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December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
December 21, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
War
Good for Bush
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
December 18, 2001
Shahid
Alam
Clash
of Civilizations?
Carl Estabrook
Who
Opposes This War?
December 17, 2001
Edward
Said
Mahfouz
and the Cruelty
of Memory
December 16, 2001
Amira Howeidy
Dangerous By
Definition?
Bahour
and Dahan
Zinni's
Doomed Mission
December 15, 2001
John Isaacs
Bush's 12
Lumps of Coal
for Christmas
Dana Cook
The
Execution of bin Laden
Yusuf Agha
Tale of the
Tape:
Osama Gump?
December 14, 2001
Don Atapattu
A Conversation with
Norman
Finkelstein
December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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The
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December 28,
2001
Civilian Bodies:
On the Recognition
of Death
By Suren Pillay
I took my usual trip from our apartment off Amsterdam
Avenue uphill toward the School of International and Public Affairs
building at Columbia University. It was a crisp morning, just
a hint of autumn in the air.
On my way to the library I passed the
small lounge area for students, where there was a television
suspended from the wall. Usually it would be tuned into a financial
news or sports channel. Most days don't pay much attention to
the tv, as I pass by on the way to the library. But that morning
I noticed a crowd of people standing around it watching intently.
This was peculiar.
I walked over. There was a strange silence,
as a CNN reporter interviewed a man, an 'eyewitness', who described
the sound of a jet engine aircraft that passed over him, very
low in the sky, as he was out for his usual morning jog around
Battery Park. A plane, it turned out at had crashed into the
World Trade Center. I thought it must have been accident. And
it seemed that most other people thought so too--even, it turns
out, President Bush.
Knowing the capacity of CNN to run this
story endlessly I decided to go the library and get the books
I needed. The crash would still be 'breaking news' for a long
time and if there were further details they didn't seem to be
apparent at the time. When I finished my business in the library
I strolled by the TV again. This time the mood was different.
A second plane at just hit the second tower. And now it became
apparent that there was some organization in this random-seeming
event. I heard someone mention 'terrorists'. There was a palpable
sense of anxiousness. Students were trying to contact friends,
relatives, loved ones, on their cell phones. The rushed traffic
of calls jammed the network. No one could get through. Panic
began to set in. There were tears too.
I walked over to the main campus, hoping
that I would bump into anyone I knew, and I must admit, anyone
I felt I could talk to--a fellow third-worlder maybe. It had
become apparent that when people were saying "we are being
attacked" that I didn't seem to be, or for that matter,
didn't want to be, part of that "we". And when I met
some students from South Asia, whom I knew, we soon fell into
a quiet conversation about what was going on. Amidst this, people
passed by in all directions. Dazed and bewildered.
The South Asians expressed their anxiety
about who could be responsible. An American student whom I knew
walked past, looking flushed. She turned to me and said "What
the fuck's going on? What are they doing to us?". It was
said in the spirit of eliciting my solidarity. I could only give
her a blank stare in that moment. And so too with the rest of
the group. I felt for the victims. I wanted to express that.
But it was not the language that she was compelling me to respond
in. So all I could offer was silence, a long silence. Then she
seemed to lose patience, as if she was hurt by my inertia. Bewilderedly
she walked off. When I see her these days I can still see that
suspicious look on her face.
Within the first few hours after the
attacks, a chasm had already began to open up between those who
weree able to see this as a 'thinkable' event and those who seemed
to be utterly and completely taken by surprise--a surprise that
could not make this event intelligible or possible. Why would
anyone want to do this? How could they hate us? people asked
exasperatedly as CNN ran and re-ran repeatedly images of young
kids jubilating on the streets of Gaza. Some hoped it was not
a real image. And when a report circulated on email about the
footage being old archive material many feverishly passed this
on. But it was most likely authentic footage. And the point was
not to try and erase the jubilation. The point had to be to place
the jubilation in a context. To pan out and show that street
corner on which those kids danced. For then you would see the
most densely populated piece of earth in the world--a refugee
camp for generations, hemmed in by the humiliating might and
historical force of the Israeli state, the largest recipient
of US foreign aid.
The intersection of the past of those
kids, with the present of the smoking rubble of the Twin Towers,
had to be seen as a crossroads of hopes and fears, of histories
of justices and injustices, power and domination. This moment
could serve as a microcosm for the larger clash of cognitions--the
one that could see a past to this event and the other that could
only see its present--and could only see that present through
the eyes of looking inward at itself.
The 'world' is really a distant place
here. For it is 'here' and therefore is not out there. The 'world'
comes here. Wants to be here. It walks through deserts dehydrated
to get here. It hides in airplane storage containers. It queues
endlessly for a visa. It gambles for a greencard. If New York
is the capital of world, the 'best" place in the world,
then the outlying provinces appear as not worthy of enquiry,
other than as destinations of pleasure and adventure for the
citizens of the center. Or as market opportunities. And as if
to offset slightly opportunity and pleasure, the world occasionally
features as a charity ball or place of pity.
And now, after the event, a large part
of the rest of the world is also seen as a place of fear. Fear
comes from outside. And fear lurks within. It hibernates quietly.
The agents of fear move amongst us. We stare at them, fixing
their profiles and contours in our minds. On subways and street
corners, in coffee-shops and restaurants, in taxi cabs and newspaper
vendor stands, fear it seems has been able to creep in slowly
and undetected. And now we have to 'regret' the ease with which
we let it in. The body politic is contaminated. So we need to
seal off those porous borders: Homeland Security, USA Patriot
Act, background checks. These sentiments waft through the air.
They imprint themselves on you as you walk down the street. They
strip search you with a nervous glance.
And then the bombing and the obsession
with military technology. Rarely if ever did you hear about a
real person, a civilian, who was killed in Afghanistan. A civilian
killed by US bombing was not a civilian, not even collateral
damage, but rather a disputed number, a questionable claim. To
have given the dead the status of collateral damage was to give
them the recognition of death, even if cleansed of its stench
by the stainless language of military euphemisms.
To recognize death is to recognize life.
But the Afghan dead are not even given that recognition. They
are 'disputed figures'. 'Taliban propaganda claims'. They are
the actually living dead. We are given some numbers: how many
cruise missiles, how many Daisy Cutters, how many sorties, how
much soldiers, the diameters, the flight distances, the co-ordinates.
These numbers make the war real, as real as a video-game. And
the casualties we only know as 'lies'.
It is war fought on the basis of a doctrine
that tries to keep the splattered blood of 'the enemy', 'the
evil ones', off your uniform. To keep you far enough away so
as not to see the mangled smithereens of fragmented bodies. Contorted
and pained bodies, caked in dried blood, rotting: these attributes
are only given to the victims of the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. They are blood and flesh. They are individual biographies.
They are fathers, and mothers, brothers and daughters. They are
made human, which they rightfully were. They are remembered as
a loss to humanity as they rightfully should be. We smell their
death, and feel their terror. The wrenching apart of their bodies,
that tearing apart of their skin that makes us recognize them
as one of 'us'. They are us, and we feel for them.
Yet in Afghanistan all traces of humanness
is erased from 'the enemy'. The right to possess the stench of
death has become a privilege. All trace of loss is edited out
of the picture. Either evil or just poor and wretched, 'they'
are the world as pity, the world as charity, the world as infantile
and archaic. And we have been absolved of any feeling that they
are one of 'us'.
The bombs that have rained down have
killed more than 3,500 civilians according to one estimate. A
big aggregate blob of a number devoid of individuality. A number
that we can archive and forget. Because it is a number with no
age, with no face, with no smile, with no tears, with no hopes.
It is just a number, just a price
to be paid by those who peddle mortality and morality at the
markets of good and evil.
Suren Pillay
is a native of South Africa now at Columbia University in New
York City.
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