(fwd from Sharif M. Youssef) Fisk the Barbarian

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I admire Mr. Fisk for his willingness to have a visceral reaction to
violence in his journalism. At least it's not the usual sentimental
garbage we usually see, since sentimental emotions tend to extend only
as far as "our troops" and "our innocents." People who are trying to
shake things up don't always have time for the stomach turning twists
and turns of dialectical rhetoric. I'm certain that Fisk is right to
have little faith that the images of Sadaam's sons will "shake things
up" and provoke revolution in Iraq (the boon of dialectical thinking
is that it's not binary thinking). It's more likely that those images
will simply add fuel to the fire of the senseless violence of all
against all (which he's seen plenty of in Lebanon). If I'm
understanding correctly he's incorrect to object to the propagandistic
use of images on one day, yet when he fails to object to another
example of photographs of punished and mutilated bodies deployed
politically he's behaving equally badly? Damned if you do and damned
if you don't. Perhaps as he is familiar with the brutality of those
Hussein boys, and the complicity of their entire families (in this
war, even children and complicit), he can't bring himself to heave out
a gut reaction whatever he may believe in theory? Just a thought.