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...
