"will Johnny Depp play Osama bin Laden"?

[frandroid]

That's the amusing question theoria asks in this entry, which he wrote in 2005 but I only got around to read now:

Jon Beasley-Murray wrote a few weeks ago, “it is the terrorists who are the inheritors of piracy’s historic tradition.” It is surprising that it has taken this long for attention to be drawn to the similarities between pirates of the early modern era to terrorists of the postmodern era — or, perhaps, the similarity is in reverse? Such similarities do lead one to pose an essential question, one that Jon has been silent on: in the Walt Disney superproduction, “Terrorists of Arabia”, will Johnny Depp play Osama bin Laden and can Orlando Bloom pull off a convincing Saddam Hussein? Only time will tell.
[...]
The problem that terrorism provokes, and the lack of ‘moral authority’ in combatting it, is simply a matter of law: [According to Burgess,] "What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism."
[...]
Homo sacer is sacred man “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (Homo Sacer, 8). The terrorist as hostis homini generis and homo sacer meets the essential question of the contemporary biopolitical arrangement: is a life of terrorism “a life worthy of being lived” (Homo Sacer, 137)? If it is not ‘a life worthy of being lived’, the life has no value as such and is thus reduced to a variable in a calculation: should the life continue to live? The answer, of course, for Burgess, Bush and Blair alike is “no”.

theoria rightly expresses his doubts on this, since you always end up with freedom fighters being confused with terrorists; furthermore, just going around and killing terrorists is not going to solve the political problems underlying terrorism. Terrorism is the symptom of the imperial malady mixed with local volatile elements... Killing terrorists only reaffirms the imperial conditions and is most likely to make the symptoms worse.

What I like is how theoria then delves into the relationship between this proposal by Burgess to make terrorists into hostis homini generis (enemies of the human race!) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and finally and mostly this short quote from Giorgio Agamben I believe (refugees are mentioned due to terrorists being "reverse-refugees" in the view of states):

The concept of the refugee (and the figure of life that this concept represents) must be resolutely separated from the concept of the rights of man, and we must seriously consider Arendt’s claim that the fates of human rights and the nation-state are bound together such that the decline and crisis of the one necessarily implies the end of the other. The refugee must be considered for what he is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from the birth-nation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights (Homo Sacer, 134).

I have nothing to add.

Comments

[theoria.livejournal.com]

I expect that you will receive comments on this post in roughly four years! I had "forgotten" I wrote that - even though it is one of the most popular pages on my site thanks to someone linking to it from Wikipedia.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

So, any thoughts on the emboldened Pirates of Somalia? :]

[theoria.livejournal.com]

Obviously, I'm a huge fan. I don't think - or at least I'm not aware of - there is much known about their social organization, which is an important part of historical piracy. I like this picture of some pirates in prison.

Piracy is likely to be the academic industry of 2009 - at least three books I'm aware of. Two on historical piracy and one on Somali piracy.