The above is quoted in the spirit of fair use for political speech, and is the copyrighted property of NBC Universal.
It's quoted because what seemed a belief-defying abstraction then is very concrete now, and we can draw conclusions about people based on what they have to say today about what we saw then.
Knowing, as we do now, that what was broadcast, what we're seeing, were the last moments of Juliana McCourt and her mother Ruth, who boarded a morning flight to LA. Their transport was hijacked by four zealots, who slaughtered the flight crew with boxcutters, and carried out their purpose of murdering a planeful of people in order to murder thousands of people.
If you have any humanity, you can't not put yourself in the place of a parent, with a child, seeing the slaughter carried out, seeing what the zealots' accomplices had done, what they were going to do to your four-year-old daughter. If there is hell on Earth, those moments of knowing her fate while being unable to do anything about it, knowing this was a calculated, willful action, are it.
So, the venom spat out by Mari Pili Hernandez, intended to keep her in the good graces of the sycophancy she profits from. From the asinine (where is this suicide with a vest of explosives detonating himself? If he liquifies himself alone, he's a suicide. If he kills others, the murder is intended to propagate terrorism, Hernandez) to the lies ( servicemen the likes of Linnde England perpetrated the scandal in Agu Ghraib, but it was serviceman Joseph Darby who uncovered the evidence and turned it over for criminal investigation; the images were broadcast as an indictment, not "to let the world know that they can do anything, that they're above all human beings, above anything that can be considered human" --although that interpretation tells us an awful lot about what Chavistas would do with the power they envy and covet so), to the appetite for collective guilt ( note the zeal in describing attacks against people who look like family members (!) of the "guilty", against people who share the same nationality as the "guilty") and the twofer dismissal of Cuban state abuses/ championing Taliban combatants held in Guantanamo (think they'd trade places with any Venezuelan jail, Hernandez? The Supreme Court sided with Saddam's driver in settling what sort of tribunal to face - a better day in court than any of Tio Fidel's dissidents have ever seen), the agitprop is telling.
That such a mediocre talent was given a position as Deputy or Under-Secretary of State for North America tells us why cash-flush Chavismo is so popular: if you can be given jobs for which you are unfit simply because you are a loyal sycophant, then there will be a limitless supply of opportunists eager to follow suit.
But it's the defense of the Saudi/Yemeni head zealot, the radical son (seventh of fifty siblings) of a self-made wealthy father, that transcends. The zealot, radicalized by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (and we can guess where the Chavistas would have been vis-avis the Soviets), his religious fervor enraged by the presence of American "crusaders" in Saudi Arabia ( to assist in repelling Friend-Of-Hugo Saddam's invasion of Kuwait), holy to the followers of Mohammed-- can this be the multimillionaire mastermind of "the most sophisticated operation known in history" ( D-Day? Y eso con que se come?) that Hernandez sympathizes with? Teaching a lesson to the purported "assassins of his people" ( Saudis? Afghans? Yemenis? Moslems? A lesson for the same people that went to war to save the Moslems of Bosnia and Kosovo, Hernandez?)
Teaching Juliana McCourt a "lesson" - that's what this is to you, Hernandez?
Beyond opportunism, sycophancy, beyond cynicism, Hernandez exemplifies what Hannah Arendt spoke to us of: the banality of evil. Just as this Palestinian cartoon does
If I had the power of curses, I'd curse Hernandez and the author of this cartoon to spend eternity living what Juliana McCourt and her mother lived through in the moments we see in the broadcast, the moments the cartoonist cheers, and the moment whose architect Hernandez is reptilian enough, immoral enough, to lionize, for her own profit.
It's the work of that cartoonist, of Hernandez, it's that what we witness above
-rather than revelations retracted by a Meccan, or Salman Rushdie's prose- that are Satanic verses, written in the blood of the blameless.
2 comments:
I love you mention of Hanna Arendt's banality of evil, I was thinking about that the other day... I am not sure if we can compare Eichmann with Hernandez though, I mean, Hernandez should know better, we don't live in 1939 anymore... and yes, there's a lot of this banality that Arendt spoke to us in the world these days, more than on WWII I would dare to say. (Case in point, your article about China, they all love China, nobody cares anymore for human rights or what?), and we are not talking that the majority of this idiots are evil people of have some kind of mental problem, like Hugo. They all behave like sheeps. I don't get it and it really makes me so pessimistic about our future. Maybe it's true that the world will end in 2012 :(
feathers - that goes to Arendt's point, that Eichmann, on examination, was an undistinguished, unexceptional man,
and that the people who perpetrated great evil weren't some Goyaesque nightmares, but people like us. Which is, of course, chilling.
You can compare Eichmann with Hernandez in that they're both unexceptional people functioning as willing, self-serving cogs in populist, demagogic social-political-military movements that are predicated on division and demonizing those who aren't sufficiently pure- Aryan, Rojo Rojito, what have you.
There's no comparing what Eichmann was responsible for with the petit-mal vile sucking-up that Hernandez emits, but in terms not of what they've done, but what they are, lo mesmo, come dicen.
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