As ever, when I haven't written a weblog article for months, it's not because there isn't much going on, but because there's so much going on at home and in the world that I really should be making more time to write. Hopefully there will be some catch-up postings soon. However, my immediate reason for scribbling a quick article today is because my cousin Andrew (who is from Trinidad and has lived in Barbados, the UK, and is now in Canada) drew our family's attention to the following article:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wobadr094492447oct31,0,1261
> 397.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines.
The article asserts that two writers from Afghanistan were incarcerated in the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison for three years, because they were handed over to the US military with the accusation that they had publicly encouraged the assassination of President Bill Clinton. If you read the article you'll find that Pat Robertson's incitement to crime against Venezuela were much more serious, but he's American, Christian, white and rich, so of course he got off with a round of mild public rebuke.
Just a couple of days later, the UK Parliament voted down the Blair Government's plans to increase to 90 days the time for which police can hold terrorists without charging them with any crime. Even though this would still have been a mere snip compared with the astonishing "3 years and counting indefinitely" which the United States has chosen over the ancient writ of Habeus Corpus, that is no standard for any self-respecting country that claims to hold freedom dear. I am delighted that our representatives in parliament are standing up for the ancient rights that made our culture worth defending in the first place (and that the MPs for Halifax and Newcastle were among the Labour "rebels" involved in this defence).
Anyway, my main reason for putting this brief posting together was so that my family could hopefully add some of their insights as comments. Some of the discussions over e-mail (from the USA, Canada, the West Indies and the UK) have been very thought provoking, and I hope that some of them will appear here in due course!
3 comments:
This is gonna be a biggie, so bear with me:
In addition to the regularly stated objection to the war that the world did not have just cause to invade regardless of how evil the people in charge were, I think this "War" (that began in Afghanistan) seems to have been a bad idea from the outset also because it's not a good 'candidate' for a conventional war (with infantry & guns & tanks & whatnot that seems to be America's favourite method of discourse).
Let me elbaorate: to paraphrase George Carlin, it seems that America only has one response to a protracted problem: it "declares war" on it. They have 'The War on Drugs', 'The War on Crime', 'The War on Poverty' and of course now 'The War on Terror'. The problem is that you can't wage war on these things in a conventional sense. Of course, the 'War on Terror' does involve bombs & guns but so far it seems that they're in danger of ending up with a situation like the one in Vietnam ..... and we know how that turned out.
It's the same situation where Hitler didn't learn from Napoleon's example that invading Russia is a Bad Idea....
I'm not going to go on about his bluster about not wanting to wait for the next attack & how he had to take the fight to them (granted, there were evil people behind the dirty, cowardly attacks and we all commiserate with the horror and the tragedy, but they're not the only country who's been the victim of dirty, cowardly attacks). Thank goodness he doesn't know where AFRICA is, because his head would spin if he saw all the nasty regimes who "deserve" to be removed from power -just like the Taliban & Saddam Hussein "deserved" to be removed from power.....
Anyway, these "wars" just need to be "fought" more sensibly and one of the best ways to do that is to EDUCATE PEOPLE! I find that there are few things so educational as a good, open-minded, many-sided conversation! My measure of whether I know enough about the topic is whether I can describe the argument for the other side. It might be a fairly thin, shakey argument that doesn't stand up to close examination, but when you know enough to know WHY they're making the argument you can understand what brought them to their point of view & go about trying to change their mindset.
I'm sure that this would go a long way in the rich, desensitised countries (where "hardship" means that their cable TV won't get fixed until after the long weekend) to help people learn to care enough about the people who are REALLY in need of our help to actually DO something to help them in a meaningful way.
Listen to other people. It can't make things worse.
Terrorism needs terrorists, and reducing terror means eliminating terrorists.
We can try to do that by zapping them, or we can try to do it by changing the conditions that cause them to become terrorists.
One of the arguments that led Parliament to reject 90-day detention without trial was precisely that this sort of thing breeds more terror. A sense of injustice; a sense of alienation can only be a fertile seed-bed for the propagandists of terror.
There is also the question of what we do to ourselves. If we resort to injustice, however great the provocation, we ourselves take the first step to one sort of terror fighting another.
At the end of Animal Farm, the animals look from the pigs to the men and the men to the pigs and realise that they have become identical.
Kit Widdows
Master of St Thomas Church, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Thanks for the comments, Andrew and Kit. Yes, we need to distinguish ourselves from extremists, not resort to their methods. I suspect that the mere suggestion that we are in any danger of becoming comparable with terrorists will put off many readers, but there it is.
War on Terror ... I agree with Andrew, we are way too war-happy. It's become used to mean "policy against something that we really really do mean to tackle". But you can't wage war on terror or drugs or crime or poverty in a conventional sense, and you certainly can't win such a war in a conventional sense. What can you do? Force terror to surrender and sign a peace treaty? What do they hope to do to win a war on terror?
In Britain for many years, terrorism was very clearly an act of crime not an act of war. Why? Because a terrorist is a criminal, not a warrior. Don't give them the status, they don't deserve it.
One of the huge follies in the war on terror is the status we have awarded to "Al Qaeda", the nebulous hydra of an enemy. Every time the Republican Guard wants us to be really really scared, they tell us that Al Qaeda, or "Al Qaeda like elements" are responsible. As far as I can tell, if Al Qaeda exists at all, it's a loose federation with no single point of failure.
Before the US elevated Al Qaeda to an "enemy in time of war", a group of disaffected hoodlums who threw stones at Westerners were, well, disaffected hoodlums. Now they're members of Al Qaeda. All they have to do is say that they are. And suddenly they're warriors, at war with the world's most powerful nation. They don't have to raise taxes, keep supply lines, pacify occupied territories - they don't have to do anything at all. They're so much to be feared, we should devote our society and its finances to defeating them. And they don't even have to give up their day jobs.
The terrorists know all this, and are perfecting the art of manipulating it.
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