Paris attacks: Unimaginable horror but imaginable violence (by Nora Loreto, blogger for Rabble.ca)

[Ken Burch]

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/nora-loreto/2015/11/paris-attacks-unimaginable-horror-imaginable-violence

The unimaginable happened last night in Paris.

Unimaginable: people randomly targeted on a night out, gunned down either senselessly, or as an act of revenge against a government’s foreign policy. Or both.
Either way, families and friends now mourn the dozens dead in Paris, the victims of tragic, unimaginable acts.

Unimaginable. Unimaginable for whom?

Violence is only unimaginable for the most privileged among us.

Watching the horror unfold in Paris last night, unimaginable wasn't what I thought about. It was: imaginable. Because in a society where violence against women, radicalized people, queer people, trans and non-binary people is the norm, violence isn't just imaginable, it's something we think about. All the time.

Imagine not feeling safe at a concert. Imagine not feeling safe at a café.

I do imagine that. Regularly.

Patriarchy and white supremacy define who is and who is not allowed to feel safe. These two forces operate together to give some people the privilege of demanding security while at the same time, reminding everyone else that they’ll never feel entirely comfortable or safe.

The height of freedom in the West is our personal safety. Random acts of terrorism are so evil, so barbaric precisely because they shake the collective notion of security to its core.

This is why terror tactics and terrorism are so effective. With the dominant media frame in the West driven by white men, terrorism is so horrible not because of the effect, but because it exposes how unsafe we really are.
Most of us are never safe: from gendered or racialized violence, from car accidents, from whatever. But when the men who frame the narrative discover what it's like to live under constant threat of violence, it's as if there could be no act more horrible than this.

[msongs]

1. there we were at this wedding and suddenly from out nowhere BLAM and dozens were dead nt

[Ken Burch]

2. OK...you want to pretend that all Friday means is "Muslims are evil".

Never mind that that it isn't that simple, that we don't even know for sure who the hell actually did it. or that MOST OF THE WORLD'S MUSLIMS HAVE CONDEMNED THE KILLINGS.

What the link points out is that this is actually a lesson in the nature of violence in life.

Oh, and in the Eighties, our bandit fascist army in Nicaragua(a.k.a., The Contras) used American weapons to shoot up weddings. muslims didn't invent that.