Dear Platt,
Replying to your 16/9 19:25 -0400 post:
I agree your analogy of terrorists and germs holds up. I only
draw other conclusions.
I am not so sure about the analogy of terrorism and brigandage
and (therefore) your statement that the attacks on the USA (and
therefore our civilization) were rooted in biological values.
Brigands are/were in my understanding motivated by a "pursuit of
happiness" wrongly directed at having other peoples' riches.
Usually operating in groups, they are comparable with bacteria:
to a large extent self-sustaining biological entities, with the
same kind of life as the cells and bodies they are attacking. If
they destroy the society they are attacking, they only do so from
short-sightedness. More "enlightened" brigands developed into
feudal states, protecting their source of plunder from
competitors, thereby providing their subjects some safety and
peace in which to grow more wealth to be taxed.
Terrorists, justifying their deeds with some political theory,
are more dangerous. Like viruses they use the life-sustaining
systems of the entities they attack for their reproduction: the
terror and hate they induce lead (by means of age-old knee-jerk
social reaction patterns) to reactions that are experienced by
others as counter-terrorism, which induces more terrorism, which
induces .... Like the fever that kills the body that is attacked
by a virus. Viruses/terrorists are barely alive/social. They are
no more than a bit of lethal biological/intellectual information:
RNA that prompts cells to copy itself respectively a
justification for hatred that prompts others to hate in return.
Antibiotics don't work against viruses, neither does war against
terrorists.
The point is not wheter a doctor is justified to annihilate germs
but whether he is able to. If in doing so he hurts the patient
more than the species of germ, his reaction is of low quality.
Again: he should try to strengthen the patient's own immune
system and his natural boundaries. How do we sustain love and
curtail hatred, feelings of revenge etc. in the face of terrorist
acts?!
Could you please comment on Tamim Ansary's story of how
Afghanistan has already been bombed back to almost Stone Age
levels? And on Marco's "doubts about the actual ability of USA to
directly annihilate" its enemies?
With friendly greetings,
Wim Nusselder
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