I wish for peace.
Mar. 18th, 2003 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasI wish for peace.
And here's why.
In the shower this morning, I was thinking about what I would say if I were called upon to give a speech to the nation opposing the war. Here's what I came up with.
I was trained as a rhetoritician. That means that I believe that the way to convince people of things is to tell the truth. Rhetoric, when it works, is the ability to see and express the truth. The idea is that one person tells the truth that supports one idea, and another person tells the truth that supports another idea, and then, intelligent people listening can listen to those truths and weigh them.
Few people are telling the truth as I see it. That's most likely because most people don't see, or focus on, the same truths I do, but it may be also because people are not used to telling the truth to convince people of things.
So, I'm going to tell the truth as I see it. All of it. Not just the parts which support my position, but also the parts which support the other position. Because I'd rather people hearing this decide that they disagree with me, based on the truth, than agree with me, based on misinformation.
If you listen to the news, some names of places will sound familiar. Kashmir. Bali. Chechnya. The West Bank. These are all "hot spots" in the world, places with ongoing problems with terrorism, guerilla warfare, and even occasional regular army conflicts. And they all have something in common.
The Kashmir conflict, and, in fact, the entire ongoing tension between Pakistan and India, is based on tensions between Muslims and Hindus. It's easy enough to find websites written from both points of view -- http://www.kashmir-information.com/ gives a Hindu view of the conflict, while http://www.ummah.org.uk/kashmir/ gives an Islamic view. It is not my purpose, in giving both of these links, to imply that both claims have equal merit. However, it is also not my purpose, right now, to express my views of which claim is more valid: I merely wish to establish as a point, that the Kashmir conflict is a conflict between Muslims and Hindus, or, perhaps, between religious, perhaps even fundamentalist Muslims, and secularists.
Indionesia and the Phillipines may be considered together. Indionesia is a largely Muslim country, with a few cities and areas with high concentrations of other religions. Bali, for instance, is a largely Hindu area -- which is why the nightclub bombing happend there: it was an attack both against the Hindu population, and against largely Christian Austrailian tourists.
The Phillipines, on the other hand, are largely Roman Catholic, but there are ongoing Muslim uprisings in the south of the country -- where it borders on Indionesia, which has Muslim terrorists and guerilla groups. This is why I state that Indionesia and the Phillipines may be considered together.
Then let us consider Chechnya. Yes, the Russians have been brutal there. And I really don't want to justify their actions. And there are huge numbers of reasons they want to be independent. But one of them, one that, I get the feeling is underreported in the American press, is the fact that the Chechens are largely Muslim. Chechnya is under sharia law. Chechnya was a largely moderate Islamic country, until the war started heating up, and it became more fundamentalist.
And, of course, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a clear conflict between Jews and Muslims.
And, let's not forget al-Qaeda, whose goal is to establish a worldwide Islamic government.
Are these all separate wars? How could they not be? They're in different parts of the world, among countries that have no significant economic or historical ties. . . yet the people fighting those wars, on the Muslim side, do see them as all part of the same conflict, a conflict between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world.
A war with Iraq is a battle in this larger conflict. And I'm certain that the Bush administration is aware of this fact. I'm certain that the Bush administration sees the conflict between the Muslim and the non-Muslim world as a fait accompli, and have basically decided that they're going to be on the winning side.
And I can see their point. And I can imagine that some people reading this could agree with this, and could feel that this justifies, or at least necessitates, the war.
I don't.
A very small percentage of Muslims worldwide support this idea. The vast, vast, majority of Muslims want the same sorts of things that I do -- more-or-less peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. Self-determination in their own areas, sure, but they've got no problem with "Western Culture" as a whole. Not mostly.
The Bush administration at least acknowleges this fact in some of their speeches, but I don't know if they "get it". I think they think there's this big block of "normal Muslims" and there's a little block of "fanatical Muslims" and there's no connection between the two.
It's not like that, in any population. There's a continuum. A bell-curve, perhaps -- most populations look like that.
Let's imagine a bell curve. We label the Y axis "population", and we label the X axis "degree of fanaticism."
Let's mark a point on that X axis. It's called "current degree of provocation." Everyone to the right of that point, they're willing to fight.
Right now, only those few people on the far right end of the graph are willing to fight.
But as the levels of provocation increase, that dot keeps moving left, and more and more people might be willing to fight.
That's how it always works, with any population.
So, let us look at the upcoming war between the United States and Iraq. Saddam Hussein is not overly popular among Islamic radicals. He's too secular for them, and not a supporter of their goals. But, still, Iraq is a Muslim country, and naturally, even if they don't much like Hussein, they'd have a deep gut-level repugnance for seeing a Muslim country invaded. The dot moves left.
Attacking Saddam Hussein, and, even more, Bush's determination to attack Hussein (the rest of the world, and that includes the Muslim world) really looks bad. It confirms what al-Qaeda says.
I assure you, al-Qaeda is using Bush's "crusade" comments, and Ann Coulter's "we should forcibly convert them to Christianity" comments as recruiting statements. But Bush's insistence on attacking Hussein is a far stronger recruitment argument than anything that he's done yet. And Bush himself, with his strong identification as a Christian, is the wrong person to do this.
I want to find a way to defuse these worldwide situations. I want to find a way that cooler heads in the Muslim world will prevail, talking with and coexisting with cooler heads in the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and secular worlds.
Attacking Hussein doesn't help this larger problem. It removes one (relatively) small problem, at the cost of escalating the worldwide Muslim/non-Muslim conflict.
And that is why I wish for peace.
And here's why.
In the shower this morning, I was thinking about what I would say if I were called upon to give a speech to the nation opposing the war. Here's what I came up with.
I was trained as a rhetoritician. That means that I believe that the way to convince people of things is to tell the truth. Rhetoric, when it works, is the ability to see and express the truth. The idea is that one person tells the truth that supports one idea, and another person tells the truth that supports another idea, and then, intelligent people listening can listen to those truths and weigh them.
Few people are telling the truth as I see it. That's most likely because most people don't see, or focus on, the same truths I do, but it may be also because people are not used to telling the truth to convince people of things.
So, I'm going to tell the truth as I see it. All of it. Not just the parts which support my position, but also the parts which support the other position. Because I'd rather people hearing this decide that they disagree with me, based on the truth, than agree with me, based on misinformation.
If you listen to the news, some names of places will sound familiar. Kashmir. Bali. Chechnya. The West Bank. These are all "hot spots" in the world, places with ongoing problems with terrorism, guerilla warfare, and even occasional regular army conflicts. And they all have something in common.
The Kashmir conflict, and, in fact, the entire ongoing tension between Pakistan and India, is based on tensions between Muslims and Hindus. It's easy enough to find websites written from both points of view -- http://www.kashmir-information.com/ gives a Hindu view of the conflict, while http://www.ummah.org.uk/kashmir/ gives an Islamic view. It is not my purpose, in giving both of these links, to imply that both claims have equal merit. However, it is also not my purpose, right now, to express my views of which claim is more valid: I merely wish to establish as a point, that the Kashmir conflict is a conflict between Muslims and Hindus, or, perhaps, between religious, perhaps even fundamentalist Muslims, and secularists.
Indionesia and the Phillipines may be considered together. Indionesia is a largely Muslim country, with a few cities and areas with high concentrations of other religions. Bali, for instance, is a largely Hindu area -- which is why the nightclub bombing happend there: it was an attack both against the Hindu population, and against largely Christian Austrailian tourists.
The Phillipines, on the other hand, are largely Roman Catholic, but there are ongoing Muslim uprisings in the south of the country -- where it borders on Indionesia, which has Muslim terrorists and guerilla groups. This is why I state that Indionesia and the Phillipines may be considered together.
Then let us consider Chechnya. Yes, the Russians have been brutal there. And I really don't want to justify their actions. And there are huge numbers of reasons they want to be independent. But one of them, one that, I get the feeling is underreported in the American press, is the fact that the Chechens are largely Muslim. Chechnya is under sharia law. Chechnya was a largely moderate Islamic country, until the war started heating up, and it became more fundamentalist.
And, of course, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a clear conflict between Jews and Muslims.
And, let's not forget al-Qaeda, whose goal is to establish a worldwide Islamic government.
Are these all separate wars? How could they not be? They're in different parts of the world, among countries that have no significant economic or historical ties. . . yet the people fighting those wars, on the Muslim side, do see them as all part of the same conflict, a conflict between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world.
A war with Iraq is a battle in this larger conflict. And I'm certain that the Bush administration is aware of this fact. I'm certain that the Bush administration sees the conflict between the Muslim and the non-Muslim world as a fait accompli, and have basically decided that they're going to be on the winning side.
And I can see their point. And I can imagine that some people reading this could agree with this, and could feel that this justifies, or at least necessitates, the war.
I don't.
A very small percentage of Muslims worldwide support this idea. The vast, vast, majority of Muslims want the same sorts of things that I do -- more-or-less peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. Self-determination in their own areas, sure, but they've got no problem with "Western Culture" as a whole. Not mostly.
The Bush administration at least acknowleges this fact in some of their speeches, but I don't know if they "get it". I think they think there's this big block of "normal Muslims" and there's a little block of "fanatical Muslims" and there's no connection between the two.
It's not like that, in any population. There's a continuum. A bell-curve, perhaps -- most populations look like that.
Let's imagine a bell curve. We label the Y axis "population", and we label the X axis "degree of fanaticism."
Let's mark a point on that X axis. It's called "current degree of provocation." Everyone to the right of that point, they're willing to fight.
Right now, only those few people on the far right end of the graph are willing to fight.
But as the levels of provocation increase, that dot keeps moving left, and more and more people might be willing to fight.
That's how it always works, with any population.
So, let us look at the upcoming war between the United States and Iraq. Saddam Hussein is not overly popular among Islamic radicals. He's too secular for them, and not a supporter of their goals. But, still, Iraq is a Muslim country, and naturally, even if they don't much like Hussein, they'd have a deep gut-level repugnance for seeing a Muslim country invaded. The dot moves left.
Attacking Saddam Hussein, and, even more, Bush's determination to attack Hussein (the rest of the world, and that includes the Muslim world) really looks bad. It confirms what al-Qaeda says.
I assure you, al-Qaeda is using Bush's "crusade" comments, and Ann Coulter's "we should forcibly convert them to Christianity" comments as recruiting statements. But Bush's insistence on attacking Hussein is a far stronger recruitment argument than anything that he's done yet. And Bush himself, with his strong identification as a Christian, is the wrong person to do this.
I want to find a way to defuse these worldwide situations. I want to find a way that cooler heads in the Muslim world will prevail, talking with and coexisting with cooler heads in the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and secular worlds.
Attacking Hussein doesn't help this larger problem. It removes one (relatively) small problem, at the cost of escalating the worldwide Muslim/non-Muslim conflict.
And that is why I wish for peace.
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-18 08:36 am (UTC)My boss Jim had an interesting thought today, that Israel, which was founded to protect people from genocide, should have presented itself as a haven for *any* group experiencing genocide or "ethnic cleansing." Think of the great PR it would be for Israel to welcome Bosnian Muslims!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-18 09:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-18 11:40 am (UTC)Do you have any thoughts about some of the stuff I've been putting in my journal? I would be curious to hear/read them.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-18 01:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-18 04:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-19 09:02 am (UTC)I'd feel more comfortable if they were removed. But, in my calculus, the danger that those weapons present to me is less than the increase in danger caused by a unilateral, or mostly-unilateral United States action.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-18 04:32 pm (UTC)All very interesting...
Date: 2003-03-19 11:27 am (UTC)Whether or not the population is primed to fight is immaterial in this case, the fighting can now be done by the leadership sans any recourse to the citizenry.
The notion that sufficient provocation can make a niche political phenomenon attractive to the masses is interesting, but there is also a dangerous play of purely elite politics involved here.
Don't forget that.
Take a look at this
Date: 2003-03-23 12:38 pm (UTC)Scary stuff.