Tag Archives: Terrorism

Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism, Being an American and Rejoicing in Death

News, Politics, , , , ,

For some reason, this has been gnawing at me all day. Fortunately, I’ve had one of those days where I’ve sat behind a computer and had to work on meticulous details about a health care module I’m building, so I’ve had little time to really reflect on anything. But when you’re doing that sort of drudgery work, your mind gets to thinking, and no matter what you do, you can’t stop it from thinking the things it does.

Right off the start, I’m left thinking a bunch of random thoughts about the whole situation. A horrible man who hated Americans, just because they were Americans, is now finally dead, reportedly killed by a group of Navy Seals. As I have no reason to doubt the events that took place, I am left with a bit of concern as we went through a lot of work to get rid of the body really, really fast. But I’m going to assume everything went as planned, although it did seem a bit odd to have done the whole “burial at sea” thing without a grandstanding of parading the dead body through Ground Zero first. But I’ll just leave it at that.

What does bother me is the hoo rah’s that are going around by average Americans, including someone who sent out an email to people stating something to the effect of “thank God for protecting America and for blessing us with Navy Seals.” Or something like that. Now, I’m not one to rain on a parade, but I really hope that if there is a god, that god isn’t really going out of his way to make it easy for Americans to kill people for revenge, even if it is the right thing to do. I was as angry as every other American after 911, but something feels really wrong to be celebrating the death of anyone, no matter how bad he is.

You see, part of me wishes for the redemption of man and mankind. When bad people do really bad things, I’m not tied up in a sense of Christian revenge, but if I have to take a page from Christianity, I would like to think that the ultimate redemption of a bad person is probably the best revenge. We seem very tempted by the desire to achieve vengeance in all things, and you can see that in so many things that we do, including our tendency to build more prisons than we build schools. Rehabiliation is rarely our goal; instead, we want to make people pay for their crimes. Sometimes, we’re like the Roman Empire in how it deals with those who trespass against them. Rather than punish the transgressor, we tend to go after the transgressors family, friends, his dog Skippy and anyone who might live on the same block. We use the word collateral damage as an afterthought, and years ago stopped answering for it as an excuse or as an apology. Much like Rome, if this is the tactic we want to take, we need to understand that it has to play to its logical conclusion. We either destroy all of our enemies, including those who are friends of our enemies, or we become destroyed ourselves. The whole idea of “rebuilding Afghanistan” makes little sense if we’re a country that understands only revenge. What we should have done was lay waste to Afghanistan, chase down any of their friends to their eventual deaths and then park an aircraft carrier off their coast to make sure they never join the rest of humanity again. That’s the Roman way, and if we’re going to celebrate like Romans, we need to be a lot more like them.

But I don’t think we want to be the Romans. We have a president in office who is supposedly trying to achieve “peace” in the world, especially in places where we seem to be exacting vengeance upon our enemies. I don’t think we’ve figured out exactly what it is we really want to do. When our enemies, like Al Qaeda, put on Pakistani clothing at night after returning from their day job as a harbinger of terror against all things America, it’s pretty hard to try to achieve a sense of friendship with the same people who have no desire to ever be friends in their lifetimes. But we keep trying to play both sides of the fence, and we’re not very good at doing that.

In all, I’m disappointed that the end to our conflict wasn’t eventual peace and friendship, and maybe a learning moment for some people. The realist in me realizes that maybe such conclusions just aren’t possible. But the little guy inside me that still hold onto hope thinks that we’re doing this all wrong, that perhaps there’s a better way that doesn’t involve either killing someone or being killed by someone. Unfortunately, in our good/bad choice paradigm of American understanding, I don’t think we’re capable of seeing alternative pathways to future avenues of prosperity. For too long, we’ve existed in the “you’re either with us or you’re against us” universe. Honestly, George W. Bush didn’t start that thought process. We’ve been living under that delusion since we first pretended to be Native Americans and threw British tea into the Boston harbor. I don’t thik we’re capable of thinking any other way.

But as an American, I have to feel a sense of “we got our enemy yesterday”, and perhaps leave it at that. As a veteran, I’m proud of what our trained soldiers accomplished. As an American who hated what he observed nearly a decade ago, I can’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment was made here. However, as someone who secretly wished that the world might one day be a better place, I’m afraid we’re continuing to move further and further away from that ever happening.

Terrorists Win! War is over….

Politics, Television, , ,

For the last better part of a decade, the United States has been fighting a “war on terror” and this has involved sending a large contingence of US soldiers to Afghanistan, and even though there were no terrorists in Iraq, it’s been used as a continuous justification for the continued presence of US troops in that country. Since the start of those wars, the US has been involved in an ideological war against terrorism everywhere, even though it’s been pointed out many times before that you really can’t go to war against a concept, but war against terror is what we’ve been in, so minor points aside, that’s what we’ve been doing.

Well, last night the creators of South Park decided to push the envelope a bit and air their cartoon in which they have a depiction of Mohammed. Well, actually, it’s not really a depiction, but it’s a continuous lack of a depiction, which is a joke on the idea that it’s dangerous to have an actual depiction of Mohammed. As such, they put the religious icon into a bear costume and pretended that THAT was their depiction (because that way they wouldn’t have to actually depict him). I think you’re getting the idea.

Anyway, Comedy Central, the station that airs South Park has censored the episode to avoid showing any such depictions, or lack thereof. When they West Coast showed the episode, Comedy Central decided to show a repeat of an earlier, depiction-less episode instead.

The fear is from a semi-threat that was made against the creators of South Park and Comedy Central if they DARED to show the episode, depicting Mohammed, which for some reason automatically turns normally religious people into hotheads that kill people. The real world example of what happened to a Danish cartoonist is the threat they continue to make in case anyone forgets (cause they actually killed him).

What has happened as a result is that fans of South Park (and freedom of speech in general) are angry at Comedy Central for backing down on its freedoms. They say that Comedy Central has caved in. Just looking at CNN.com’s site is very educational. A posting from buddy198227 says in no uncertain terms:

What??? That’s it??? Some nutjobs who hide behind a website win??? If this is how America caves in, then we should lose. Muslim idiots aren’t going to win because they’re stronger, smarter or more durable. They’ll win because we act like pusses and fold like wet noodles when someone says Allah or Mohammed. Here’s my take…F#$% Allah and F#$#@ Mohammed.

That was just one of the nicer comments. Apparently, Comedy Central was supposed to air the episode in its entirety, and it is a blow to freedom if they don’t.

What isn’t being discussed is how all of these people are so comfortable from their anonymous postings, demanding that Comedy Central put itself on the line and risk the lives of its employees to bring forth freedom of speech that pretty much no one else is willing to risk themselves. Hell, they aren’t even willing to risk it in their own postings about how Comedy Central should risk its own skin.

It’s always a lot easier to ask of other people to take risks when one is not willing to do the same himself/herself. Oh, they’ll claim they’re willing to risk all, but that’s a fake claim when they haven’t actually ever done it themselves. It’s like the people who talk all tough about the military and what should be done with it, but when it comes to actually serving, they’re kind of silent, often announcing some ailment that makes it impossible for them to sacrifice their own lives and safety, even though they claim that if they could, they certainly would. I moderate on a current events boards where I hear that kind of boasting all of the time, and as a veteran it drives me nuts, but there’s nothing that can be done about it because people are always willing to be brave when they don’t actually have to put forth the risk themselves.

So what was Comedy Central supposed to do? Personally, I don’t blame them for what they did. Granted, the criticism will come down heavy on them because Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators of South Park) were willing to take the risk themselves. Unfortunately, the risk didn’t end with them because crazy people rarely go after the more difficult target, often killing any easy target they can get their hands on, like low level people working for a television network, like Comedy Central.

What’s really going on here is a much bigger issue than the surface one that is being covered here, because the very nature of freedom is constantly at risk here. One of the first claims that came from the War on Terror was that terrorists want us to change our way of life to one of fear, yet when we are faced with a circumstance that invokes fear, the first thing we do is cave in and allow them to win. When faced with adversity, the first step we take is to give in, which immediately tells me that somewhere down the line we lost the war on terror mainly because when it finally came time to fight the first battle, we surrendered the entire war.

Sadly enough, our only recourse throughout all of our interactions with terror has been fear. When they blow up a plane, we go into fear mode and start doing all sorts of things with TSA we never would have done on our own. When we start to make cartoons, we stop making them because we fear the ramifications if terrorists don’t like the cartoons we draw or watch. In about every maneuver, we’ve been outmaneuvered by low tech, 16th century thinking while we pretend that we’re still the most powerful country on the planet.

Kind of makes you think. Although if that bothers anyone, I’ll stop cause I don’t want to upset anybody.