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June 25, 2006
The Number of Legs, Again
Is there some rule that our ogre-terrorists must be one-legged?
If you hoped his June 7 death might be the end of the line for Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, you really don't want to see the newest recruitment videos for the Taliban. ... The star is Mullah Dadullah Akhund, a one-legged guerrilla commander in southern Afghanistan who now seems bent on matching or exceeding Zarqawi's ugly reputation.
I know I seem to be light-hearted in these leg posts (oops, that one slipped by) but the deeper point is that no sooner was Zarqawi dead than the U.S. commanders were announcing his replacement -- and what a big-bad terrorist this new guy was. It almost seems like we need to personalize an ogre-terrorist as much as Al-Qaeda needs to have a flashy media person that's just as bad. So they choose to center and publicize a person who is actually one-legged, as Zarqawi had been rumored to be, and who, according to the rest of the article, beheads six people in the video. In other words, Dadullah is precisely following the Zarqawi script while making sure to outdo it just enough.
Posted by zeynep at June 25, 2006 09:23 PM
Comments
And what are the odds he was recruited by 'Al CIA d'oh! ?
Posted by: GreginOz at June 26, 2006 02:14 AM
actually I think there may be a reason. there's a long consistent thread in western detective/thriller fiction in which the Bad Guy has a deformity -- is a one-armed or one-eyed man, has one too many or too few fingers, wears a mask to conceal a "hideously deformed" face, etc. much is made, for example, of Richard III's hunched back. the trend continues with the "one armed man" in the recent Harrison Ford remake of The Fugitive.
I suspect that the roots of this thread go very deep into the culture, into the vague feeling that deformed or crippled people are "bad luck" or cursed, or the simple hermeneutic notion that the soul echoes the body, so that a damaged body means a defective soul. and of course it also means that the Bad Guy is instantly recognisable on sight (as reassuring as a literal Black Hat in the cowboy movie conventions).
I suspect there are very old cultural resonances behind this apparently irresistible propagandist compulsion to dwell on, or invent, physical deformities or shortcomings in "the Enemy" du jour. compare with the nonstop effort to present Preznit Bush as an athlete -- whole, hearty, healthy, etc. there's a kind of sympathetic political magic at work in which the figurehead is supposed to symbolise the state of the nation or force he represents: America is as manly, upright, and strong as its Preznit (heaven help us) and the Islamist cause is (per our official sources) headed by incomplete men, cripples, diabetics, etc.
Posted by: DeAnander at June 30, 2006 04:30 PM
Seems like our government's casting for terrorist leaders is just like the casting for a b-movie pirate flick. The captain of the pirate ship has to have a pegleg (an eyepatch and a hook for a hand considered a plus).
Posted by: James at June 30, 2006 05:40 PM
It helps them to get a leg up on the enemy.
Posted by: Love at July 1, 2006 10:55 AM