From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu Aug 15 2002 - 12:06:13 MDT
On 15 Aug 2002 at 18:25, Sean Kenny wrote:
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded Message ----------
>
> Subject: RE: globalization of fear
> Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 22:13:56 +0100
> From: "pchaston" <pchaston@supanet.com>
> To: <extropians@extropy.org>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-extropians@extropy.org
> > [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On Behalf Of Brian D Williams
> > Sent: 14 August 2002 19:28 To: extropians@extropy.org Subject: Re:
> > globalization of fear
> >
> > >From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
> > >
> > >Brian D Williams wrote:
> > >>>From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
> > >>>What is the hard answer to a nuked Manhattan?
> > >>
> > >> A Mega-nuked Mecca.
> > >
> > >That is absolutely unacceptable.
> >
> > So is a nuked Manhattan.
>
> Is it not more worrying that so many have accepted a militarisation of
> foreign policy through the adoption of the "war on terror"? Reading
> the many responses on this thread, there appears to be a visceral
> indulgence in the political and military possibilities that this
> vision brings on the part of some or a wholesale rejection of these
> actions on the part of others.
>
> But the subject line of the thread is misleading. There is no
> globalisation of fear since the phrase, "war on terror" had (at least)
> two meanings: actions against terrorists who struck at the targets of
> the United States or its Western Allies; and, a war to ensure that
> Americans would not feel terror in their own land. This thread is
> about the terror that respondents on this list who live in the United
> States fear and their political responses to that threat.
>
> However, a response that includes turning Islam into the 'other' by
> picking out certain themes and events that you find disagreeable in
> these countries, this culture, this religion and selecting them as the
> traits of an enemy, is counterproductive. Moreover, it is easy and
> lazy, because you do not have to think about whether certain actions
> are acceptable.
>
Actually, certain themes prevalent in radical Islam serve to potentiate
such terror attacks among the people who hold them.
>
> I know that it is easy as it is often the gut reaction of Westerners
> to these cultures. If you watch "One Day in September", the
> documentary about the terrorists at the Munich Olympics, you come away
> applauding the Israelis for having wiped these scum of the face of the
> earth, after the Germans let them go. You feel horrified at the
> contemporary feel of Arabs parading coffins through the streets in
> Libya in 1972 and celebrating the deaths of martyrs, even though they
> had the blood of innocent civilians on their hands. These people hold
> values that are morally and politically perverted.
>
> But war will not change this, not unless you physically conquer these
> countries, like Nazi Germany, and use defeat and poltical rule to
> restructure their cultures.
>
And of course, Japan.
If that's what it takes.
>
> You must find those elements of the Islamic cultures that are
> pro-Western, strengthen them, and ensure that they prevail in an
> Muslim Kulturkampf. It is a battle of 'hearts and minds'. If this is
> not done, we will face the same problem in the next generation.
>
We will be facing strands and strains of this problem for centuries, until
the medieval mindset of radical Islam is dragged kicking and screaming
into responsible rapproachment with the modern world.
>
> Philip Chaston
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
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