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Aswad -> RE: N.Y. bus ad showing mosque, burning WTC towers OK'd (8/11/2010 11:26:11 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Louve00
It is for those reasons I can understand their upset.
I can understand it, as well. If you have been to see people who have been tortured at the hands of Pinochet, or hit by Israeli rockets, or otherwise have suffered greatly at (in their eyes) the hands of Americans, then you can probably understand the emotions which lead to 9/11 (apropos Pinochet...).
That just serves to underline the need for people to check their hearts with their minds at times. I have a pretty long list of people who would be dead if I only responded emotionally to the world around me. But my ability to vote is linked to my capacity for rational thought as well, and I can apply that capacity to other things than voting, as should anyone who is in such a situation. There is a time for emotion to carry the day, and a time for cooler heads to prevail. When a seriously single track emotional reasoning arises, it is a good sign the latter is the prudent choice, lest the violence just keep going until nobody even remembers why it started in the first place.
I should point out that I am ambivalent about terrorism.
Germany occupied Norway during WW2, and there were a series of actions carried out by many nations on our soil to curtail their efforts that would be called terrorism today. And most of the resistance which Roosevelt pointed to in his 'Look to Norway' speech was outright terrorism of the sort the US faces in the course of their occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. We used IEDs to kill soldiers and destroy vehicles. We blew up buildings and ships. Fishermen rammed the German boats with fire bombs and explosives. And civilian agents carried out attacks which certainly cost civilian lives.
As a result, Germany lacked a heavy water moderator for nuclear weapons research, and their position in France was weakened. It did not end the occupation, of course, as the will of the people was too weak for that. Look to Finland vs. Stalin for the will to independence, instead¹. Anyway, whether the ends justify the means is a question for each to answer, of course. By Kantian morality, we should have handed the Germans what they needed for nuclear weapons. That doesn't strike me as likely to be desireable in the eyes of many.
One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
And we need to remember that when we consider the face of 'the enemy', even when our emotions threaten to cloud our judgment, lest we find ourselves fanning the flames of a protracted war and terrorism campaign without the means to end either, setting up internment camps and death camps on the basis of creed or ethnicity, and all without anything remotely resembling moral high ground. It doesn't take many steps down a slippery slope to slide down to the bottom.
You poke me, I poke you, until one of us decides that we can leave it at that and move on.
Even though the arm is still sore from the last poke.
Health,
al-Aswad.
¹ A digression on Finland vs. Stalin, and what real will to territorial sovereignty looks like:
That was the closest to a modern equivalent of Thermopylae. Quarter million Finns against about a million Soviet troops. Four months into the war, Stalin offered an acceptable truce. At that point, he had lost more than a quarter million men, 3600 tanks and 260 planes. The Finns started out with a five digit count of soldiers, old rifles, no tanks and no planes. They took out the Soviet tanks with crowbars and molotov cocktails, mostly. The top sniper had 500 confirmed kills. All because Stalin wanted a buffer for the capital city and the Finns said "we will resist any foreign presence on our soil."
Soviet troops would find themselves faced with scopes glinting over a wall of corpses and burned out tanks, suddenly realizing that hell was already frozen over to begin with.
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