Jean Claude Paye and Tulay Umay: The Cult of Killing, and the Symbolic Order of Western Barbarism!

How the Media Worships Violence and Ritualized Atrocities. The display of the lynching of Gaddafi, exposes our societies for what they are. It mesmerizes and dismantles our capacity to think and critically assess a historical process. By focusing public attention on what constitutes a ritualized atrocity, these gruesome images confirm that the US Empire actually represents an unprecedented regression, a step backwards in the history of humanity. They show that the objective of the war on Libya was not only conquest, leading to the plundering of oil, or of Libyan assets, but also, just as was the case in the Crusades, the destruction of a symbolic order, leaving room for the sheer enjoyment of an act of killing, as displayed by the media, in a capitalist World Order run amok. When watching the broadcast images of the lynching of Mouammar Gaddafi, our political leaders manifested a strange pleasure. Strange Fruit, these images remind us of the images of the hanging of Saddam Hussein, organized on the day of the Eid al Adha, the feast of the sacrifice. These two instances inscribe us into a religious structure which, through the substitution of the human sacrifice to the one of the ram, restores the primitive image of the Mother goddess. It turns the Old Testament upside down. Such book free religion is reduced to a fetish. It has neither Other, nor Law. It merely bids public opinion to enjoy the spectacle of death. Through images, the will to power becomes unlimited. Transgression is no longer bounded as in the sacrificial rite, neither in space, nor in time, it is everywhere. It echoes the continuous violation of the order of Law, that can be observed since the 9/11 attacks. The way Gaddafi's body was treated, is a token of the tragedy the Libyan people went through. The treatment of his remains was the object of a double exception, a double violation of the symbolic order that rules society, instead of being buried on the same day, as required by Muslim rites. His corpse was displayed for four days in a cold room, before being buried in a secret location, in spite of his wives request to the UN, that she may retrieve the body. This double decision by the new Libyan authorities, places the Libyan people in a situation that the Greek tragedy explored long ago. As they deny the family the right to bury the body, the new political leaders do away with the symbolic order. As it deletes any connection between human and divine law, the National Transitional Council merges the two, and grants itself the monopoly of the sacred, thus placing itself above the political level.