Hello readers!

These last couple of weeks in my ASTU class, we have been reading a collection of articles and poems surrounding the “War on Terror”. Judith Butler’s book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? poses many questions about which lives societies find valuable and invaluable in situations such as war. She asks “What is our responsibility toward those we do not know toward those who seem to test our sense of belonging or to defy available norms of likeness?”(36). Butler loosely answers her question about who the “we” and “them” are by stating “We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. The ungrievable life is one that can not be mourned because it has never live, that is, it has never counted as a life at all” (38). A life that is considered grievable, then, is one that shares similarities to us wether that be through nationality, religious affiliation, or simple proximity to us. Therefore, when Butler refers to people who have “never lived”, she is referring to the those people in third world countries thousands of miles away, whose lives have never effected ours and whose insignificance in the political matters of the world are greater than their significance. However, Butler uses the example of post 9/11 mourning to show that even proximity cannot make a life mourn able if the government doesn’t want it to be, stating that because public grieving was dedicated to making the images of the victims iconic for the nation, “..there was considerable less public grieving for non-US nationals, and none at all for illegal workers” (38).

To answer some of her many questions and bring new ones in to play, Butler cites Talal Asad and his book On Suicide Bombing, which I happen to have read. Asad’s book poses many questions similar to Butler, such as the grievability of life, and more mainly why certain ways of killing are condemned and others are accepted. Focusing on the act of suicide bombing, Asad states that “suicide bombing does not kill as many civilians as conventional warfare, and yet people react to them with exceptional horror” (65). He mentions that the horror might be found in the fact that while aerial strikes take place mostly in the context of war, suicide bombing can disrupt daily life; the attacker having the capability of walking around publicly, un noticed before the attack. Another part of the horror he pointed out, could be the fact that the attacker dies with his victims, while western warfare praises the act of dropping bombs,    “dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant, it is somehow deemed, by western leaders at least, to be morally superior” (66). Scholars such as Butler and Asad have proposed the idea that in order for western nations to avoid guilt over their senseless killing through aerial bombing and other war tactics, they have made the public believe that war is necessary for survival. This kind of thinking leads people to accept the death of the “other” or the proposed “them”, because as Butler states, “When a population appears as a threat to my life, they do not appear as “lives”, but as the threat to life” (42). Therefore, one could say that in our world, lives are not actually lives until the media or the government tells us that they are.

Why do we accept certain ways of murder and condemn others? Is it a matter of ignorance, or lack of education? Is the acceptance a product of our modern western lifestyles in which we are too busy or simply do not care enough to question the beliefs and feelings that the media and our governments are instilling in us? I don’t know, but until the blind acceptance changes, not very much else will.

Until next time,

Mia Spare

Works Cited

• Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Print.

• Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?London: Verso, 2010. Print.