Unfortunately, I have little time to be online at the moment and have only just been able to read the debates on ET on this subject. Your position is pretty much mine. I'll recommend your diary and in this way cast my vote, in the camp of DoDo, Migeru, kcurie, DeAnander, the stormy present, Londonbear, and others I may forget.
Here's my quick riff for the evening, and it echoes the parallel of the beam and the mote.
Much is made of the "backwardness" of the Muslims because of the violent and barbarous threats of their Angry Young Men against uninvolved individuals (collective punishment, mob violence for ethnically-motivated revenge or blackmail, or just the katharsis of unfocussed rage and macho bravado). But I do not notice much being said about, for example, the backwardness and barbarity of the tactics used by the US and other states against Iraq -- blockading medical supplies and damaging civilian infrastructure to deprive people of clean water and electricity, heavy aerial bombardment, embargo of critical medical supplies, collective punishment, etc. Is siege warfare and the hostage-taking of an entire population any more civilised than burning embassies?
Is such behaviour somehow respectable or legitimate because it is done on a grand scale by professionals, coldly planned for profit and geopolitical advantage, instead of on a small scale by a lot of yobs whipped up into stick-waving frenzy by skilled demagogues? Can anyone look at the conduct of a significant chunk of the "coalition" armed forces in Iraq, or read interviews with the US rank and file, without thinking that many of these (including a frightening percentage of the officer corps) are just another bunch of ignorant yobs cranked up to do mob violence?
We cling desperately to the things which we believe make the West "superior" and "civilised," but how does the rest of the world perceive us, on the basis of our governments' and our armies' actions abroad? We steal, we bribe, we threaten to with-hold desperately needed aid if governments do not knuckle under to our corporate bigshots. We send in armed force to protect private business profits, we assassinate popular leaders and shore up dictators, we try to loot even the rain. How many journalists have died in prison under dictatorships directly supported by funds from the US, EU, etc? Where was our tender regard for press freedom when we were supporting those regimes? (when we still are supporting some of them?)
I say this not to claim that the West is somehow worse than any other cultural/economic bloc, but just that we don't seem to me such a heckuva lot better -- not so much better that we can stand up on a pedestal and point down, contemptuously, at others as so very 'backwards' and needing to be taught a lesson in how civilised people behave. The most I can say -- and lucky we are too -- is is that thanks to imperial power and the core/periphery dynamic, most of the brutality and repression required for the maintenance of our elites is exported and dumped on other people (like our other toxic wastes) rather than on us fortunate citizens of Empire in the core... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
But I do not notice much being said about, for example, the backwardness and barbarity of the tactics used by the US and other states against Iraq -- blockading medical supplies and damaging civilian infrastructure to deprive people of clean water and electricity, heavy aerial bombardment, embargo of critical medical supplies, collective punishment, etc.
Do you mean here on ET or in general? Because I take full responsibility for what I write here, but only partial responsibility for what our governments do (in our collective name) In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
So I think you're right about Western brutality in Iraq not being perceived as "backward". If anything, it's perceived as hi-tech, state-of-the-art and more. But then, how much effort has been made to hide reality, and how much propaganda has been rolled out over how many years about surgical precision in warfare? That's how we are taught to perceive ourselves. It's not how we are perceived.
Sure, a percentage of Them are "just like that," and so are a percentage of Us. And their leaders cynically whip up and exploit the barbarian quotient in their demos, just as our leaders and media whip up the barbarian quotient in our lapdog "news" services and CivClash/Crusade speechifying.
... [musing] One gets the feeling at times that what people really hate about Islamist extremists is not that they kill people -- they have killed only a fraction of the number of people killed by the US in Iraq sp far, for example -- but they do it in low-tech ways. I'm losing track of the number of times I've read of a "primitive" explosive device being used for a roadside bomb, and the horror that Westerners express about a beheading seems curiously absent if the beheading is done by shrapnel or a cookie cutter mine rather than by hand with an old fashioned sharp knife. Burning people alive with WP doesn't shock us in the way that stoning someone to death shocks us, though if forced to choose I'm not sure that stoning wouldn't be more merciful (there's always the chance of a lucky shot to the head to knock you out before the awful end).
Sometimes it seems that our real objection to Muslim popular violence is that they are peasants, and how dare they strike back at Lordly Us with their ignoble, primitive weapons? How infra dig, to be killed by an uppity Untermensch... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
But I don't see it as peculiar to one ethnicity or cult, and that's why I keep objecting to the "Muslims are just like that" meme.
As Colman writes above, "There are assholes everywhere." I'm really thinking that is a runner-up for my still absent sig-line.
Actually, I think I am more shocked by the fact that the modern "we" melt the skin of children (in Hunter's words) by WP, than by those stoning adulterous/raped women to death. And probably for the whole wrong reason you attempted to sketch out: us westerners, with all our technology and wars and earlier deaths, haven't we learnt our lesson yet? The number of deaths through history is a learning experience in humanity, cruel enough. If its gets too bad, we attempt another method, hoping that this time it will work out better than the last time. Because we have WP, and they have rocks, we should stop using it. If we would've rocks, we wouldn't know any better.
I hope that makes sense.
they do it in low-tech ways.
Yes, I think that's what I was lumbering towards. In fact, the Western Way of violence is sold to us as a sexy consumer-society package. Whereas those barbarians...
