Sorry about the untimely response-I've been a bit busy as of late. Anyway, here goes:
James said:
This may come across as nasty - if so, it wasn't intended that way.
Not at all, you're merely stating your opinion, just as I previously stated mine.
I'm really surprised my post drew the kind of response it did. I was merely trying to explain the symbolism behind the picture to the usually knowledgeable Tannin.
No, I'll never understand that talk, because it involves killing 9 million or whatever it is innocent civillians. Kill Al-Queda members if you must, although it's hard to see what benefit it will achieve and frankly it's "revenge" rather than "justice," and I happen to think that's an important distinction. Getting rid of the Taliban was probably on balance good, but not in any way directly justified by the original act. Anything else is barbarism.
Killing 9 million Afghans
would be revenge of the worst kind, and I certainly wouldn't condone it regardless of whatever I may have posted in the days following September 11. Killing Al-Queda members is not revenge, it
is justice. Justice takes many forms, not all of them in a courtroom. The legal system is ill-equipped to deal with people for whom the threat of punishment is meaningless(since they are ready, willing, and able to die for their cause), so killing known terrorists by any means available is really the only realistic option open to any nation hoping to secure itself against terrorism. That being said, if there was some unforeseen set of circumstances that made eliminating millions of people necessary for world security, I would not hestitate for one minute to make such a horrible decision, and I would probably commit suicide once the deed was done out of guilt.
In all fairness, although the U.S. proudly points to getting rid of the Taliban as a positive result of the military action, the simple truth is that we turned our backs on what was going on in Afghanistan for years until it finally came back to bite us in the ass, and if not for the attacks, the Taliban would still be in power.
It's strange that the WTC incident made Americans so very angry and looking for revenge, and yet Americans are apparently completely unable to understand (for example) the anti-American views of the Palestinians, born from what they feel is the U.S. supporting Israel killing thousands of their people.
I don't condone the Palestinians' views, but it's possible to understand where they came from.
I definitely understand the Palestinian's views, and in their shoes I doubt I would be acting much differently(I would only send suicide bombers to military targets). I'm certainly no apologist for Israel, or for my nation's blind support of it. I was a little disgusted by otherwise objective SR members blindly siding with Israel when the topic came up, but I was in no mood to get into any long running arguments in what would likely have been a futile effort. The U.S. supports Israel mainly because there are a disproportionate number of Jews in positions of power in the United States. Furthermore, the Jewish-controlled media has a rather pro-Israel bias, and our education system is very poor at creating independent thinkers(actually, very poor at teaching anything really), which explains the pro-Israel attitudes of many of my fellow countrymen. I'm beginning to understand the reasons why the American government(and in some cases the American people) are so despised around the non-Western world, but sadly not too many of my fellow Americans are willing to take that step.
BTW, I entirely blame U.S. support for Israel for the destruction of the WTC, and I'll explain my reasoning. I think we can both safely assume that OBL considers himself at war with the U.S. Therefore, the Pentagon was a valid target, but not the WTC. However, if he wanted to make an issue of US support for Israel he couldn't have picked a better target. The WTC was full of firms dealing with finance, and in fact was the premier symbol of the financial district in NYC. Finance is the chosen field of a disproportionate number of Jews, New York City itself has a very large Jewish population, and Jews dominate NYC government. Even the owner of the WTC is Jewish. In short, it made a perfect symbolic target against U.S. support for Israel, even though the majority of those killed were
not Jewish. Of course, the WTC also made a perfect symbolic target if OBL wanted to attack capitalism. Perhaps he used both reasons in his twisted mind.
Asd for the idea that whether it was deliberate or not makes it more or less tragic I don't agree, I think that needless deaths are always very sad. This is one of the reasons why the "collateral damage" of bombing Afghanistan (the most conservative US reports indicate that more Afghani civilians were killed by US bombing than Americans were killed in the WTC/Pentagon attacks) has always seemed to me equally terrible - I can't buy the line "yes, it's a shame, but people get killed by accident in wars and we didn't mean to kill them, so it's okay" which from overseas news reports at least seems to be the American view.
First of all, I wholehearted agree that any death is tragic, and I don't even restrict my beliefs to human deaths(nothing gets me more angry than cruelty to animals). Any preventable death is all the more tragic for the simple reason that it needn't have happened, and this certainly includes deliberate acts. There are many deaths every day from illness, accidents, and so forth, but it is always the deliberate ones that get our attention for the simple reason that another human being purposely caused them. In this light, yes, the so-called "accidental" deaths of Afghan civilians are equally tragic, and if OBL truly professed to care about the Afghan people, he and his men would have surrendered when they were first offered the opportunity. He chose not to, and so indirectly caused the civilian deaths by forcing the US to arms. Once the use of military force started, the "fog" of war more or less ensured that there would be non-military casualties. Or to quote Captain James T. Kirk:"War is a messy business, a very messy business".
I think every country has landmarks which would be sorely missed if they were destroyed. Obviously some are more famous than others (ie. if Venice was to sink completely, it would be an absolute tragedy) but I still think that every country has landmarks that the populace holds very dear - we shouldn't rank them according to whether US tourists have heard of them or not.
I doubt that many people in the US (or elsewhere in fact) had heard of the statues the Taliban destroyed until the destruction was played on the news - but it was a terrible loss of some really pivotal art, and I'm very sad that now I'll never have a chance to see them.
Agreed on your first point. Regarding the statues, I
did know about that. I saw it on CNN prior to September 11. I know you consider many Amercans ignorant of world events, but it is important for you to understand that American media is largely to blame for that. Prior to September 11, what little world coverage existed was often buried within hours of sensationalism. The American media was(is) obsessed with totally irrelevant celebrity gossip and American events to the point that the average American knows little of what goes on in the rest of the world. So-called "International News" might comprise 30 seconds out of any hour of broadcasting, and the obsession with celebrity gossip often means that the rest of the hour might be 80% irrelevant garbage. As a result, many people, such as myself, simple gave up watching the news or reading newspapers entirely, and the remainder lived in the American fantasy world created by the media. What little news I got was usually from the Internet, and even most of that was filled with celebrity gossip. This changed to a certain extent for a while after September 11, but as of late it seems that the news is reverting back to it's tabloid ways, and as a result I'm paying less attention to it. I just don't have the patience to listen to hours(or read pages) of gossip to hear(or read) a few relevant bits of news. You may be incredulous about this, but such is the ratings driven American news coverage, and apparently the majority of the American public can't get enough of this celebrity trash, which speaks volumes for the poor state of our educational system.
I find it hard to assign differing values to the worth of innocent human life.
You may, but it is accepted that some lives are worth more than others, at least from a compensation standpoint. At the risk of sounding callous, if you had a limited number of seats on some transport off of a doomed Earth, an American(or pick any other nationality) engineer will rate much higher than an Afghan villager. In fact, there are some in government who want to assign every citizen a number based on IQ, education, experience, health, and a few other factors in order to set up a system to decide who would receive limited resources first in the event of some national or global catastrophe. The purpose of such a system would be to increase the chances of survival of the human race following some cataclismic event such as an asteroid hit or global nuclear war. A cold, calculating way to look at things for sure, but someday the survival of the human race may hinge on somebody picking the most promising candidates to survive.
Sorry to get overly emotional every time this topic comes up, but the first time I saw the ruins of the WTC I had the very disturbing thought that I was looking at the future of the human race in microcosm. I've imagined such an apocalypse many times, but to actually see some of my visions translated into reality was quite disturbing. Had an earthquake or meteor brought the towers down, I would have felt differently, likely thinking that it was a one-time freak occurence.
