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Today's
Stories
April
14, 2004
Tom
Reeves
Return to Haiti: an American Learning
Zone
Reza
Fiyouzat
Japan and Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
What Bush Really Said
Diane
Christian
The Real Passion Story: We Rule; You
Die
April
13, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
The Ill, Old and Young of Fallujah Ask:
"Do We Look Like Fighters?"
Stan
Goff
The Bridge: a Rant
Dave
Lindorff
The Real Lessons of Vietnam
April 10
/ 12, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Greatest Radical Journalist of His Age
Patrick
Cockburn
Ambush, Kidnap, Murder: Another Day in "Post War" Iraq
Ellen Cantarow
Health Under Siege on the West Bank
Tariq Ali
Iraqi
Resistance: a New Phase
Werther
Pseudoconservatism Revisited: When God is Pro War & Other Delicacies
Robert
Fisk
Bush's War Lords to Their Critics: "Just Shut Up"
Gary Leupp
Indian Wars, Vietnam and Orientalist Fantasy
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Cont.
Jorge Mariscal
Perils of the Bootstrap
Phil Gasper
Defying Stereotypes About Death Row
Dave Zirin
Bringing the Black Freedom Struggle Into Sports: an Interview with Lee
Evans
Brandy
Baker
The Revolution is Playing at a Theater Near You
Mickey Z.
Underground Music is Free Media: an Interview with Twiin
Ali Tonak
Get Ready for the Million Worker March
Harry Browne
Asking the Wrong Question About Richard Clarke & 9/11
Gideon
Samet
The Sharonizing of America
Conn Hallinan
Remote Control Warriors
Website
of the Weekend
Taboo
Tunes
April 9,
2004
Robert
Fisk
This
War's Simple Truth: Iraqis Do Not Want Us
John L.
Hess
The
Non-Confessions of a Warrior Princess: Condi on the Stand
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Condoleezza's Condescensions
Christopher Brauchli
Holes in the Sky: Bush's Crazed Missile Defense Plan
Don Santina
Forget the Alamo!: Glorifying the Fight for Slavery in Texas
William S. Lind
The 4G Warfare Seminar, Cont.
Bill Christison
9/11
Commission is Bush's New Lapdog
Website of the Day
What We've Done to Fallujah
April 8, 2004
Wayne Madsen
Rice
(and the Record) Proves It: Bush Knew, But Failed to Act
Kurt Nimmo
Will
Bush Flatten Fallajuh?
Patrick
Cockburn
Guided
Missile; Misguided War
Laura Flanders
Steamed
Rice
Larry Everest
What Condi Rice is Hiding
Adam Federman
Sacred Capitalism Hits Russia
M. Junaid
Alam
The Iraqi Intifada Begins
Norman Solomon
The Quest for a Monopoly on Violence
Douglas
Valentine
Echoes
of Vietnam: Phoenix, Assassination and Blowback in Iraq
Website of the Day
Xispas: Chicano Art, Culture and Politics
April 7,
2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Those
Pulitzers!
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Deeper
into the Mouth of Hell: We Must Find the Exit from Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Tet
in Iraq: Closer to the Cosmic Disaster?
Patrick
Cockburn
Battles
Across Iraq: US Death Toll Mounts
Kathy Kelly
Pacification: Worth the Price?
Sonali
Kolhatkar
What Are You Doing About Afghanistan?
Rahul Mahajan
Report from Baghdad: Opening the Gates of Hell
Robert
Fisk
US Airlifts Saddam to Qatar
Mike Whitney
America Out of Iraq, Now!
Sam Hamod
Bush, Pandora's Box and the Tiger
April 6, 2004
C.G. Estabrook
Mercenaries
and Occupiers
William
Blum
The
Anti-Empire Report: the Israel Lobby
Col. Dan
Smith
The
Language of Disbelief: 1.3 Billion Still Live in War Zones
Dr. Bulent Gokay
The Coming Islamic Republic of Iraq?
Lynn Landes
Faking Democracy: Americans Don't Vote; Machines Do
Sheila Samples
What Would Royko Write?
Jason Leopold
Condi's Blind Spot: Rice Never Mentioned al-Qaeda
Mickey Z.
A Reality Show with No End in Sight
Robert
Fisk
Iraq on the Brink of Anarchy
|
April
14, 2004
Scapegoating as Deadly Error
The
Passion Story
By DIANE CHRISTIAN
The Passion Story is not a whodidit
vengeance saga, though it’s often played that way. Nor is it a
mystery about how blood heals and washes and works, though it’s
often interpreted that way. It’s about the human suffering of
death, about the misery of the flesh when tortured, about the terror
of pain and cruelty and death. Christ’s story is transfixing not
because he’s the son of God or sinless or noble, but because he
suffers the violent fate of the weak and sinful and vicious and criminal.
Crucifixion
was widely used in the ancient world for spectacular deterrence, to
punish and strike fear of resistance to authority. Only the weakest,
slaves and criminals, could be crucified. You get a good sense in the
movie Spartacus where Kirk Douglas the rebellious slave is crucified
to quell resistance to Rome. Those who kill, torture and demean use
the crucified body to demonstrate their strength. We can bruise, bloody
and break you; we rule, you die. In the story we live our fears and
fantasies and furies and weakness in the brutalized body.
Mel
Gibson says this meditation saved his life, restored his balance. Like
Christian mystics who sought the stigmata of Christ’s wounds (particularly
Catherine Emmerich whose meditations directly informed Gibson’s
staging), he finds healing humanity and divinity in those wounds.
Is
Christ any different from the rebel leader in Braveheart who is terribly
tortured, humiliated and killed, or from other action heros who suffer
torture?
Yes,
he isn’t a warrior, a killer in the cause of freedom or country
or good. He suffers the killers who act in the cause of their good—the
Jewish highpriests, the Roman rulers, the crowd, the punishing soldiers.
He forgives them.
The
enlightened Christian reading is that we’re all those others,
the sinful ones saved by the sinless Christ. That is, we’re not
the innocent one. The innocent one forgives. It’s the guilty who
seek violence and vengeance. Scapegoating is revealed as an error. Christ
is killed because he’s judged, convicted, punished and executed
as the evil one. That brings communities together.
It
comes to a theory of blood. Jewish Christians or Christian Jews saw
Christ as the slain Passover lamb, whose blood saved them from the angel
of death in Exodus. Normally blood from a slain animal must be poured
to the ground and thereby given back to God as blood, life, belongs
to God. In the Exodus story the blood is sprinkled on the doorposts
and lintels of the Jews. But the revised Christian view is that the
blood is shared by the community: Christ is what the community lives
on. They live not only after death by his blood, but they feed on it
in life. Christians at least symbolically (and literally for conservative
Catholics like Gibson) eat and drink the body and blood of Christ.
What
can this mean, to drink blood? Normally blood calls for blood in vengeance,
as with the Greek Furies which spring from the bloody drops of Uranus’
castrated organ. Blood is answered only by blood. In Jewish practice
blood is not to be drunk; it is reserved to God, poured off, do not
eat the blood. The Christian Jews who made it the sign of the new covenant
changed the sense of the Passover meal. Christ became the meal and the
liberation. The blood became wine and communal feast. The blood boundary
of death and life recycles death into life and flesh and hope.
The
Passion story is about Christ’s blood crying, but not crying out
for vengeance. That’s a different passion story, closer to the
Greek where a castrated organ breeds—through blood—fury,
hatred, and the relentless thirst for vengeance.
Diane
Christian is SUNY Distinguished Teaching
Professor at University at Buffalo. She can be reached at: engdc@acsu.buffalo.edu
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