Leo corrected

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Thu Sep 13 11:13:37 PDT 2001


At 12:35 PM 9/13/01 -0400, Nathan wrote:
>-Imagine a man who is from a poor country. The country has little in the way
>-of technology, money, world influence, or military might. Imagine the man
>-has had his wife and all his children killed by American bombs. What should
>-he feel? What should he do? How should he go through his life? What kind of
>-thoughts would you allow him? If you met him on a street and he said he
>-hated you because you were an America, would you understand?

I think you err by ascribing super-agency to the US by claiming that "we," whoever that is, are somehow responsible for all the evils around the world. As I argued in my previous posting under (no subject), the old pre-modern institutions of the islamic world are disintegrating after the collision with modernization and many folks, especially those who stand to loose from that social change no matter what (e.g. islamic clerics, village patriarchs, etc.) see that change as ultimater evil and need an incarnation of that evil. "America" in their minds provides such incarnation. It thus matter little who manufcatured the bomb that this or that warlord or government dropped on their village, or eeven what we as a nation do or do not do. America is the Great Satan, and as such - responsible for any imaginable evil, and thus myst be fought at any cost. Case closed.

It thus matters little what the organism called the US actually does or does not do. What matters how it is perceived by the minds who see it as the epitome of all their woes.


>
>Jim and others are not from poor countries and have all sorts of resources.
>They are the ones I condemn. I am not making a big fetish of condemning a
>few angry Palestinians in the West Bank, even though I think they are
>suicidal politically, but condemning the "explainers" of mass murder.

Well, these marginalised perennial malcontents think primarily in the religious terms I just described. They see the US as the incarnation of all imaginable evil in the world, and thus "deserving" a "counterattack." It is an act of faith, not a rational analysis based on emprical analysis of causes and effects. Why condemning someone for prefering religious divinations (disguised as rational discourse) over emprical analysis?

wojtek



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