R C Macaulay wrote:
These people have their religious mandate to kill us. You try separating the good muslims from the bad ones because I can't see the difference.
Not a problem! Not long ago, by historical standards, most Japanese people had it in for us, and were determined to kill Americans. It was more or less a religious thing -- Emperor worship, in their case. I knew a good many of them, although they are mostly dead by now. They fell into two groups, easily recognizable:
1. People who were formerly committed to killing Americans, but who no longer felt that way. This was the vast majority.
2. People who still have it in for us, and/or the Russians, Chinese, Koreans, and anyone else they went to war with in the 1930s and 40s. They are mostly tattooed gangsters (yakuza) who drive around in large trucks playing military music at high volume, to cause trouble and bother the neighborhood. You can't miss 'em. In 1990, one of them shot the mayor of Nagasaki, because he said the Emperor was not god and was partly responsible for the war.
I never have had any difficulty telling peaceful Japanese people from war-mongerers, and I am sure I would have no difficulty identifying Muslims who want to kill us.
Such people exist in every country, and every society, including our own. But the numbers are usually small. There are many in the Muslim societies at present because these societies are undergoing a crisis. There is a civil war going on in Saudi Arabia, and in Afghanistan. It is a fight between modernity (science, rationality and technology) and a fanatical version of religion. Those wars spilled over into the U.S. in the 9/11 attack. Fundamentally, they have little to do with us. We just happen to be in the line of fire, you might say.
There were many brutal fanatics in Japan in the 1930s because they were undergoing a similar crisis, and in the U.S. in the 1860s for the same reason. Such crises never last long. Either the society recovers and acts civilized again, or it goes too far and destroys itself. Pre-war Japanese society destroyed itself in 1941 at Pearl Harbor, and the Confederacy died at Gettysburg in 1863. Sooner or later, Saudi Arabia will either recover or destroy itself. It cannot go on in a war with modernity for decades. When it recovers, the threat to us will recede. That will happen a lot sooner if we stop using oil and bankrupt them.
I think the notion that we are in a second cold war that will last for decades is absurd, and without foundation.
- Jed
