by VINICIUS VALENTIN RADUANMIGUEL
One year has passed since the Gaza War (2008-2009) and other seven years since the beginning of the Iraq War (2003- ). In human losses, more than 1440 Palestinians were killed and 1 million of Iraqis were dead since the beginning of the U.S. led occupation. For the purposes of the present text, the two conflicts will be analyzed together as exemplificative to the Orientalism and Imperialism. There are other reasons to consider the wars together: Both military operations were articulate in terms of a temporarily unlimited and unavoidable war. Furthermore, both wars were expressed as a battle against a faceless, loosely defined and territorially widespread, although threateningly close to us, enemy.
The adversary/other was meticulously described as oppositional to all occidental values, an evildoer in all senses having no aims but to impose the destruction of our virtues and our ethnocentrically cherished standards of liberty. Pari passu, the enemy/other was reconstructed, being carefully placed in the social imaginary as a purely oppressive regime capable of unscrupulous acts against its own people. This theatric drama is performed hiding that the colonized repressive violence was instrumentally used and has its roots at the opportunistic foreign policy of imperial lords; these same lords were benefitted by this despotic coercion, both economically and geopolitically.
ALAI for more