Michael Benson on Thu, 15 Jun 2000 18:58:11 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] re: "The wicked" and WW-3 |
Weber & Weber ask, rhetorically: >Are we just blowing smoke--or is it mushroom clouds? But it seems more like attempted comedy (or maybe that's just the only way these weird fantasies can reasonably be processed). If Dragan Nikolic is a "poor soul" -- I mean, that one deserves a whistle of appreciation! -- I suppose Ratko Mladic isn't an angel of death, but just an angel (admittedly, one with certain carnivorous tastes), and Radovan Karadzic is a kind of misunderstood clown -- Chaplinesque but with vaguely sadistic overtones (and never mind that he was responsible for raining high explosives down on Sarajevo for four years). As for Slobodan Milosevic, the poor guy, look how misunderstood _he's_ become. Then they rave on about how Russia "willingly" dissolved the Warsaw Pact -- this after Velvet and other revolutions had simply erased that sad alliance of slave states from history (further, the Warsaw Pact was a creation of the Soviet Union, Russia was one component part of that multinational empire, the rise to sovereignty of Russia under Yeltsin spelled the definitive demise of the Soviet Union, and anyway there was never any "understanding" with either the USSR or Russia that NATO would be dissolved -- either ratified-explicit or behind the scenes-implicit). Tom Keenan correctly points out that the Weber's bizarre "wicked hem in the righteous" mail is particularly offensive -- though again, another approach one could take is that it's a failed attempt at (gallows?) humor. We're told that "The Russians have protested, the Chinese government has demanded another investigation, and Yugoslav Minister of Information Goran Matic has asked the U.N. Security Council to disband its 'illegal, illegitimate and biased' war crimes tribunal and sack Carla Del Ponte without delay." Well, last time I checked, Russia had brought Chechnya to its knees (reducing Grozny to rubble and conducting massacres of civilians in the process) and, just two days ago, arrested the head of the only independent TV station left in the country. The Chinese government, which annexed Tibet and has almost totally destroyed Tibetan culture (not to mention massacring its own people in the notorious Tiennanmen bloodbath), also has every reason to protest international human rights tribunals and other inconvenient potential incursions into its sovereign right to do whatever it likes to one fifth of the world's population. As for citing such figures as Goran Matic, this is where the Weber's sense of humor truly comes into its own. Strangely, Weber & Weber seem simultaneously to position themselves in such a way that Eichmann-in-Jerusalem and Pinochet-in-London (the latter, alas, for such a short time!) serve as fitting examples of what the wicked ultimately can expect (in their case, of course, the wicked being Arbour, Del Ponte, and their "lynch mob" -- not Serbia's poor, misunderstood, victimized war criminals!). Here their inspired froth really makes the kind of cork-screw turns difficult for even hard-core aficionados of fractured logic to follow. But what the hey, Tom, we might as well read it on nettime -- it's not as if this kind of stuff can be taken very seriously anyway. What was it that Orwell wrote, about the left's lunatic fringe being its own worst advertisement? But probably I'm doing the Webers, and the left, a disservice. In aligning themselves with such noted humanists as Li Peng, Vladimir Putin, and Goran Matic, they've probably -- well, left -- even the looniest leftists far behind. Michael Benson Ljubljana _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold