Hey, we're going to meet soon and I wanted to remind you about it, and also send along some quotes that I thought about while reading "Gender War" (chapter 4 of Tip of the Spear).

quotes & reflections

there was no tactical or strategic reason to show these videos to incoming cadets and that perhaps the footage was screened simply so that they could see what they had done, to appreciate it from an aesthetic point of view. It was to train the cadets—that is, to help them develop habits, thoughts, and/or behaviors (page 134)

through lynching photos white subjects construct their collective identity and group solidarity upon the substrate of Black subjection. (page 135)

The New York Times never printed a formal retraction of their false claim that the rebels had castrated a hostage, nor did the newspaper of record renounce the white supremacist theory of ontology that authorized the claim in the first place. (page 137)

maybe they saw that Casper was mad and therefore, that his claims had little value. Alternatively, they could have read the petition and believed Casper’s claims, but felt that no action was warranted because this is what happens, or should be happening, to "those people." (page 148)

This chapter was particularly difficult to read, and if you haven't read it yet, I can only offer that this chapter contains numerous detailed accounts of sexual and other obscene acts of violence, especially in the last 5 pages of the chapter.

I'm struck by the cold, methodical quality of so much of the violence that Burton narrates. By which I mean, the lynching in Omaha, the Attica massacre, and at the time of his research the murders of George Floyd and Eric Garner in the 2010s and 2020s in the recent memory of both him and the people he was interviewing.

I was also surprised to see the old cliche - "The New York Times never printed a formal retraction of their false claim..."; WAWOG continues to ask that the New York Times retract their fallacious account of child murder and gang rape on October 7 (the debunked "Screams Without Words" essay). Apparently the most consistent element of the NYT is a stubborn refusal to be accountable for stoking genocide.

video chat details

In about an hour (at 12pm ET) let's get together¹ and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

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supporting The Sameer Project

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