I'd always been under the impression that you had to try and harm someone else to be making war, but apparently not any longer: hanging yourself with your blanket in a prison cell now counts as an act of war.
Update, 12/06/06: There's been a fair and entirely justified amount of oppobrium heaped on the US government's clearly morally bankrupt official line, but I think that the most thoughtful thing I have read about it is this, which, having discussed and endorsed the Kantian view that suicide, because it treats human life as an end not a means, is morally culpable, ends:
[The suicides'] personhood was already being used as mere means, by their jailers, and their suicides put an end to that abuse, as the abuse of slavery is ended when the slave dies attempting to escape. What we would say of the slave is, not that he lacks regard for human life, but that he shows precisely that regard which is appropriate to it. I would say the same of the Guantánamo suicides.
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7 comments:
This is disgusting, not to say disturbing - compare the attitude revealed by this statement with that of Moazzam Begg's captor ("I convince myself each day that you guys are all subhuman – agents of the devil – so that I can do my job. Otherwise I’d have to treat you like humans, and we don’t do this to people where I come from.")
But I think a more significant parallel is with Baader, Ensslin and Raspe, whose deaths - almost certainly at their own hands - were the single most effective piece of political propaganda they ever achieved, and may have been planned as such. It sounds as if somebody somewhere has been reading the literature. (Not reading it very well, though - the phrase is 'asymmetric warfare'. 'Asymmetrical warfare' would be merely inelegant.)
I've seen the Richter paintings, I think in New York. There is something, in common with the rest of his work, quite disturbing about them: the flatness, the lack of affect, which seems to deliberately draw attention to itself and so what is missing.
I suppose the parallels with the Baader-Meinhof group are fairly clear. It seems unlikely that three suicides occurred independently in Guantanamo on the same day, so collusion is probable. Whether that means that these three knew of the German three is another matter. It's not like revolutionary socialist idealism has a monopoly on ideas of self-sacrifice.
The attitude of their captors, though, is just outright disgusting.
By 'somebody somewhere' I meant the jailers and their bosses, not the prisoners.
As you say though, if they have been reading it, not very well, since calling suicides an act of war surely can't have been a very successful PR strategy.
Well said. To call the suicides an act of war is maliciously absurd.
If we're thinking history of ideas, there's a much longer trail back, surely, than the Baader Meinhof three. Both for the suicides,and for their antagonist/guard convincing himself that these 'guys are subhuman'. Back at least to the Athenians in Sicily who were saved from the death quarry in Syracuse because they could convince their captors that they were human and worth saving because they could recite dramatic poetry. So how far forward (or backward) have we got in two and a half thousand years? Do not write on both sides of the page at once.
Yeah, that's, in this context, fair enough: think of Socrates' execution - as I understand it, he could have left, but chose to take poison, partly as a political gesture and partly out of desperation, at the possibility of being excluded from the political community he thought mattered. On the dehumanisation angle, think of what, so far as I know, the etymology and meaning of barbarian in Ancient Greek: baba from the noises made in imitation of speaking by non-Greeks, those outside the Polis, the original Gods and Monsters.
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