Holocaust 2.0

The twilight of the American Empire, it thus appears, will be remembered for its endless kill lists and its codification of murder. -Ben Schreiner 

It is high time we learned to read the signs of the times. The epitaph above is taken from the recent Counterpunch article "Obama's Endless Kill List." In that article Schreiner briefly illuminates some of the key facts about Obama's drone program, including the administrative policy defining any military age male in so-called combative area as combatants, and the assumption of guilt unless proven innocent. Schreiner goes on to call our attention to the total credulity of those in government, and the absolute lack of challenge from the Republican quarter. Whatever the differences Obama and Romney both agree that killing poverty-stricken people in Pakistan is a good thing. And that is all that was said in the presidential debates, maybe not in those words.

The mainstream American media is onboard too, perpetuating an incredibly callous attitude human life, which, as an aside, I remember all too well from the attitudes of people around me at the onset of the Iraq war. Because the people being killed are so far away it is easy to lump them into some indiscriminate category of "the enemy" as though the people in question were simply elements in a video game. (This in fact was the exact attitude of some of the people who attended my high school.) Schreiner has this to say:

The callous absence of doubt is just apparently just as prevalent among elite U.S. media. For instance, in an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein chillingly sought to justify the gravest horror's of Obama's drone program. 

In a debate over drones with right-wing host Joe Scarborough Klein went on to aver: "The bottom line, in the end, is this: whose four-year old gets killed. What we're doing is limiting the possibility that four year olds here are going to get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror." 

The very fact that rationalizing the killing of children can freely emanate from amongst "respectable" circles in Washington is indicative of the severe moral deterioration from which the  Obama administration's drone program was born. (Obama's Endless Kill List)  

This is disgusting. The subtext of Klein's statement is perfectly clear; it is okay to kill the poor Arab Muslim child. But of course it isn't okay. When anyone, even a liberal American, starts to justify the murder of children then it is time to stop listening to that person. It is time to denounce them as cold-hearted killers and face the facts of what is going on. Murder is murder. Obama's drone program is not a foreign policy it is a brutally vicious extermination program. There are lists, lists of people who are condemned to die at the say-so of the American president without evidence, without trial, without justice. Anyone who gets in the way is "collateral damage."

The technology may have changed, but the game is the same. Welcome to Holocaust 2.0.

The Hiddenness of Time

The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was.

It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot 

in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it 

paid the outrage of ontology no mind. 

- China Mieville Iron Council 

By some strange happenstance or mystic wisdom I had the pleasure of reading China Mieville's Iron Council, while I was enrolled in a course on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. More specifically I read Iron Council as I was working through Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. The effect was electric and unsettling, particularly in the way both these authors engaged with themes of time,existence, and hiddenness. 

Everpresent in Bonhoeffer's theological project is the underlying theme of an "epistemology yielded on the basis of revelation," an idea he discusses explicitly in his post-doctoral work Act and Being. The world is known, in other words, not through empirical observation nor through a process of ratiocination, rather it is known only as it is revealed. In The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer addresses this theme around the binary of revelation/hiddenness. The true disciple of Christ knows only what is revealed to her or him through Jesus Christ, there is no unmediated relationship with the world, with others, or even with oneself. The reverse of this, therefore, is that much is left hidden. Revelation has its own rhythm, its own timing, over which the subject of knowledge has no control. It is given, by the spirit, in the moment it is needed. 

This is a mystery, yet not a mystical fusion of the I with the Oneness of Being. Precisely in its momentous character revelation is a matter of existence, and in existence there are always others. Indeed, for Bonhoeffer becoming a person is only possible through the other. He writes, "the individual becomes a person ever and again through the other, in the moment." (Sanctorum Communio). 

In Mieville's story there is a monk who, out of the pantheon of gods in the world of Iron Council, worships the God of the Moment. This God reveals knowledge to the monk at the necessary times. Yet the discipleship of the monk is not without cost, indeed it is at the cost of the monk's very self-knowledge that the revealing comes. Without giving too much away, as the tale progresses the monk, who has joined with a band of rebels and political outcasts in search of their comrades, loses more and more of her (or his) self-knowing as she seeks the revelation needed to make important decisions. 

Bonhoeffer and Mieville inhabit very different worlds. One a theologian, the other a writer of science fiction. Yet the mysteries of existence, and of time are strongly present. Discipleship, for both, is a costly endeavour, and yet in the end proves the very grace of life. 

It is grace, it is violence, it is passion. The Christian sense of time is not one of linear accumulation. Nor yet of circulation within an ontologically fixed field. The event of Christ is singularity, forever affixed existence within which existence can take place. 

This too is the mystery of the church, the presence of Christ on earth, already fulfilled and yet waiting. Hidden yet revealed. Perhaps the Church too, like Mieville's time golem" is a clot in diachrony, who with the dumb arrogance of its existence pays the outrage of ontology no mind. 

Or perhaps it should be so.