IN THE SHADOW OF INSTEAD RT @rmslim: By far this is one of z best, if not z best analysis, of unfolding devepts in the Arab region penned by Yezid Sayigh http://t.co/zMW7oGUsKZ 09:52:10, 2014-08-29 #prt among most interesting aspects the…
…plus a few observations as tweeted. I’m sure I missed a few good pieces (possibly while I was busy yesterday, for instance). Please feel free to link anything interesting or useful in the comments.
In light of the ritualized sacrifice of a single man, on the altar of what we cannot help but believe – no possible justification – the many may be revealed to us as allies, as “with us,” perhaps first symbolically, but now also practically. Put simply, Foley’s death marks if it does not itself restore American re-engagement on behalf of those we had all but abandoned in the region.
In ignoring the geographic, political-economic, ethnic, religious impediments to the universalization of the human idea, Americans repeat those ineluctably pleasing, necessary operations of the spirit that tell us our luck – or the sum of our combined advantages in relation to geography, politics, economics, ethnicities, and religions – is deserved, a product of our virtues and a proof of them, whatever costs to others not only unavoidable, but just.
Soon, in whatever state or state of states or unstate we are found, today’s neo-isolationists of left and right may find themselves exposed to ironies mirroring those now felt by the neo-conservatives of just the other day, who thought they were advancing a needed heightening, deepening, and expansion of engagement, but instead reinforced an older impulse to wash one’s hands of it all.
To the extent we cannot construct or re-construct the principles for a collective right to life in the age of weapons of destruction of the masses and disruption of global-ecological homeostasis, those principles may be expected to construct or re-construct themselves for us, and through us.
For now, as spectators, we may hope that our cheers or jeers may be heard on the field and somehow affect the outcome. From orbit, relieved of any such aspirations, we can see that the deal took the only shape it could take.
The mass annihilation of civilians in war, the conversion of citizens or subjects into eradicable vermin, ought to refer us to events at the inception of the American-centric international order as we know it, its immediate predicate in a shared experience of total war and a victory both in and against it, and its older predicate in the longer movements of history.