Irena Korosec, "Kurds, Forgotten by God" (2004)
let the blood be on our hands, and on the hands of our children
one can only turn the holocaust into a unique event, a sacrosanct atrocity, by a stubborn and studied act of forgetting: a forgetting of history, a forgetting of a history of blood, a forgetting of murder; and this forgetting is itself a form of murder. genocide is a political crime because it divides us by some party, some ethnos (some genos). but by grouping us genostically one has already begun the process of dehumanizing the other so that one can kill more easily. murder is much more the unthinkable – it puts the blood on my hands and makes the killed my responsibility: one i am forced to address by their first name, their good name – the stranger is made my neighbor when there are no nations to reduce the address to a tribal identity. personal crimes – the only crimes against humanity. politics is always already such a crime.
-LoA
4 comments:
dear you
bloodshed is just the spectacular peak of our nature's iceberg which is violence in anything
especially whenever we "love"
For me, this is exactly what the cross means for us, the extreme personalization of all wrongs. Christ bears all, personally, in his cross, taking responsibility for all ills without any attempt to recuse himself. There is a 'washing of hands' in the passion, a divestment of personal responsibility, but by another. We seem called to do the same.
makes me think about "the last king of scotland," which we watched last night... what about massacring one's own people?
anyway, the movie left me wondering aloud how it is an entire nation can get caught in the web of one man's megalomania, with hundreds of thousands killed as a result, and my hubby goes, "well, we have george bush here..."
(sorry, digressing from your powerful post... :) )
we without doubt have a marvelous capacity for violence, and much as with pilate, no amount of washing one's hands leaves one clean.
politics was very astutely defined as the process of making war by another means. and now, as ayesha's husband points out, we stand in the midst of a story that has been told many times. estimates of half a million iraqi lives in short period time...in the name of a political cause that makes it all permissible and even allows us to claim that they are victims of our enemies.
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