{"id":54505,"date":"2017-04-02T21:20:33","date_gmt":"2017-04-02T21:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=54505"},"modified":"2017-04-02T21:20:33","modified_gmt":"2017-04-02T21:20:33","slug":"footnoted-readings-03-violence-theirs-and-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=54505","title":{"rendered":"Footnoted readings 03 \u2013 Violence, theirs and ours"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — on analysis by symmetry, asymmetry, comparison, form ]
\n.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nVijay Prashad<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

Vijay Prashad<\/a><\/strong> writes in Jadaliyya <\/strong>under the title Violence: Theirs and Ours<\/a> and sub-head Binaries<\/strong>: <\/p>\n

I have spent decades thinking about the asymmetry of reactions to these sorts of incidents in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. I have written about them, indignation as the mood of these essays. But this is spitting into the wind. It is futile on Facebook, for instance, to make the suggestion that the 2016 Karrada bombings in Baghdad (Iraq), which killed over 300 people, should have driven people to turn their profile pictures into Iraqi flags (as the world had done after the 2015 Paris attacks, when 137 people were killed). \u201cJe Suis Charlie\u201d is easy to write, but not #AmiAvijit. Eyes roll when these gestures are urged, whether through bewilderment at their meaning or exhaustion at their sanctimoniousness. After all, the eye-roll suggests, how could one compare a satirical French magazine with obscure Bangladeshi bloggers who have been hacked to death? It takes an immense act of will to push editors to run stories on tragedies that seem distant even from the places where they occur. All eyes focus on the latest attack in Molenbeek, but few turn with the same intensity to look at the tragedies in Beirut or in Cairo.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, what interests me here is his mode of analysis by form: Prashad pays specific and repeated attention to binaries<\/strong> — symmetries and asymmetries. I think that’s a key move in analytic terms, and you can see it in play, again, in the way he phrases his concluding paragraph:<\/p>\n

From Lord Baring\u2019s Violent Shock to George W. Bush\u2019s Shock and Awe: this cannot be terrorism. It is the business of rational states. Terrorism is what the others do. Always.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Violent Shock :: Shock and Awe.<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Agree or disagree with Prashad’s analyses as you will, his method is one that I too have been focusing on here at ZP for a while now — that of emphasis on form<\/a> as a clue to analytic significance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — on analysis by symmetry, asymmetry, comparison, form ] . Vijay Prashad ** Vijay Prashad writes in Jadaliyya under the title Violence: Theirs and Ours and sub-head Binaries: I have spent decades thinking about the asymmetry of reactions to these sorts of incidents in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[527,46,526,859,45,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-analytic","category-charles-cameron","category-form","category-iraq","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54505"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54550,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54505\/revisions\/54550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}