Comments on: The “Bush Doctrine” is about Lynching

By: “Mind power Swede, mind power…” « zunguzungu

“Mind power Swede, mind power…” « zunguzungu — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:01:03 +0000

[...] hysterical I got about how horrifying it was that she didn’t even understand that the “The Bush Doctrine is About Lynching,” as I so pithily put it. I wrote some follow up posts because that initial post seemed [...]

By: This American Life: Moby Dick and Screwing with Africans « zunguzungu

This American Life: Moby Dick and Screwing with Africans « zunguzungu — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:37:53 +0000

[...] The “Bush Doctrine” is about Lynching [...]

By: Chapati Mystery » Zungu Notes

Chapati Mystery » Zungu Notes — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:59:12 +0000

[...] Bush Doctrine is about lynching, [...]

By: zunguzungu

zunguzungu — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:32:41 +0000

Scrim,
I’m glad you explained that; the idea that the bush doctrine’s “expression of power actualizes race instead of sublimating it” is a fascinating insight, and I think goes a long way to glossing the why and wherefore of the Republican party’s disavowal of him. He’s just too stupid (or too crude) to know how to placate the American imperialists who prefer to use idealism to rationalize adventurism rather than religious crusades against racial others. Lynch mobs cloak their authoritarian violence against innocence in the guise of “justice” and ideological enterprises like the war on drugs do something similar, making “race” a sign of criminality and thereby inoculating race-based police oppression from the charge of racism. But someone like Bush tends to alienate the various liberal hawks (“Our imperialism is Teh Awesome because it is Ours”) who have managed to forget that empire equals race.

By: Scrimshander

Scrimshander — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:50:38 +0000

Hey,

Oops. Digital greenhorn that I am, I must have forgotten that word-searches don’t (yet) filter for irony. Sorry about the p-word.

In any case, in the “self-critique” remark I was interested in the way that the justification of Bush-era violence seems to rely on a rhetoric that imagines national agency as transactions of interpersonal violence. There is an imputation of desire to harm that seems incommensurate with the metaphorical character of desire as a description of large-scale political action. In the case of lynching, conceived as a modern spectacle, the presence of singular victims may work to disguise the articulation of a systemic power structure as a response to dangerous desires that are actually out there in the world, harbored by specific persons who can be punished. In this case, the expression of power actualizes race instead of sublimating it. In the case of the Bush Doctrine, I wonder if the rhetoric somewhere contains a similar tactic of personalization, an imaginary Western-movie scenario, an actualization of national desires, whose logical end-point would be something like the argument of your present post. I think, though, that your next post finds a more direct way of getting at the way these representations work.

By: zunguzungu

zunguzungu — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:37:20 +0000

And I believe both Am. pres candidates are pretty much in agreement about this policy, no? yikes.

A propos, via reuters blog, I found this quote from a Pakistan Daily Times editorial:

“According to nuclear theory, Pakistan is a nuclear power and cannot be attacked. If the US attacks Pakistani territory, battles with the Pakistan army, stops military assistance to Pakistan, and thus ends up making Al Qaeda supreme in Pakistan, the nuclear theory might then apply to Al Qaeda.”

By: sepoy

sepoy — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:27:21 +0000

exactly. pardon my late-ness. but, US has an explicit “map” of Pakistan’s sovereign space. And they are counting on Pk to cede these tribal zones. the problems, as is always the case, is that the Pakis don’t share this mental jujitsu with their cartography. Yday’s dailies had pictures of PAK Air Force jets scrambling to intercept the drones. Fairly soon, they will bag one (or already have). What then? War?

By: Lynching, Shock and Awe, and other Violent Spectacles « zunguzungu

Lynching, Shock and Awe, and other Violent Spectacles « zunguzungu — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 16:31:59 +0000

[...] The “Bush Doctrine” is about Lynching [...]

By: zunguzungu

zunguzungu — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 16:27:35 +0000

Scrimshander,
Thinking through your comment is helping me clarify my thinking here, though I’d like to understand better what “begins as justification and concludes as self-critique” means. Anyway, I think you’re right on point in making “modernity” a key term, though I would use it not to distinguish between lynching and bombing, but to unite them, to make an argument that as modern, lynching was actually more like shock and awe than we are likely to realize if we think of it outside those categories. In other words, the argument is not that the GWOT is actually savage like lynching, but that lynching is actually modern like the GWOT, if that makes sense. I say that partly because I’ve spent the last week deciding that I mostly side with Frederick Cooper and against Berman on the term modernity, which (as he puts it) is a term “that confuses normative and analytic categories and reinforces the meta-narratives that it pretends to take apart.”

RE: the p-word, I once made the mistake of using the term as a metaphor for the ways spectacles of African culture get politically instrumentalized, and ever since have been on the receiving end of some very questionable google searches. Never again.

Also, Sepoy, I’ve been thinking about what you said; do you think the US expects some kinds of invasions of Pakistan’s soveriegnty to be ignored because they aren’t invasions of “real” Pakistani space (like Karachi) but of Pakistan’s own “frontier,” the so-called “tribal” zone? That’s just speculation–I know so little about the stuff you’re talking about–but there does seem to me to be (in the American media’s representations) a clear distinction between Pakistan and its “tribal” heart of darkness that might be understood in frontier language.

By: Scrimshander

Scrimshander — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 03:33:44 +0000

Nothing quite like metaphors drawn from the lexicon of the Western to show the extent to which contemporary foreign policy is already leaning on the fence with a rope in one hand and a loaded shotgun across its allegorically personified knee. I wonder what it means, though, that the Bush Doctrine can be so convincingly described in reference to a “global color-line” and yet has internalized or sublimated the signifier of race within a rhetoric of modernity. Whether or not the post is “too much,” as you say, seems bound up in whether your central metaphor is actually a metaphor, whether the transition it enables between scales of action (lynching vs. bombing) indexes an interpretive excess or a feature of the doctrine’s logic that begins as justification and concludes as self-critique.

I don’t feel prepared to decide that particular ambiguity, if it be decidable beyond one’s own ethical spider-sense, but if this post doesn’t rile people up, you can always start posting pornography.