Monday, April 15, 2002

Remora

"We are a humane army."

"I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces; but who are the images of the great Pattern as well as you or I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not." -- Edmund Burke

I've extracted this quote from a letter Edmund Burke wrote in defense of his prosecution of Warren Hastings to the painter Joshua Reynold's niece. She'd written Burke on behalf of a friend to ask him, politely, if he knew what he was doing. It's a nice example of the way pressure is exerted to destroy dissent -- you don't need a police force when there is a steady supply of Miss Palmers, generation after generation, to imply that, well, the dissenter is embarrassing himself among her sort.

From the Guardian:

The man in charge of the operation is Brigadier-General Eyal Shlein. Shlein, like Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, denies the Palestinian claims that a 'massacre' took place. Their version is that those who died were combatants in very heavy fighting. Shlein believes few civilians were killed, despite the claims of those at the hospital and the evidence of the dead and wounded we see there. Shlein believes too that the Israeli army showed restraint while operating in Jenin. 'There would have been no problem completing the operation immediately,' he told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on Friday. 'But we are a humane army.

"Whether the white people like it or not." The pathos of the conditional rings down the ages, at least for LI, sitting here in our isolation, impotent critic of all we survey. For surely one of Miss Palmer's questions -- not the one she put into words, but the one underneath all the ones she put into words -- was how a man like Burke could make himself an advocate of, well, a lower, duskier race. One that was certainly not Christian. One whose deaths couldn't be measured in the same proportion as good White deaths. And certainly Burke lived among the set of "the white people", the whitest, in fact, in the land. The Whig Aristocracy, Lord Rockingham's coterie, the London coffeehouse intellectuals. Yet Burke was too Irish not to know he had a secret sharer as he moved among these groups; it was not Conrad's secret sharer, that Blond Uber-Englishman in which the slav was at last washed away; no, this was the Catholic mother, this was Dublin, this was the sometimes over-excited (some would say affected) speech. This was a line within himself, creating zones. And definitely there was a zone to be crossed into, and out of which, in raids on the inexplicable, came that famous talent for indignation in elevated language. The banned zone within himself.


From the LA Times:
But also Saturday, rescuers discovered two other members of the family still alive. The rescuers plucked the couple--Abdullah Shobi and his wife, Shamsa--from their living room, which was under a mass of stone and dirt.

The recoveries seemed to bolster allegations that the Israeli army--as it invaded towns and cities across the West Bank and met stiff resistance--bulldozed homes with people still in them. Similar tales have emerged from the Jenin refugee camp, site of the most widespread destruction and highest death toll in any of the fighting.

An army spokeswoman said Saturday that efforts are always made to notify the residents of a home that is to be demolished. She said the army destroys only buildings that have been used as explosives factories or sniper positions.

The Shobis' neighbors gave a different account. Although fighting, gunfire and explosions had raged for days, the family was not involved. The neighbors said the bulldozer approached from the plaza in front of the Shobi home and began attacking. The building collapsed, with the family inside.


We appeal to Burke sane -- where to his Tory fans he appeared most mad -- from Burke mad, the Burke who, as the enemy of "theory in politics," was eventually driven to an excess of theory, theory as the perennial policing of theory. Burke's reactionary philosophy centers around the sort of paralogism that, in another context, would be sorted out by Godel: the idea that a meta-theory of politics that found theory in politics to be illegitimate was not, itself, a theory, and not itself subject to the fanaticism Burke felt was consequent upon the application of theory to human affairs. It was a paralogism that called upon the same apocalyptic language, the same world wide militancy, as its opponents.

"As for me, I was always steadily of the opinion that this disorder [the French Revolution] is not intermittent. I conceived that the contest once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion; but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last. I never thought we could make peace with the system, because it is not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself we were at war."

From the New York Times:

For Israeli forces, it is also an especially dangerous mission. This is not an American-style military campaign that uses airstrikes for weeks or even months before ground troops are deployed.It is urban warfare, with soldiers moving alley to alley, house to house, searching for militants amid booby-trapped homes. Twenty-four Israeli soldiers have been killed and 124 wounded since the operation began on March 28.

The raids have also led to charges by Palestinians that hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, which the Israeli Army says is one of the main sanctuaries for the militants. The Israelis have adamantly rejected allegations that their troops have attacked civilians
.

And so this is the tone of the "white people's" newspaper of note -- a paper which holds that bullets can kill an Israeli soldier, but Israeli bullets can only lead to "charges", a social condition in which, for psycho-pathological reasons, the hate America crowd, parlor politicians of Europe, and other assorted malcontents have some kind of problem with the program. They hear the "let's roll," and they don't want to roll, these people. The inherent humanity of Israeli weaponry must be one of the wonders of the world. In today's paper, the IDF, which was quite happy to report one hundred to two hundred Palestinian deaths, for domestic consumption, last week, is now claiming that the dead number in the dozens. A change that will no doubt be echoed in further stories about Jenin, and contrasted with the especially dangerous missions mounted by the government of Sharon. And LI is ready to concede that there is something mystical about the transfiguration of Palestinian flesh, properly shredded, or crushed in a house, into so many words, mere words. First comes the righteous act, then the "charges." We are watching white people's history unfold before us, entranced and horrified by the spectacle, readers.

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