Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 00:12:25 -0700 (PDT) From: Bryan C <bunnyoncoke-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: Terrorism and Vietnam Although I am horrified and angered at the recent events, I feel we should resist emphatically the recent polemic imperatives of battle. This point was given a new urgency for me when I realized that in less than 9 months I will be forced to sign a draft card. The utter futility of seeking to battle such unconventional warfare with a WWII-era battle narrative can be exemplified by our failure in the Vietnam War. "It is impossible here to convey the full scope and depth of this counterstrategy of the (non-European) 'other.' But perhaps the essence of its otherness can be suggested by invoking some of the most persistent reactions to it by those American soldiers actually fighting the war in Vietnam. As opposed to the ideologically compelled confidence of the government bureaucracy in Washington and the Military Command in Saigon (MACV) which were conducting it from an enormous topological and mental -- one might say 'panoptic' distance from the human carnage, the immediately engaged American soldier was confused ('spooked') and frustrated by the uncanny invisibility of the 'enemy': I saw cruelty and brutality I didn't expect from our people against the villagers...In this type of fighting it was impossible to know who the enemy was at any one time... To evoke the terms of posthumanist theory...the counterstrategy of the NLF and the NVA could be said to constitute a deliberate refusal to accommodate the imperative of presence informing the cultural, political, and military practices of the United States. American military tactics and practice were determined by a 'technological' -- end-oriented and ethnocentric -- mindset that perceived the differential complexities of Vietnamese life and the actual conditions of the war (the 'problem') in spatial or panoptic terms. It was a perspective that represented the dislocating otherness as a microcosmic 'world picture' or (tactical) map in which ever resistant (differential) thing/event could be, in the term Heidegger employs to characterize the essence of technology, 'enframed' (Gestell) or, in Foucault's term 'disciplined' -- compelled into its proper place in the gridded whole and pacified -- and reduced to 'standing reserve' (Bestand) or 'useful and docile body' (the 'solution'). In opposition the NLF and NVA simply obscured this representational map, blurred the categorical distinctions necessary to the restrictive narrative economy of the panoptic gaze." (WilliamSpanos, Heidegger and Criticism, 1993, p.200-1) The parallels in the (counter)strategy of terrorism and Vietnam are obvious. The "enemy" refuses to become "mappable" (as demonstrated by the failed attempt at killing Bin Laden by bombing his terrorist camps) or to restrict the "war" into a narrative structure (having a beginning, middle, and end). The leadership, military, and citizenry have become terrified at the aspect of this (counter)strategy which defies the Occidental framework ultimately culminating in brutal policies. The terrorists fail to whither under the leveling gaze of our foreign policy panopticon. Spanos later details the destruction of the Vietnamese rice culture when the US a tore out their rice fields and planted a new "better" (more nutritional) kind of rice. What the US neglected was the fact that Vietnamese culture was based on a specific method of rice cultivation. Our technocratic mindset allowed us only to perceive rice as a food-crop, neglecting the value it had to the Vietnamese and ultimately destroying their culture. Similarly, the US's cultural exportation of our "liberated" (lol) sexual practices and bourgousie materialism are destroying the Islamic culture (whether "liberating" Islamic women is right or wrong is debatable, but such practices definitely create resentment.) Again I want to emphasize that none of this is meant to legitimize the brutal acts of 9/11, but merely to remove the state from its favored position as the sole site of legitimate violence, and to force us to recognize the role the US plays in the creation of the horrors of the last week. __________________________________________________ Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help? Donate cash, emergency relief information http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Emergency_Information/
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