the war in the middle-east

[miriam_e]

If 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.

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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).

Comments

IMHO

[hestia.livejournal.com]

I totally sympathise. I was against this war from the beginnng for two reasons:
1) war is letting the mass murder geni out of the bottle,
and
2) the politicians/leaders told blatant lies about why they wanted this war.

They never gave a shit about what the Taliban were doing. It was an empty excuse used to get ordinary people to support the war. They should have given a shit but they really didn't. It was all about money and never about morality.

But it seems that the propaganda has ignited a self-fulfilling prophesy.

War creates psychopaths. Psychopaths like war. They get to do exactly what they can't help themselves from doing, and they get respect and power amongst their community at the same time. They do what they do because they just want to watch the world burn. (Yes, Dark Knight quote.) Projection of immorality onto others is their excuse. But these psychopaths were created by a prolonged bombing campaign (war) kept out of the news during the years previous to 9/11, and by economic sanctions. The psychopathic personality is created by an unrelenting sense of personal danger and traumatic and horrific experiences during childhood. Frequent bombings, scarcity of nurturing within families headed by traumatised parents, and the actual or threatened loss of care givers upon whom the child depends for survival (especially if witnessed) would make for a generation disconnected from reality and full of the sort of rage that they cannot consciously physically endure feeling.

So yeah, our lying two faced leaders made this mess in the first place, and we are stuck with the hate of horrified, terrified, violence-worshipping little boys.

Re: IMHO

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I have to say I agree very strongly with what you say. I should add that I knew some wonderful people who escaped from Iran when it was taken over by the religious nutters. They are well educated sensible people. Who knows how many of them have been crushed or killed inside Iran since the rise of religious power. But even that can be traced back partly to western interference. The Shah of Iran was by the accounts I've read, a secularising force in Iran, but shamelessly corrupt too, using the opportunity to amass a vast fortune, stealing it from the people. He was, I believe, placed and kept in power by the west.

Also I wonder how much of the horrors in the middle-east are the responsibility of faceless, remote, sociopathic, think-tank members who think it is a game and decide that "destabilising" a country or region makes it easier to exploit.

Re: IMHO

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I should also remind that the ones who bombed London, Bali, and flew planes into the World Trade Center were not victims of western oppression. They were well-educated, middle class, religious people. That isn't to lessen the part that broken, war-crippled people play in being some of the rationale for such rotten actions, but I kind of wonder if the war-torn regions which have been so mishandled by the west (and the middle-east people themselves), if they were instead left to their own devices, would they still be awfully broken? Would crazy jihadists still want our blood? I guess we'll never know. But from my reading of the koran, yes, they would still want us dead. It is right there in their book. Admittedly the christian bible promotes mass murder in a similar way, but most christians never realise this because they never read the bible. The difference with islam is that the koran is meant to be recited, not read. There is a much greater chance that muslims know what is in their koran.