Neverending Cycle ( was : Re: USPS: glowing by leaps and bounds )

[Mark Henderson]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2001 at 08:58:30AM -0800, jamesd at 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 at squirrel.com, mch at informationanarchy.org
 "Heilir æsir. Heilar ásynjur. Heil sjá in fjölnýta fold." - Sigrdrífumál
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