Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Horrorism

The Italian political philosopher Adriana Cavarero published a book in 2007, recently translated into English and published by Columbia University Press under the title, Horrorism : Naming Contemporary Violence. She wants to replace outdated words such as "war" and "soldier" which have become absurdly insufficient for discussing current events like ...


"... what happened on 14 January 2006 in the village of Damadola in Pakistan, where yet another extension of the "war on terror" begun by the United States in Afghanistan in October 2001 caused the deaths of eighteen people, all civilians, among them eight women and five babies. The American attack  following information, which later proved to be false, that one of the leaders of Al-Qaeda was hiding in the village was carried out by unmanned aircraft armed with missiles. With no pilot on board, indeed empty of bodies altogether, the aircraft were controlled from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, at a distance of thousands of kilometers from the site of the massacre. Inserted into a time of irregular and asymmetric warfare, a striking case of horrorism that no rhetoric of collateral damage can obscure, this episode was a conspicuous example of decorporealized destructive technology. It shows that, in principle at least, the direct participation of the warrior in slaughter is now avoidable."

And the man who endorsed this so-called "war" throughout his Presidential election campaign and who presently bears direct moral responsibility for the ongoing actions of the faceless button-pushers at Nellis Air Force Base is not the Satanic ignoramus who started it, but instead is the most recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and remains the darling of mainstream educated liberal American voters.