Re: The Bigger, Badder, Even More Serious Thread [5]

[Lancebloke]

Figgy - I am not quite sure how much I agree. Whatever the moral justification we try to spin on something, there is always another point of view even when you are looking at things from that extremely high level.

WW2 in Europe could be seen by some as a direct response to the outcomes of WW1. People that somewhat understand that conflict know we were just as much the antagonist as the enemies. I wonder what would have happened if we had lost and had similar punishments forced on us. Would someone like Hitler have been able to rise to power? I think Germany and it's allies were very unfairly treated in the aftermath of the first war and there was bound to be some response.

Also, as mentioned in the posts above, many of the people fighting on both sides didn't want to. How many people on our side died because they didn't want to fight and were labelled traitors, lined up and shot? All in the name of something they were forced to do.

And is the fire bombing of Tokyo justified because they were the enemy? Hiroshima? The 1000 bomber raids over Dresden, Duren and other heavily populated cities? Is it OK to commit mass genocide against civilians who want no part in the part in the name of 'being the good guys?'

I think we sold often take the default position of "well we are good therefore everyone else is relegated in to insignificance' stance. I think the reactions to the Paris and Brussels bombings versus the reactions to the same things in Turkey or Kabul show that clearly enough.

[Mrs Figg]

fair enough points and I understand what you are saying but for me pacifism at any cost is just as bad as gung-ho bomb them all attitude. sometimes fighting something evil is the only way to be able to sleep at night knowing that you didn't sit idly by when innocents were being exterminated. that's why I admire the partisans fighting behind enemy lines, sometimes self sacrifice is a morally good thing objectively because otherwise life would be hell on earth and not worth diddly squat. that's why we stopped Hitler and why Europe standing by while Muslim men and boys were shot by Karadzic and co, leaves most people feeling guilty and wondering why we allowed it to happen. as for IS fighters, I don't think they are fighting for what they 'believe in' because I don't think they give a shit about religion, this is about revenge and a group of losers with chips on their shoulders banding together for power, they are NOT freedom fighters, they are not martyrs for Islam, they are rapists, sex slavers, murdering cowards and NOTHING anyone can say to me will convince me they should not be exterminated like vermin.

[halfwise]

Though I largely agree, it's also clear that treating them like vermin is not going to be the most productive approach. The more this has a chance to be an "us against them" war, the more it can be used for recruitment. It has already extended into calls to cordon off Muslim communities outside Iraq and Syria, what effect do you think that will have on young impressionable minds?

yes, by all means continue or even expand the military effort to impede expansion into more innocent communities; but outside immediate containment we have to rise above the black and white characterizations if we are to treat the cause and not just the symptoms. I wouldn't treat confirmed jihadists with any sympathy, but we can't afford to paint anyone else with the same brush. We shouldn't even hint at it.

[David H]

I like your pragmatic approach Halfy. I don't think anybody who knows me has ever called me a pacifist, but whether using force or not I'd like to believe we're solving a problem rather than escalating it. That requires understanding it, and that's something I think we need to work on.

[David H]

sometimes self sacrifice is a morally good thing objectively because otherwise life would be hell on earth and not worth diddly squat.

This is the part of your post that resonates with me the most Mrs Figg. I know that there are situations where I've taken reckless chances to keep others from being hurt, but would I consciously go to my death for an ideal? I don't know. Perhaps the less I had to live for, the easier that would be.

[halfwise]

Back in high school a substitute teacher asked us if we would give our lives for someone else, and we all agreed so long as we knew the person, we would. He was incredulous. Many years later with a life that I've learned to savor, I understand why. The young may love life, but haven't fallen in love with their own life yet; and are more willing to spend it.

[David H]

That's a good point about age. I remember during the Vietnam war the conscription age was 18, while the voting age was 21. A lot of 18 year-olds felt that if they were going to be asked to die for a cause, they should at least have the right to vote first.

And so it was suggested that the conscription age be raised to 21. But the military countered the argument by showing data that proved that people in their 20's are less reckless with their lives and therefore less trainable as soldiers.

And so the Federal Government lowered the voting age to 18. (At least that's how I remember it, but I may not have been entirely objective about it all... )

[Mrs Figg]

try to imagine what you would do if you knew IS was advancing 10 miles from your home. would you run or would you stay and fight, street by street, house by house. think of your home invaded by these people, your family going to be tortured and slaughtered, your pets eaten. would you let them and think fuck it and run, or would you do like the Peshmerga, take up arms and defend your home. I have a more than sneaking suspicion that I would learn to use an assault rifle.

[halfwise]

People would fight: at that point it's not an ideal anymore. The only reason right now not to arm the communities is first you don't know if they'll win, so the weapons would end up with IS; and second if they did win you don't know in the long run what will pop up in the place of IS.

I'm all for arming the Kurds, though. But I suppose they have no reason to go rolling over IS.

[Eldorion]

I agree with Halfwise.

The Kurds have taken advantage of ISIS to scoop up more territory for themselves, especially in Iraq, but they don't really have the means or the motivation to try to singlehandedly roll back ISIS over its entire territory. They're not really equipped to try to take or hold much hostile (non-Kurdish majority) territory, and it would probably end up backfiring on them.

The biggest problem with arming Sunni rebel groups is that a lot of them have proven willing to collaborate with ISIS at least some of the time. People sometimes like to point at the Sunni Awakening during Petraeus' tenure in Iraq, but in that case the only reason the Sunni tribes turned against AQI/ISI (ISIS's predecessor organizations) was that they were basically bribed to. And once the post-occupation Shi'ite majority government stopped doing that, ISIS got a whole bunch of ready allies again, which is why they were able to roll over a third of Iraq in less than three weeks.

[David H]

try to imagine what you would do if you knew IS was advancing 10 miles from your home.

That's easy to imagine. That was a favorite childhood game! We grew up around guns and we'd pretend the Russians had dropped THE BOMB.

We'd run through the woods with toy guns defending our land from the invading Commies. (It was the Cold War and kids are such sponges, especially if you teach em to "duck and cover" all the time )

Our Dad hated the game and eventually forbade it. I never understood why until I was talking to my Mom about it years later. She said we reminded him too much of the little German children defending their family farms that he'd had to.... well, you know.

But anyway, if anybody tried to take the family farm, I'd be right there. I have a lot of sympathy for land owners who have lost family land to the state and federal government, and though I know it's wrong I still can't help but see landowners who meet the federal agents with guns in hand as somehow heroic.

[David H]

Here's a very good article with some good data behind it. It's a bit long, so I'll just copy the first bit.

What Motivates the Suicide Bombers?
Suicide bombing attacks have become a weapon of choice among terrorist groups because of their lethality and ability to cause mayhem and fear. Though depressing, the almost daily news reports of deaths caused by suicide attacks rarely explain what motivates the attackers. Between 1981 and 2006, 1200 suicide attacks constituted 4 percent of all terrorist attacks in the world and killed 14,599 people or 32 percent of all terrorism related deaths. The question is why?

At last, now we have some concrete data to begin addressing the question. The Suicide Terrorism Database in Flinders University in Australia, the most comprehensive in the world, holds information on suicide bombings in Iraq, Palestine-Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which together accounted for 90 per cent of all suicide attacks between 1981 and 2006. Analysis of the information contained therein yields some interesting clues: It is politics more than religious fanaticism that has led terrorists to blow themselves up.

The evidence from the database largely discredits the common wisdom that the personality of suicide bombers and their religion are the principal cause. It shows that though religion can play a vital role in recruiting and motivating potential future suicide bombers, the driving force is not religion but a cocktail of motivations including politics, humiliation, revenge, retaliation and altruism. The configuration of these motivations is related to the specific circumstances of the political conflict behind the rise of suicide attacks in different countries.

On October 4, 2003, 29 year old Palestinian lawyer Hanadi Jaradat exploded her suicide belt in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa killing 20 people and wounding many more. According to her family, her suicide mission was in revenge for the killing of her brother and her fiancé by the Israeli security forces and in revenge for all the crimes Israel had perpetrated in the West Bank by killing Palestinians and expropriating their lands. The main motive for many suicide bombings in Israel is revenge for acts committed by Israelis.

In September 2007 when American forces raided an Iraqi insurgent camp in the desert town of Singar near the Syrian border they discovered biographies of more than seven hundred foreign fighters. The Americans were surprised to find that 137 were Libyans and 52 of them were from a small Libyan town of Darnah. The reason why so many of Darnah’s young men had gone to Iraq for suicide missions was not the global jihadi ideology, but an explosive mix of desperation, pride, anger, sense of powerlessness, local tradition of resistance and religious fervor. A similar mix of factors is now motivating young Pashtuns to volunteer for suicide missions in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
.......
Typically, most suicide bombers are psychologically normal and are deeply integrated into social networks and emotionally attached to their national communities. Randomly attached labels such as “mad” denote one’s inability to fathom the deeper reasons but don’t advance our understanding of the causes of the phenomenon of suicide bombing. Rather, they impede us from discovering its real nature, purpose and causes.

Understanding the terrorist organization’s logic is more important than understanding individual motivations in explaining suicide attacks. Suicide bombings have high symbolic value because the willingness of the perpetrators to die signals high resolve and dedication to their cause. They serve as symbols of a just struggle, galvanize popular support, generate financial support for the organization and become a source of new recruits for future suicide missions.

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/what-motivates-suicide-bombers-0

[halfwise]

Yep, it has to feel heroic. And you can't feel heroic unless you're fighting someone who is bad. Just being from another religion doesn't do it. That should give their targets some pause - you don't get suicide bombers coming at you unless in some sense you are doing something bad.

[Eldorion]

So apparently there's a controversy in Australia over whether or not Britain "invaded" the continent in the process of colonizing it, and even the BBC seems moderately outraged based on the tone of its article. As an inhabitant of a fellow country that began as a British settler colony, the word choice seems perfectly apt to me (and applies just as well to the US, Canada, and New Zealand). It's not like we shy away from acknowledging that the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans both invaded England, even though they laid many of the foundations for the modern nation. Are Australian conservatives really that attached to the idea of terra nullius? (Though yes, I recognize that this view of history is not something exclusive to Australia.)

Using the term "whitewash" to refer to this, as the Australian Daily Telegraph apparently did, is a hilariously tone-deaf choice of words.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-35922858

[Eldorion]

On the other hand, the silliness goes both ways, with the university apparently claiming that you shouldn't use the word "nomadic" to describe a demonstrably historically nomadic group of peoples. Trying to ignore historical facts because you don't like the modern political implications of them is never a good look. Not to mention that it makes no sense whatsoever in this case unless you subscribe to the idea that it's okay to displace and mistreat nomadic peoples simply because they don't live in permanent settlements, in which case you've already half-capitulated to the imperialist ways of thinking you're supposedly arguing against.

[David H]

Would the term "nomadic" apply to someone from the Northeast who goes to Florida every winter?

[Eldorion]

It could. And of course there's people who travel around staying in tents or camper vans or whatever. We're lucky to live in a society where many people can choose a more or less nomadic existence if they want (and still maintain their political rights; though of course some people are forced into the situation by homelessness and that is a serious problem).

[halfwise]

Amazon has created a whole nomadic culture where people show up in trailer parks to pack boxes during holiday seasons. Amazon even cuts deals with the trailer parks, and people travel around the country between holiday season.

Wish I could find the article where I read about it, but you combine any word with "amazon" these days and all that comes up are various products in stock.

[David H]

The conceit of the term "nomad" is that it usually assumes people are moving randomly over the surface of the land with no connection to it, whereas usually the opposite is true. Nomadic pastoralism for example can be a very sophisticated strategy of land use, often with far more understanding of that older economy I've sometimes talked about: how the soil, wind, sun and rain interact with the seasons. Indigenous people often had specific fields that were visited, tended and harvested at specific times of each year by certain families for countless generations, yet the myth that they were just "drifting" robbed them of those rights. Full disclosure: my cranberry bogs are on a site that had probably been tended and harvested for a thousand years before it was taken by the state and given away through the homestead act in the 1890's.

[Eldorion]

Interesting further information, Dave. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I don't think that a culture being nomadic means its people have any less right to their homeland. But more powerful countries have never been short on excuses for taking other people's land if they wanted it. Ideally, the framework of international law is supposed to it easier for the rest of the world to support threatened peoples, but in practice such law is interpreted entirely subjectively by each country and there's rarely any enforcement mechanism.

[halfwise]

I can't hear the word 'nomad' without recalling something that happened to Michael Palin while filming his Pole to Pole series.

He was being chauffered through part of Saudi Arabia, when on desolate mountain road one of the wheels blew out.  They had gotten out and were looking at the tire thinking about their next step when suddenly a long white BMW limousine pulled up,  a tall man with a regal bearing, full flowing headgear framing smoldering eyes got out, and gallantly volunteered that he and his driver would help them.  He was an Arab Sheik, of course.  In a few minutes they had the tire changed, and before he left, the Sheik grasped Palin by both arms, looked deeply into his eyes, and said in a deep thrilling voice:

"I ... am a nomad -  here is my card."

Stepped regally into his car and drove off.

[David H]

When I hear the word 'nomad' I think of this:

[Bluebottle]

[Pettytyrant101]

{{{Me too David! }}}

{{{Nice spam run, rooftop hop...Blue }}}}

[Mrs Figg]

I think its safe to say that if a set of people settle and claim land as their own, while a native population gets shunted out to the sticks, its pretty much invasion as well as colonization, but this has been going on since the dawn of time and its not particular to Anglo-Saxon Imperialism. getting all sniffy about what happened hundreds of years ago is a bit pointless, its how we treat native peoples now that is important, if we can redress the damage done to them or at least apologize.