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sticks and stones and machetes and nukes
Sep. 20th, 2004 02:21 amThis is awesome
Also. Let's talk about hate speech. I was telling a friend about a paper I was writing, and I argued that the Michael Savage-type rhetoric, calling for a nuclear attack on Baghdad on US airways is, in fact, hate speech, as it creates a racialized enemy and essentially advocates genocide. Both proliferate and amplify racism, xemophobia and systematically construct a dehumanized enemy "other" that is locked outside of the cultural discourse of morals and ethics.
Hate speech is a murky category that is indicative of American confused puritan/libertarian moral compass, and is not criminalized in the US. It is, however, a crime under international law, although if I remember correctly it has only been prosecuted as a war crime twice, during the Nuremberg trials and at the "media trials" before the International Crimianl Tribunal for Rwanda. My friend's response was that Radio Machete was government-sponsored, which created the leap between words and policy. My argument is that our government is corporation-sponsored, not as some gloomy tinfoil-hat metaphor, but in very real, boring terms of dollars and cents and stocks and bonds, and that the Clear Channel is as much a reflection of the government policy as "Hate Radio" was of the Hutu leaders.
In a way this kind of reasoning relates to a larger problem...or, not exactly a problem, but an incongruency, a lag. Allow me to use The Economist as an illustration. I like The Economist. I often don't agree with its political platform, but it has excellent news analysis and international coverage. It's solidly libertarian, and very British. It is very polite and reasonable. And that is its downfall at this juncture in history. The Economist is stuck in a world of the past, when everyone was reasonable, when corruption could only be entertained as a phenomenon within certain reasonable parameters, when conspiracy theory was some kind of paranoid tomfoolery. It's like King Arthur at the Yankee Court. The Economist Does Not Comrephend in the way that your grandma Does Not Comprehend the nature of your dating imbroglios (or at least mine does not). How does a journal too sensible to engage with anything that deviates from the "rational choice model" and furthermore indulges in the colonial nostalgia of the Benevolent Western Influence fare in a world where the PNAC blueprint for actual Global Domination is laid out, in open text (well, open hypertext), making some pretty explicit wishes to the Neoimperialism Fairy for "another Pearl Harbor"?
Texts and people are overimpressed with reified historical categories, but they are the new Potemkin Villages; the government and the financial sector are about as separate as the other famous mythological binary, church and state. They are all about as separate as the well-kept lawn and the insects beneath it in David Lynch's suburbia. Making a distinction between government-owned Radio Machete and "privately owned" Clear Channel outlets is like falsely polarizing implicit and explicit, de jure and de facto, creating a binary opposition for flimsy, cold comfort in place of what is at best a spectrum and at worst semantics and sophistry.
Also. Let's talk about hate speech. I was telling a friend about a paper I was writing, and I argued that the Michael Savage-type rhetoric, calling for a nuclear attack on Baghdad on US airways is, in fact, hate speech, as it creates a racialized enemy and essentially advocates genocide. Both proliferate and amplify racism, xemophobia and systematically construct a dehumanized enemy "other" that is locked outside of the cultural discourse of morals and ethics.
Hate speech is a murky category that is indicative of American confused puritan/libertarian moral compass, and is not criminalized in the US. It is, however, a crime under international law, although if I remember correctly it has only been prosecuted as a war crime twice, during the Nuremberg trials and at the "media trials" before the International Crimianl Tribunal for Rwanda. My friend's response was that Radio Machete was government-sponsored, which created the leap between words and policy. My argument is that our government is corporation-sponsored, not as some gloomy tinfoil-hat metaphor, but in very real, boring terms of dollars and cents and stocks and bonds, and that the Clear Channel is as much a reflection of the government policy as "Hate Radio" was of the Hutu leaders.
In a way this kind of reasoning relates to a larger problem...or, not exactly a problem, but an incongruency, a lag. Allow me to use The Economist as an illustration. I like The Economist. I often don't agree with its political platform, but it has excellent news analysis and international coverage. It's solidly libertarian, and very British. It is very polite and reasonable. And that is its downfall at this juncture in history. The Economist is stuck in a world of the past, when everyone was reasonable, when corruption could only be entertained as a phenomenon within certain reasonable parameters, when conspiracy theory was some kind of paranoid tomfoolery. It's like King Arthur at the Yankee Court. The Economist Does Not Comrephend in the way that your grandma Does Not Comprehend the nature of your dating imbroglios (or at least mine does not). How does a journal too sensible to engage with anything that deviates from the "rational choice model" and furthermore indulges in the colonial nostalgia of the Benevolent Western Influence fare in a world where the PNAC blueprint for actual Global Domination is laid out, in open text (well, open hypertext), making some pretty explicit wishes to the Neoimperialism Fairy for "another Pearl Harbor"?
Texts and people are overimpressed with reified historical categories, but they are the new Potemkin Villages; the government and the financial sector are about as separate as the other famous mythological binary, church and state. They are all about as separate as the well-kept lawn and the insects beneath it in David Lynch's suburbia. Making a distinction between government-owned Radio Machete and "privately owned" Clear Channel outlets is like falsely polarizing implicit and explicit, de jure and de facto, creating a binary opposition for flimsy, cold comfort in place of what is at best a spectrum and at worst semantics and sophistry.
