Language and Narrative
When Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses was published there were riots -- six killed in Islamabad, twelve in Bombay, four more in India, and hundreds injured.
The work is associated with riots, and with those who rioted or incited to riot, citing that work. It also has also caused people to think, a not unexpected consequence of a literary work. I haven't read it, but I've had to think about the issue -- abstracted from one of the foreign "People of the Book" cults and competition between exploiters of religious and humanist faiths common to the cultures that identify with those cults, to the domestic and its exploiters.
The Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality was adopted on June 10, 1993 at the Lakota Summit V, a non-governmental gathering of {d,l,n}akota people broadly reflective of more than just {d,l,n}akota mores. I don't know a single Indian who disagrees with the broad contours it contains, or with the The Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted 18 June 1993.
Intellectually, blasphemy is comprehensible. But when that vanity is set aside, it reduces to an ordering and ranking conflict in a culturally specific idiom, and one that has no organic equivalent. It taxes the Christian Indian, pulling at the Christian more than the Indian. The theft, or wanton destruction of cultural history, part of the theft of land (and William Myers, IIIrd does come readily to mind), and theft of indigenous knowledge (BigAg/BigPharma patents on traditional cultigens and human genes) is easier to quantify than "blasphemy".
Truly civil people do not put authors of fiction on the list of people to be executed, whether the author is Salmon Rushdie or Hymeyohsts Storm or ... Neither are truly civil people silent about the motives, and benefits of authors of works of fiction, or non-fiction.
The works of Newsweek, whether fiction or non-fiction, are not published in a language unknown to the human mind. The routine, non-criminal execution of unarmed wounded combatants in mosques, the horrendous tortures, the lies, the killings, the endless lies and the endless killings, those are the glyphs, the words, the parts of speech. War is the language, and the Bush regime is it author. The Newsweek article is just one narrative in this language. The Bush regime, and those who sail with it, are greatly benefited by the narratives of fear and violence, fabricated and real, more than the war profiteers of the Civil War, even the Second World War.
Newsweek may cause Americans to think about the war they are waging, whether it is forced, as a for-profit business operating under an actual dictatorship, to recant that the earth rotates, not about a center of Wag-the-Dog myth, but indifferently about its axis, and several others, or maintains a truth that discomforts subscribers and non-subscribers alike.
In the "poster war" that targeted the Anglo-American populations during the 1914-1918 civil war in Europe, the symbolic use of women portrayed as victims was particularly effective. The Germans behaved much like the Americans in 1914/15 in the Mons area, mopping up English troops cut off after the battle at Mons, rolling up the ad hoc humanitarian relief, arresting and holding for months without charges Belgians of all classes, starting with the Princess Maria de Croy and the Countess Jeanne de Belleville, who aided the cut-off and wounded, and Nurse Edith Clavell. The Huns bayonetted babies. The Huns put nurses up against the walls and shot them. These messages worked because there was a sequence of fact patterns that supported them generally.
A particularly nice illustration of the fate of Edith Clavell is in the extended area. Don't forget to read Riverbend.
