The USA has a great idea of how to "restore order": "Police and national guardsmen were accused of killing innocent people." Which of course is generally considered worse than police killing "guilty" people, though it seems to me a little like saying, oh, say, chattel slavery is worse than the convict-lease system. Not untrue, exactly, but kind of missing the point. I'm not the only one to have made the falluja comparison, but I had in mind less the incompetent failure to bring 'order' and more the violent conception of what order means.
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Her face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of her feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm . . . . irresistibly propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the pile of debris before her grows skyward. (Walter Benjamin, revised)
