In Our Present-Day White Christian Culture 
Jacqueline Rose on Freud and the rise of Zionism
Ever since the fall of Baghdad, when looters went rampaging through the city, a centuries-old assumption about ‘the people’ has lurked, barely spoken, beneath the ghastly aftermath of the war. It is that the people, meaning ‘people en masse’, are incapable of restraining themselves. In the case of Iraq, two further assumptions are in play. First, people freed from the yoke of oppressive dictatorship are most at risk: the excesses of the Iraqi populace are laid at the door of Saddam Hussein at the very moment he loses his power to control them, and not, for example, seen as the responsibility of the occupying armies. Second, the Iraqi people are especially prone to such behaviour because they fall outside the civilising processes of the West. Thus beneath Donald Rumsfeld’s magnificently evasive ‘Stuff happens’ – the formula allows us to think for a second that such things might happen to anyone, including presumably us, or even him – we glimpse a much harsher, discriminatory form of judgment. Between dictatorship and barbarity, Iraq stands condemned: one reason, no doubt, democracy has to be imported and cannot be entrusted to the Iraqis themselves, even while the images from Abu Ghraib suggest that there is no foundation for such self-serving discriminations between them and us.
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Jacqueline Rose teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity, edited with Anne Karpf, Brian Klug and Barbara Rosenbaum, will be published by Verso.
Other articles by this contributor:
Entryism · ‘Specimen Days’
‘This is not a biography’ · Sylvia Plath
Deadly Embrace · suicide bombers
The Iron Rule · Bernhard Schlink’s Guilt
The Cult of Celebrity · the cult of celebrity
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