[-empyre-] is there a global horror just around the corner?

[simon]

the discussion wants to open its eyes and ears to the truth of terror 
and violence and insists or in some cases concedes - in very general 
terms, forgive me - that the vicious circle of 
perpetration-victimisation-witnessing expresses or even communicates 
politics, as if it were the mere technics of politics, the support for 
the image, but has not acknowledged - I will be wrong and embarrassed to 
be so as soon as I say - that it /is/ politics, not by convention, not 
by association, representation or performance, except that 
perpetrator-victim-witness enact politics: there is a political act in 
progress in violence and terror as these are engaged here and now. As 
violence and terror are engaged (in) as spectacle, they are here now; 
and as they are sometimes elsewhere - although always the threat this 
will suddenly alter, as with the precautions taken in anti-terrorist 
measures, or given voice to at the G20 - they are here too in our 
immediate milieux of communication, information: what collapses distance 
is not the horror but that the horror has a political function. 
Neoliberal reforms in education equally eliminate critique to a purpose. 
If the distance is historic, the proximity is in direct proportion to 
the political charge, even residue and fall-out, or ramifications of a 
past politics to us, in us, today. We feel still the fall of the empires 
of the 19th century even as so many 'senseless' wars have been fought in 
the name of empire; the senselessness of violence is not an index to its 
not making political sense. It made and makes sense for the US to have 
and to continue to support divisive and even Jihadist factions and 
factionalisation - everywhere in general. Fear is not the secret power 
invoked to paralyse populations, rather the forceful determination of 
and on a political agenda is the open secret of power. Fear is the 
projection. Fear is the knowledge that every individual will prove the 
rule by exception should he or she, you or I, criticise the Global War 
On Terror - and so become the enemy, terrorist, stuck in a cycle, where 
now the neoliberal democratic state is the perpetrator, the public is 
constructed as witness and this week's next top victim is... ...Is it 
possible to talk about a political intention in accelerating violent 
imagery, collapsing historical precedence, dividing societies by 
reversing meanings, that debt will be credit, that risk and danger will 
be security, that wars are humanitarian, that is eradicating rights 
because they threaten democracy, privatising and marketising weapons 
manufacture, including nuclear arms, while directing their deployment in 
a controlled market of the senseless consumption of living flesh, 
enslaving governments to corporations, while violently overthrowing 
states who fail to surrender sovereignty or economic self-determination? 
Is there a bigger horror being prepared just around the corner? - a 
naive question, I know.

Thank you,
Simon
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