On Sun, Oct 28, 2001 at 08:58:30AM -0800, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
It is unimportant. What matters is what those one kill are doing. British soldiers were repressing colonials. The guys in the trade towers were not doing anything to Muslims.
So what about all the civilians in Afghanistan who are being killed by American and British bombs. They aren't being killed because they are soldiers, or because they support the Taliban, or because they hate the U.S.A. They are killed simply because the U.S. and a few other countries are attacking and they happened to be sitting in their homes, caring for their children, eating, sleeping, etc. So are most of the Afghan civilians who are being killed doing anything to the U.S., U.K., Canada, etc.? I think not. The devil in this is the old cliche, "the end justifies the means". This kind of thinking allows people to destroy the WTC, kill thousands of innocents in the U.S.A. and Afghanistan, allows the police in so called "civilized" first world countries to imprison, and torture people who have been charged with no crime (let alone convicted), and allows lawmakers to pass draconian legislation that will lead to more abuses of civil rights. It is a very simple trick of the mind with devestating consequences - once you allow yourself to forget that a particular person or group of people are actual human beings, who live, experience joy, and suffer just as we all do, any sort of brutality in support of a cause (revenge, justice, freedom, etc.) becomes relatively easy to inflict. I'll end this with a pointer to a well written insightful article about "the war" - http://www.zmag.org/roywarpeace.htm --- Mark Henderson, mch@squirrel.com, mch@informationanarchy.org "Heilir æsir. Heilar ásynjur. Heil sjá in fjölnýta fold." - Sigrdrífumál OpenPGP/GnuPG keys available at http://www.squirrel.com/pgpkeys.asc