Hello world!

This website blog is devoted to the study of artistic and cultural images, in particular those found in dramatic literature and poetry, and their intersection with questions of human rights, in order to investigate the nature of international or ethnic conflict and the various relationships between perpetrators and victims of violence.  Our search is for some common sense of humanity within the ongoing tragedies that mark our time and to reject any dialectic that insists on describing these tragedies in absolute moral terms. 

Instead, we are interested in finding a path to action based on a deeper understanding of our collective security.  That security, which we all seek and too few enjoy, cannot be achieved without an awareness of the cultural, literary and profoundly felt self images embedded within various cultures caught up in political and ethnic hatreds that seem to drive so much of the violence in our world.

Political necessity has been invoked since the invasion of the Island of Melos by the Athenians, in 416 BC as “necessary” for the preservation of  state based security aims.   And yet actions taken by various nation states or non-state entities in the name of this necessity are open to challenges as to the nature of this necessity or the moral basis on which it is invoked.

As William Aerosmith states in his introduction to the play Hecuba, by Euripedes: “  Necessity — what it is, when it arises, what it entails in action — is not easy to know, especially from the point of view of those who hold power.   But just because necessity is hard and because the justification it gives — in politics in love, in war — is unanswerable, it is the justification most frequently debased.  Hecuba is not tormented by the calculating cruelty of two vicious politicians but  is a victim of men, (Agamemnon and Odysseus)  in the process of corruption by a power whose real necessities they understand no better than their own motives.  Necessity cloaks their fear and their arguments for her suffering are all based on the mistaken premise of  the insensitivity of the mass to moral considerations.    In the disparity between facts and their arguments, justice withers, while the callous shifting of responsibility from the those in power to the mass dooms political life by depriving it of either trust or the illusion of moral action.”

Ethan Bonner, in his recent analysis in the New York Times on the war in Gaza, compared his role as journalist to that of “the despised chorus of a Greek tragedy:

“It turns out that both narration and mediation require common ground. But trying to tell the story so that both sides can hear it in the same way feels more and more to me like a Greek tragedy in which I play the despised chorus. It feels like I am only fanning the flames, adding to the misunderstandings and mutual antagonism with every word I write because the fervent inner voice of each side is so loud that it drowns everything else out.”

He goes onto suggest that neutrality appears impossible in a conflict where even the vocabulary of basic ideas, self descriptions and identity is so violently conflicted by either side.   There are many reasons for the various extremist views taken by all sides in the conflict between Israel and Palestine.  But again, like Hecuba the once noble queen who resorts to her own level of barbarity by blinding a perpetrator and murdering his sons, it should not be too difficult to understand why some are so dehumanized by the political necessity of others they in turn, are debased to the point of  radicalism.

More to come -