Fahamu Pecou
The Tipping Point, 2006
acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 72″ x 54″

Via

Robin Varghese on the trial of Saddam Hussein. He writes that the self-delusions of the deposed Iraqi dictator as well as the self-deception of the coalition forces “do offer lessons … but these seem hard to articulate”:

Maybe it was the constant invocation of the Nazis as an analog for Saddam, but part of me was hoping that out of the coverage of the trial would come the sort of reportage that Hannah Arendt filled the pages of The New Yorker with during the trial of Adolph Eichmann, pieces which became the basis of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

There were enough parallel issues: the legitimacy of the court trying Saddam; the attempt to have the horrors of Iraqi Ba’athism become the foundation myth (in the sense of mythic, not in the sense of false or not true) which would create a continuity between the peoples of Iraq and a new Iraqi polity; the issue of complicity of Shi’a and Kurdish leaders, the West, the East bloc, China, the rest of the Arab world; the Pontius Pilate like reaction of much of the world to the trial; the nature of international law, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Moreover, there is a tale to be told of the hope and tragic descent into corruption and brutality of much of the post-colonial experience, a trajectory and narrative captured only on occasion and waiting to be captured in the form of the political theory-cum-reportage that Arendt deployed so well. Eichmann in Jerusalem, whatever its limitations, help us to understand something about modernity, the officialese of modern bureaucracy and ethics.

In Saddam Hussein and the experience of Ba’athism in Iraq, I imagine a similar tale could be told of the colonial aftermath, the Cold War, and the devolutions into thuggery

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Last week, when I had blogged about child soldiers I had also meant to provide a link to the very wonderful Jenny Diski’s thoughts entitled “Jungle Clearings” (thanks to Maud Newton for discovering Diski’s website; this way, one gets to read Diski more often than the LRB allows access to her witty, acerbic mind):

If the world was a less excruciating, less incorrigibly awful place for most people to be, there might be a case to be made for taking it seriously. Just a glimmer of the possibility of doing something about any of it, would justify making that the centre of your life. As it is, sincerity seems at best naive, more likely self-righteously and pointlessly pious. (Just reinvented the wheel there: the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.) So I think now, after so many years of watching very little improve, unless you count the freedom to fuck on TV a great humane breakthrough. It’s not cynical to be cynical, it’s perverse not to be.

Still, I remember marching from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square at sixteen, half of me thinking that so many people must have some effect, and the other half knowing absolutely that at best I was just making myself feel good. Exactly divided. I confess I still am astonished (while 50% of me knows better) that the voiced dissent against the invasion of Iraq could be entirely ignored, that the scandal of lies, evasions, claims to having god’s ear and the corruption of those who both bombed and made money out of rebuilding, all just went on and on, transparent enough for an infant to see through. How can that happen? How, in full daylight, with intelligent objections, can essential individual human rights in the UK and US be whittled away in the name of guarding against an incredibly handy global something which, for entirely understandable reasons, doesn’t like us? I don’t like us either.

This morning, the radio news announced that some international negotiator had stood in ‘a jungle clearing’ and tried to persuade the leader of God’s Revolutionary Army in Uganda that the best way to get the international community to respect him more would be to release his child soldiers. I hope the negotiator moves on to jungle clearings in Washington and somewhere near Downing Street.

Photo: Eugene Richards

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