2010-05-14

MOVE 25 years later | Philadelphia Inquirer

MOVE 25 years later | Philadelphia Inquirer

It was actually 13 May. I remember this quite clearly and was outraged then, as now, that the city government could actually drop a bomb on a house--a row house, in a crowded city: Philadelphia. But this was during the Reagan Regime, which not only effectively legitimized cowboy disregard for the rule of law in the popular consciousness (I noted this when Eddie Murphy's *Beverly Hills Cop* series came out: crime is insoluble as long as cops follow laws; and is the egregious if rollicking series *24* that different?), but also put such a disregard into effect, most famously in the Iran-Contra Affair, which illegally funded the US's war against the Nicaragua Contras.

(The consequences of this, and the related Salvadorean Civil War, which killed, according to Wikipedia, 75,000, are still being felt and in some cases have magnified. I am thinking of the development of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, formed in Los Angeles by displaced Salvadoreans, evidently initially as a defensive tactic. Again, for an impartial account, I point to Wikipedia's entry. On a side note, I'd be interested in researching the broader issue: the effects in the 20th century of local wars like this on the displacement of populations and the establishment of more or less permanent subversive classes. It's one thing to refer to Kleist or Deleuze and Guattari, but quite another to look at, say, Sudan, Senegal, Ugunda, Rwanda, Angola .... and so many other places where local war, whether proxy or not, has forced the creation of by and large destructive blocs. And I guess one can further point to Afghanistan, as a brilliant case in point.)

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