I wasn’t going to write about the latest Atlantic genocide apologia. Once the author, Eliot Cohen, threw in a dunderheaded comparison between anti-war activists and “defund the police” movement I got so mad I had to stop reading.
Then this came across my timeline and Jon Schwarz refuses to go back in time, Deep Space Nine style, to erase it from my brain.
It’s been a fruitful intellectual season for those of us who got pointless degrees in the humanities. Semiotics!
Why the obsession with rape? Bestial rape in Gaza (of which there’s no credible evidence. (CAVEAT!: I’m not saying no one was sexually assaulted! But the discourse consists of totally unbelievable depictions of poorly sourced witness accounts that read like the standard historical rape fantasies meant to portray an “other” as non-human). The rape obsession represents the invasion of the body politic, represented by young fertile women (as I said before, there’s a reason the Nazis were obsessed with pale blonde women. The future of the Volk, etc).
And the “immigrant rapists” Trump and the right-wing press are obsessed with (and which liberals tacitly support by not putting out a forceful pro-refugee language). A continent away, in a tiny town on the border of Turkey and Bulgaria, I had the following exchange about the young Syrian refugees in a camp in the town.
“They rape children,” a nine-year-old kid told me. “Yes, his friend added. “They raped a child in a house in town.” (They did no such thing). Then everyone else was obsessed with the refugees “carrying knives.” Penetration, invasion, is everything about fucking?
Going back to Mr. Cohen. His weird sex analogy to bombs—sex and death, are we (a)rousing the corpse of Freud like he snorted cocaine? The headline somberly intones:
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