Human Worth revisited

[Quotable "reduced" image here]

I think quite a bit about which quote to post first in each of these DoubleQuotes, generally wanting to close with the more forceful and unexpected twist, but also happy to open with the more surprising opening (the hook, as writers call it). Sometimes those two preferences agree with one another, sometimes they are in conflict -- and maybe you the reader's sense of which would be which might be different from mine, because the zing you get from the resonance between them may not be the same zing I get.

What's the striking contrast, what's the relevant parallelism here?

I can see thes etwo quotes as expressing a contrast between the US paying compensation to unfortunate victims of war, and the Saudis (and Saddam, back then) paying the families of deceased terrorists (victims and killers, respectively).

I can also see them as offering a parallel between the Palestinian suicide bomber who may sign up partly for the payment his family will receive, and the enraged Iraqi who has come to "await compensation from God to kill all of you in Iraq" in response to the death of his family -- two valuations of human life, each of which drives people to take up arms in the Islamist cause.

But what strikes me most clearly here is one simple sentence, spoken in shock: a question. Neither the Americans nor Saddam and the Saudis come out of these events with the logic of their respective civilizations intact, it seems to me, and I am far from endorsing the man's decision "to kill all of you" -- but that single, appalled, first question of his rings true for me as a question we might all want to ask:

Is this the logic of your civilization?

Christian Iraq

I've been thinking about the Conquistadors, and the sense in which the twin pillars of church and state translate quite readily into the two prongs of military and missionary persuasion when conquest or liberation is afoot, and how this in turn plays into the perception of crusade, which may in turn call forth its mirror image response, jihad...

Franklin Graham's missionaries following (accompanying?) US troops into Baghdad, then, and the reverse of that, the flight of Iraq's native Christians...

One more paradox in a world of unintended consequences...

Pen and Sword

I'm reminded of the machete that was also a flute in Samuel Delany's The Einstein Intersection, and for that matter of the guitar that was also a rifle wielded by Antonio Banderas in Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

Grasp of Strategy

Compare and Contrast:

The distance in strategic understanding between the Iranian clerics' worldview as described in an article in the current issued of Parameters, the US Army War College quarterly, and that of Al-Qurashi, the close lieutenant of OBL whose account of fourth generation warfare was published in the al-Qaida net journal Al-Ansar, is vast -- and significant at both ends.

It is particularly telling that Al-Qurashi reads (and quotes from) such sources as the Marine Corps Gazette and Parameters.

Sources:

Parameters: http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/parameters/04autumn/russell.htm
Al-Ansar via MEMRI: http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=middleeast&ID=SP34402

Supreme Quote

This one is simply bizarre.

The DOJ has apparently required the ACLU to remove a quote from a publicly available 1972 Supreme Court ruling from a brief that contains it. That is what the first of today's DoubleQuotes tells us, and obviously it points to a certain USSC quote which it might not be, ahem, judicious to quote in this context.

The second of today's DoubleQuotes, on the other hand, comes from a significant Supreme Court ruling given back in 1972, which appears to be the perfect response to the DOJ's ruling, coming as it does with the authority of the Supreme Court itself. Perhaps surprisingly or perhaps not, but certainly self-referentially, it is in fact the very quote that the DOJ wishes to suppress.

Truly Borgesian.

Anyone wishing to read the relevant texts in context can find them at:

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=16275&c=262
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=407&invol=297

I found out about this via Orcincus:

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_08_29_dneiwert_archive.html#109402054878675118