A good read “In the end, Hughes argues, there can be no end to dirty work. The most urgent task for any society is not its elimination but its containment. Dirty work will continue so long as it remains in its proper place. Not here, but elsewhere; and if not entirely out of sight at least out of mind. It is only when such containment mechanisms fail, says Hughes, that a fanatical inner group threatens to form, that liberalism becomes fascism, and that something like ICE steps out of the shadows. “To be sure, the sociological conceptualisation of dirty work does not perfectly fit Merz’s use of Drecksarbeit . Both Hughes and Press focus on dirty work as a play of visibility and invisibility that hardly seems applicable to Israel’s spectacular dirty work in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza: two televised bombing campaigns and a genocide broadcast in real time. And there are other problems. Was Merz trying to say that Israel was acting as the bad agent of Euro-American power? Was he aiming to...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51