "we" do, the world would be kaput in a matter of weeks? Conspicuous consumption, planes, cars, fags, guns, obesity, choked with 'rights' and whining = death to everyone.
