How the Brutalized Become Brutal
The horrific pictures of the beheading of
American reporter James Foley, the images of executions of alleged
collaborators in Gaza and the bullet-ridden bodies left behind in Iraq
by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant are the end of a story, not
the beginning. They are the result of years, at times decades, of the
random violence, brutal repression and collective humiliation the United
States has inflicted on others.
Our terror is delivered to the wretched of the earth with industrial
weapons. It is, to us, invisible. We do not stand over the decapitated
and eviscerated bodies left behind on city and village streets by our
missiles, drones and fighter jets. We do not listen to the wails and
shrieks of parents embracing the shattered bodies of their children. We
do not see the survivors of air attacks bury their mothers, fathers,
brothers and sisters. We are not conscious of the long night of
collective humiliation, repression and powerlessness that characterizes
existence in Israel’s occupied territories, Iraq and Afghanistan. We do
not see the boiling anger that war and injustice turn into a caldron of
hate over time. We are not aware of the very natural lust for revenge
against those who carry out or symbolize this oppression. We see only
the final pyrotechnics of terror, the shocking moment when the rage
erupts into an inchoate fury and the murder of innocents. And, willfully
ignorant, we do not understand our own complicity. We self-righteously
condemn the killers as subhuman savages who deserve more of the violence
that created them. This is a recipe for endless terror.
