The Manifest Horror: Ministers of Death, Praying for War

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hundredmillionlifetimes

Banned
Timely, as an ex-prime minister and wanted war criminal converts from one form of Christianity to another (he must be really envious of the Catholic Church's 2,000-year history of mass slaughter and systematic abuse):

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1. Soldiers at Fort Jackson Army Base pose with their rifles and Bibles.
2. A Hamas suicide bomber posing with a rifle and a copy of the Koran.

"The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says the two photos show how the infiltration of fundamentalist Christianity in the US military is starting to mirror Islamic fundamentalism."

Military Evangelism Deeper, Wider Than First Thought

This is my rifle, this is my gun
This is for fighting, this is for fun
 
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hundredmillionlifetimes

Banned
Perhaps other examples of paradoxical image juxtapositions are called for, particularly those that reveal some ominous, disturbing truths about relations between East and West that the latter prefers to actively suppress?

Another notorious recent case in contrapuntal image hermaneutics is this:

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1. The doctored soft-focus photo on the cover of Azar Nafisi's memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran was originally taken in February 2000.
2. The actual context: A reformist newspaper that the two Iranian students were reading was cropped from the original shot.

I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that in the space of the front and back covers of Reading Lolita in Tehran we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage "girls" and on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism himself.

The evident act of provoking this colonial trait on the cover of Azar Nafisi's book is not the end of what this cover does. There is more, much more, to it. In fact the case of this cover provides an intriguing twist on Roland Barthes' binary opposition between the denoted and connoted messages of a photograph and its caption. The twist rests on the fact that the picture of these two teenagers on the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is in fact lifted from an entirely different context. The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.

The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are "Reading Lolita"--with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of "in Tehran." In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading "Lolita" strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem. From : Hamid Dabashi, Native informers and the making of the American empire.
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The fact that the author of RLT is a well-known, well-connected, and well-funded neocon, employed by the principle doctrinaire of neo-conservatism Paul Wolfowitz (when he was the head of SAIS), endorsed by the most diabolical anti-Muslim neocon alive Bernard Lewis, and promoted by a scandalous PR firm like Benador Associates, and many other similar indications are all entirely tangential to the substance of my critique which as you read in my essay is the tenor and diction, message and narrative of RLT itself—namely the portrayal of a figment of imagination called “the West” as the arbiter of truth and salvation, and the dismissal of “non-Western” cultures as banal and diabolical.
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hundredmillionlifetimes

Banned
swears said:
Oh c'mon...as if people wouldn't just assume that was a stock photo anyway.
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... but not a doctored, Orientalist-serving one. The book, IIRC, was a best-seller.

Gavin said:
My cousin joined the Marines and came back a raving racist!
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One of my Aunts, a nurse-turned-Catholic nun, after spending 40 years doing 'missionary work' in Africa (25 years in Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe, and a further 15 years in South Africa), retired home a benevolent racist.
 
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heroesandvillains

Lono ̴
mixed_biscuits said:
That rock-on gesture is indeed deeply, deeply sinister.

Get a grip, people. :rolleyes:
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It's not that gesture that makes it scary, but it's that coupled with the bible toting killers that generally exemplifies everything wrong with that attitudes of our soldiers....

"yeaaaa I'm in the Army I'm gonna kill me some towelheads in the name of jesus rock onnnn!!!"
 
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