dropping food in mindfields

Doug Millison millison at online-journalist.com
Mon Oct 15 17:15:08 CDT 2001


 "Organisation of Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation spokesman Alhaj
Fazel said: "When the food lands, these desperately hungry people will
simply rush towards it. Women and children are most vulnerable."
http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/shtml/NEWS/P10S1.shtml

In the English language, of course, this "will + verb" construction can
indicate an action taking place in the present, or a habitual action that
is repeated again and again, so Malign's argument is completely beside the
point and obfuscating  from the get-go -- it's not an unusual way for an
observer describe an action, especially not for somebody for whom English
might be a second language.

I find it curious that Malign is so desperate to deny the consequences of
the U.S. attack on Afghanistan that he/she would split hairs this way --
perhaps he/she is feeling a bit uneasy at the thought of babies being
killed because of our President's cowboy revenge?

By the way, on TV earlier today Rumsfeld excused the killing of civilians
by mis-targeted bombs (or were they those
million-dollar-each-no-war-profits-to-big-business missiles?) in general
throughout Afghanistan and specifically in the village of Karam by saying
that any civilians there would have been working for the Taliban. (In
virtually the same breath he admitted he didn't have enough information to
say how many civilians had been killed, or who they might have been.)
Anyway, I guess Rumsfeld was referring to the civilians who included a
"child barely two months old, swathed in bloody bandages"
(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/15/international/asia/15SCEN.html) as the
New York Times reported today.

Speaking of analogies, that's the same kind of excuse that apologists for
U.S. war crimes in Vietnam used to make for military actions that targeted
and killed (or maimed) children, old ladies, and other non-combattants --
they were accused, generally without proof, of working for the Vietcong.
And, maybe, sometimes they did, although most of them were coerced into
doing so with threats not unlike those that Bush has used to build his
"coalition".  It's that old "shoot them all and let God sort them out" kind
of thinking that has served the U.S. so well in its post-WWII military
engagements, just one of the many reasons we are so well-loved around the
world.



More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list