On Fri, 21 Mar 2003 topp8564 at mail.usyd.edu.au wrote:
> I used to think this was a nutty take, but I am starting think that
> there really is a kind of chiliastic drive in these guys. There is a
> pretty clear preference for using force, sometimes that becomes so
> intense it looks an awful lot like the belief in the cleansing power of
> Fire from Above. These people seem to revel in the whole Holy Warrior
> ethic; they seem totally caught up in a project unto death. From their
> perspective "petro-war" is mass, and permanent lockdown purification.
> The system is self contained - anyone who complains isn't even making an
> intelligible utterance. They are just out of the loop. How do you
> decipher nuanced dissent when you think in terms of totalized
> monstrosities like Freedom, God and Western Civilization? That would be
> like fixing a watch with a sledgehammer. And so it spirals on: Money,
> God, death, fixation on oozing juices from the earth, the cathexis of
> bombs, the Heaven's Gate stare of the President - someone has to send
> the White House to Vienna, ASAP. There literally is no reasoning with
> these guys; who knows where they are going, frankly, you'd have to be
> mad to risk finding out.
>
> Thiago
>
This kind of critique isn't very useful to me; it's just ad hominem argument, isn't it? "They're mad and irrational" is pretty much the same language Bushoids use to describe their evil enemies. What I think we should understand is how a person comes to accept the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld worldview as rational, moral, and just. Let's face it: it is an internally consistent worldview, based on logical reasoning from its premises. The president must ensure national security; terrorists threaten security; thus the U. S. must attack terrorists and their supporters. qed.
What is sad and amazing to me is how adept we are at justifying the wholesale slaughter of innocent people for some abstract noun ("security", "freedom"). But that's an observation based on my moral premises, not a more diligent, rational assessment that those provided by the Bush administration.
Miles