Bodies, legs, eyes

Police Brutality Of Toronto Police at G20 Protest

Bodies, legs, eyes

x Maciek Wisniewski: Wherever - in the context of global war from above to migrants or the global anti-neoliberal revolt from below - the world is full of repressed bodies

Is it a coincidence that Israeli soldiers shoot Palestinian protesters in Gaza's legs - descendants of refugees, victims of ethnic cleansing, expelled during the Nakba, today prisoners in the world's largest open-air prison - than in Is the context of the Great March of Return intended to return (symbolically) to their homes, denouncing the inhuman conditions of the Israeli blockade and the periodic punitive incursions? Almost 300 gazatíes have been killed - a true massacre - and 30 thousand were injured, many by live bullets, rubber-coated steel bullets or tear gas containers, especially in the legs, also with the prohibited fragmentation ammunition: more of 120 protesters had to suffer a subsequent amputation.

Is it a coincidence that Chilean police officers shoot the protesters who rebel against the balance of the neo-liberal model - rising cost of living, low wages, pensions, ultraprivatized health and education, etc. - a system that has them precarious and indebted, who - after a dose of sedatives and painkillers (bit.ly/2RgQSc9) - finally wake up and open eyes to injustices? Almost three thousand people were injured - and there were about 30 dead - in a brutal and totally disproportionate government response to the social outbreak very much in tune with the best traditions of the Pinochet dictatorship, including more than 400 who lost an eye on shots on purpose. face with pellets and rubber bullets with metal center (bit.ly/2Nyv21t), some even both (bit.ly/3ajNKUj).

No. It is no accident.
 
 CHILE LOSE THE EYES IN PROTESTS
 As the body tends to occupy the center of politics - a step from political economy to biopolitics that we have not yet reflected enough (bit.ly/2ujlW2j) -, and the growing politicity manifests itself more and more in it, control and repression focus more and more on containing it - the process marked in turn by the rise of necropolitics (A. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2019) and securocratism (J. Halper, War against the people, 2015 ) - pointing also to its specific and symptomatic parts: legs to walk / eyes to see.

Everywhere - in the context of global war from above to migrants or the global anti-neoliberal revolt from below - the world is full of repressed, wounded, detained, fenced, beaten, beaten, gassed, mutilated, broken, run over bodies, massacred, raped, imprisoned, missing, dead.

Perhaps never as now, mutilation is seen as an official and legitimate tool of public control and state policy (bit.ly/35JsPGU). Perhaps never as now the torture of a particular body is so much the torture of the social body as a whole and has never been so globalized (Latin American generals of the Condor Plan have been early precursors of this transnationalization as well).

According to the Chilean Ophthalmology Society, the number of wounded with eye injuries is totally unusual for the history of the country and the world and if it resembles something, it is what happens in Palestine (bit.ly/35VQpAd); But while there - according to a 1990-2017 study by the medical journal BMJ Open - 300 eye injuries have been reported from rubber bullets, in Chile only in three weeks we had more of these than in three decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As A. Mbembe emphasizes, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a great laboratory of repression, control, surveillance and separation techniques. Even a paradigm of what is coming for our planet, already governed by a containment architecture of which Gaza is a model: an imprisoned territory, subject to periodic military incursions and mass murders, where a peculiar and particular form of biopolitical control consists of abdicate responsibility for the fate of those incarcerated, something “that becomes central to our times and is already integrated into our 'democracies'”.
 
Palestinian protesters are being shot in their legs by Israeli soldiers

What we see in the Chilean streets where the protesters, who, despite the fact that they may lose an eye, - just like the Palestinians who demonstrate despite the fact that they can lose a leg - leave the embodied fear in the bodies left by the military dictatorship (The clash with which the Chilean model was implanted by Pinochet) against the forces of order that, in their eyes, are true foreign occupation forces that consider their enemy citizenship (bit.ly/3bbf87k), is equally paradigmatic.

On the one hand, given the history and present of military cooperation between Israel and Chile (https://lahaine.org/cS3f), it is a creative - more violent / more brutal - realization of the exported Gaza model (“the‘ export