I take it you're in South America? How're things?
On 9/2/06, Kragen Javier Sitaker <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At 2006-08-16 11:01:53 +0530, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> That is exactly why I said (I repeat): "We the public have a duty to
> choose which side we want to be on"
I think you're confused about what the sides are.
As time goes on, we'll figure out what happened in this particular case:
were these guys actually planning anything, and if so, was it a
plausible plan? And we'll be able to figure out if it was the security
agencies crying wolf, or a real success. I want to talk a little about
the bigger picture, though.
Most of the world consists of decent people going about their ordinary
lives, mostly consisting of beneficial interactions with people they
know to some degree or other. Commerce, love, friendship, quizzes at
the pub, work, medical treatment. No relationship is perfect, and most
have some element of animal dominance games mixed in at some level,
sometimes escalating to the level of actual violence, but by and large
they're positive, and the sum overall is what we call "society" or
"culture".
There are a small number of people who choose to live lives of dominance
contests, perhaps including violence. For example, career criminals,
policemen, litigators, or soldiers. Most of them are not very
successful, because the decent people perceive their activities as a
threat to society and put limits on how much they can take, by not
cooperating with their attempts to dominate others, or only cooperating
up to some limit. (For example, we're not very tolerant of policemen
who go around shooting innocent people.) There isn't really a word for
this class of people in English, so I'll call these guys "militarists"
for this discussion.
The most successful militarists are those who can get large numbers of
decent people to identify with them. For example, Hezbollah is
fundamentally a militarist organization, but large numbers of Lebanese
people support them financially and by cooperating with them, for
several reasons. One important reason is that they feel threatened by
Israel, since Israel could invade at any time, and they feel that
Hezbollah is "on their side". Other reasons include the hospitals and
schools Hezbollah has built.
Ariel Sharon was certainly a militarist, and he was able to get elected
because large numbers of decent Israelis identified with him --- partly
because they felt threatened by the intifada.
As a result of large numbers of decent people on the two sides of that
conflict siding with their pet militarists, against the ordinary people
on the other side with whom they have much more in common, the
militarists are able to pursue their conflict with each other with
little interference from the decent people. The militarists on each
side are only able to persuade the decent people to side with them
because of the attacks from the militarists on the other side.
Similarly, the BJP has persuaded large numbers of India's ordinary
Hindus to identify with them, to the point of sometimes getting elected
and perpetrating mass slaughter.
We, the public, have a duty to choose which side we want to be on: the
side of decent people, or the side of fear-mongering militarists who
abuse the trust of decent people to start wars. The war is almost never
in the interest of the decent people, from either side; it benefits only
the militarists.
Historically, there's been a widespread belief that some injustices
could only be rectified by violence, with the accompanying problem that
the violence gave power to violent militarists who could then abuse it.
Sixty years ago, in her struggle for independence, India led the world
to a new way of rectifying injustices without letting militarists run
amok, and followed it immediately by demonstrating the depths to which
ethnic hatred inflamed by militarist opportunists can sink a noble
people.
In the United States, fifteen years later and inspired by India, we
began to heal ethnic hatred among our "black" and "white" people by the
same means, hatred that had simmered for centuries, fueled by
decades-long campaigns by terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan
and the Black Panthers. There were times in that decade when it seemed that
the militarists might get the upper hand and plunge our society into
another bloody civil war. Today racism still afflicts the US, but it's
a pale shadow of the evil that formerly kept a sixth of our population
paupers.
If you side with your local militarists against some set of decent
people they have chosen to target, you make those people less safe, and
frighten them into the arms of their local militarists, who get
stronger. So it's not a matter of siding with one ethnic group or
religious group against another; it's a matter of siding with
militarists (in both ethnic groups) against decent people.
So which side do you want to be on? The side of slaughter, or the side
of satyagraha?
