the war in the middle-east
Aug. 4th, 2008 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eIf just months ago someone had told me that I would begin to feel that perhaps the war in Iraq was the right thing to do, I'd have laughed at them. I've always been a passionate pacifist.
Lately I've been listening to a number of lectures by Christopher Hitchens and I have to say that he makes a lot of sense. If the jihadists are deeply evil people who dream of bringing about the death of all non-moslems, and this certainly seems to be so, at least judging by what they themselves say, then we have an obligation to human civilisation to stand against them. When they kill people whose doubts cause them to leave islam then this murder must be resisted. When they oppress women, treating them as little more than possessions, to be kept or dispensed with or killed at masculine whim then they must be stopped. When they wish to force their horrendous theocracy upon us all then they must be prevented from doing so. Religion is immoral. Fundamentalist religion compounds that with insanity. Fundamentalist islam is currently the most dangerous form of that insanity.
I find myself being pulled unwillingly toward the conclusion that we should be doing all we can to crush the fundamentalists in Iraq and Iran and elsewhere that they infect humanity.
Unwillingly? Yes. I can't help feeling that the cycle of violence is just that: a cycle, an endless treadmill. If not stopped it repeats, over and over again. However I am very aware that Germany is now an extremely peaceful country, which it would not be, had its desire to enslave the rest of the planet not been stopped in its tracks. Japan is now one of the great exponents of peace, which it undoubtedly owes to being crushed in its efforts to violently subjugate the world. So war doesn't always bring war. It can bring peace. Peaceful resistance against the nazis or imperial Japan would have simply shed more blood, not less. The mullas and clerics in the middle-east are gleefully celebrating what they see as western decadence in our desire for peace. They have no patience for half measures. There is no place for negotiating. They want bloody ruin. That is what a fanatic is.
What scares me is that the religious push in the western nations (mostly USA) could simply end up pitting one fevered, crazy religion against another. In that case nobody wins; we all lose no matter which way it goes. Everybody gets a radioactive hell.
Also it bothers me that wars now have reverted to an older, deeply immoral biblical or koranic form where the civilians are the ones who suffer the most. The moslem fighters deliberately target civilians and use them as shields against the western forces. The western forces use laughably named surgical strikes against the people and infrastructure and use mercenaries to rape and murder in order to avoid the repercussions of their legitimate troops so offending.
I wish there was a peaceful way of dealing with this, but, depressingly, I can't help feeling that there simply isn't.
----
Additional: I just now listened to a quite uplifting talk by Katha Pollitt in which she argued from what is my more usual optimistic, pacifist position. She said, "Keep from creating a clash of civilisations. That way lies disaster. Every country that has a fundamentalist government has lots of people that don't go along with it." She points out that corruption, exploitation, and poor living conditions must take a lot of the blame for the ignorance. "If the only place you had to send your kid to learn was a madrasah then you'd be grateful for the madrasah, but if you had a choice of sending them to a school where they could learn real knowledge that would be better." She wound up with the caution, "We have to resist the idea that there are one billion muslims out there wanting to kill us. If we think that way we can make it true."
Perhaps I should stop listening to Hitchens for a while and pause in my researching the Dark Ages (christianity's greatest and most depressing gift to the world: a thousand years of ignorance and lack of progress).
Lately I've been listening to a number of lectures by Christopher Hitchens and I have to say that he makes a lot of sense. If the jihadists are deeply evil people who dream of bringing about the death of all non-moslems, and this certainly seems to be so, at least judging by what they themselves say, then we have an obligation to human civilisation to stand against them. When they kill people whose doubts cause them to leave islam then this murder must be resisted. When they oppress women, treating them as little more than possessions, to be kept or dispensed with or killed at masculine whim then they must be stopped. When they wish to force their horrendous theocracy upon us all then they must be prevented from doing so. Religion is immoral. Fundamentalist religion compounds that with insanity. Fundamentalist islam is currently the most dangerous form of that insanity.
I find myself being pulled unwillingly toward the conclusion that we should be doing all we can to crush the fundamentalists in Iraq and Iran and elsewhere that they infect humanity.
Unwillingly? Yes. I can't help feeling that the cycle of violence is just that: a cycle, an endless treadmill. If not stopped it repeats, over and over again. However I am very aware that Germany is now an extremely peaceful country, which it would not be, had its desire to enslave the rest of the planet not been stopped in its tracks. Japan is now one of the great exponents of peace, which it undoubtedly owes to being crushed in its efforts to violently subjugate the world. So war doesn't always bring war. It can bring peace. Peaceful resistance against the nazis or imperial Japan would have simply shed more blood, not less. The mullas and clerics in the middle-east are gleefully celebrating what they see as western decadence in our desire for peace. They have no patience for half measures. There is no place for negotiating. They want bloody ruin. That is what a fanatic is.
What scares me is that the religious push in the western nations (mostly USA) could simply end up pitting one fevered, crazy religion against another. In that case nobody wins; we all lose no matter which way it goes. Everybody gets a radioactive hell.
Also it bothers me that wars now have reverted to an older, deeply immoral biblical or koranic form where the civilians are the ones who suffer the most. The moslem fighters deliberately target civilians and use them as shields against the western forces. The western forces use laughably named surgical strikes against the people and infrastructure and use mercenaries to rape and murder in order to avoid the repercussions of their legitimate troops so offending.
I wish there was a peaceful way of dealing with this, but, depressingly, I can't help feeling that there simply isn't.
----
Additional: I just now listened to a quite uplifting talk by Katha Pollitt in which she argued from what is my more usual optimistic, pacifist position. She said, "Keep from creating a clash of civilisations. That way lies disaster. Every country that has a fundamentalist government has lots of people that don't go along with it." She points out that corruption, exploitation, and poor living conditions must take a lot of the blame for the ignorance. "If the only place you had to send your kid to learn was a madrasah then you'd be grateful for the madrasah, but if you had a choice of sending them to a school where they could learn real knowledge that would be better." She wound up with the caution, "We have to resist the idea that there are one billion muslims out there wanting to kill us. If we think that way we can make it true."
Perhaps I should stop listening to Hitchens for a while and pause in my researching the Dark Ages (christianity's greatest and most depressing gift to the world: a thousand years of ignorance and lack of progress).
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 01:56 pm (UTC)It is, as you point out, imperative that those beaten by war be helped up to prosperity. This seems to be the best way to stop resentment festering and war breaking out again. (Germany was crippled after the first world war and this appears to have been a factor in the growth of nazism.) Hopefully the pillaging by western corporations can be restrained somewhat and Iraqi resources handed back to the people living there after the religious despots are defeated (if they can be defeated).
I absolutely agree that prosperity, or rather, standard of living, plays an important part in a country's civility. (USA is very prosperous, but has a quite low standard of living for a first-world nation, and seems to be accordingly dangerous.)
From what I understand, many of the problems in the middle-east have been made worse by constant interference and mishandling of the region for decades. That nasty creep Saddam Hussein should never have been given the reins of power by the west, and we should never have starved and squeezed the Iraqi people with sanctions. The corrupt royalty in Arabia should not have been propped up by the west to rob their citizenry blind. Western leaders should not have been allowed to lie in order to trump up a fake war. However it is useless for me to say this with hindsight. I wasn't smart enough or aware enough to work against any of those, so I can't really blame others for failing too, and in any case we don't have the luxury of changing the past.
None of those things affects the stand of fundamentalist islam either. To gain some perspective of that truly schizophrenic religion read the koran. It is a surprisingly small book. You can download it from Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org) It constantly reiterates that god is good, just, and merciful, and rabidly goes on about how he delights in the brutal deaths of non-moslems. It is a horrible book, as murderous as the old testament, but far more obsessive.