And let's not call it a jihad - it is such a perversion of an already difficult word.

So how do we change their minds? I don't think there is any easy way. My question is, should that be the top priority? What of peace and world justice? What of the fact that already the innocent Afghans are more at risk than before?

I'd like to copy here something I read elsewhere from Christian Aid as well as part of someone else's response:

"The recent appalling terrorist attack on the United States has focussed the eyes of the world on Afghanistan as the hunt for the perpetrators continues. And yet the consequences of this attack on organisations working to alleviate the effects of the drought have gone largely unreported. With the increasing political tension, aid organisations (such as Christian Aid) have been forced to withdraw international workers from Afghanistan, inevitably scaling down operations. This includes the World Food Programme (WFP), which supplies most of the free grain distributed by aid organisations. With no free grain available, and with the price of food in Afghanistan already increasing dramatically, the cost of any relief we are able to deliver will soar.

"Regardless of all these factors Christian Aid WILL continue to operate in Afghanistan through ten local organisations. We are doing all in our power to get food and other essentials to as many people as possible."

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Originally posted by Nicole Smith:
I don't know how hunting down the known ones and killing them would improve their attitude. If anything, seems to me it would worsen it (my hydra analogy).

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I lost all interest in improving their attitudes the minute they steered two jets into the WTC. Their attitude means, in precise, technical terms, jackshit to me.

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And let's not call it a jihad - it is such a perversion of an already difficult word.

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Ummm... jihad is their word, not mine. How understanding is it to tell them what they really mean, Nicole?

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So how do we change their minds? I don't think there is any easy way.

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There is no way. Period. If they are prepared to steer civilian airplanes into civilian buildings, they are beyond reason.

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My question is, should that be the top priority?

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No, it shouldn't be a priority at all. The top priority should be to find them and dispatch them. The second priority is to publicize this so that the next person who thinks it's a good idea to recruit someone to steer a plane into a building will realize that all it does is bring dishonor to himself and his cause.

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What of peace and world justice?

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The highest priority, but I would rank justice above peace, as peace without justice is in fact neither.

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What of the fact that already the innocent Afghans are more at risk than before?

I'd like to copy here something I read elsewhere from Christian Aid as well as part of someone else's response:

"The recent appalling terrorist attack on the United States has focussed the eyes of the world on Afghanistan as the hunt for the perpetrators continues. And yet the consequences of this attack on organisations working to alleviate the effects of the drought have gone largely unreported. With the increasing political tension, aid organisations (such as Christian Aid) have been forced to withdraw international workers from Afghanistan, inevitably scaling down operations. This includes the World Food Programme (WFP), which supplies most of the free grain distributed by aid organisations. With no free grain available, and with the price of food in Afghanistan already increasing dramatically, the cost of any relief we are able to deliver will soar.

"Regardless of all these factors Christian Aid WILL continue to operate in Afghanistan through ten local organisations. We are doing all in our power to get food and other essentials to as many people as possible."

A quarter of the population of that country, over five million people, are expected to be dependent on food aid by November. Many will die, especially women and children, of starvation and exposure if that aid does not get through. Christian Aid are determined not to turn their backs on innocent people who have already suffered so much. Against this background terrorism is irrelevant.

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Originally posted by Nicole Smith:
So how do we change their minds? I don't think there is any easy way. My question is, should that be the top priority?

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Six hundred people were massacred at a Christian mission in Congo on 24 August 1998 and since then tens of thousands more Congolese have died in other atrocities. Europeans have not held a three minute silence for Congo. That event and the attack on New York were both premeditated and sudden acts of violence against civilians. So why, in the UK, were we outraged so little by one and so much by the other?

Our leaders prepare for war, and the TV advises us that we should be feeling an unparalleled level of moral outrage at this act of "unprecedented evil". And yet on a scale of human tragedy it is dwarfed by Congo's loss - and far more so by the 1994 Rwanda genocide when in a carefully planned operation 800,000 civilians were murdered over one hundred days (UN Report, 1999).

Less dramatically, many poor nations suffer from unfair trade and Christian relief agencies campaign to "Change the Rules!" - the world trade agreements that some believe transfer wealth from poor nations to multinational corporations. In recent years millions have been killed by man-made disasters and genocides - some dramatic, some subtle - almost all in the Third World.

The only explanation I can see for the disproportion in reactions to events in the Third World and the USA is that our primary emotion is fear. We ask, if chaos can touch the capital city of a fellow NATO-member, then perhaps the world's pain cannot be confined to poor countries? If disaster can strike even the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, structures central to US financial and military power, then perhaps we too are vulnerable.

regards,

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Originally posted by Erin:
I could not possibly disagree more with this if I tried. ANY change in US, Britain or other Western foreign policy that is in any way prompted by the attack is nothing short of total capitulation to these terrorists. It is a clear and unambiguous message that if you kill enough Americans, you can get what you want. Last week's attack should have absolutely zero bearing on any change in foreign policy (other than, "now we're going to hunt your sorry ass down like the dog you are").

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And, Erin, I could not possibly disagree more with you if I tried. Sorry if this is a roundabout way of explaining, but let me try a parable.

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Once, there were two great families, the Bloggs and the Smiths who had a long history of bickering and feuding. Each family was large and sprawling, with many cousins and second cousins and third cousins, some of whom had never even met one another, the families were so large. In the Blogg family there were a group of young men who would lie in wait for young women of the Smith family, and rape them. They did this repeatedly and frequently over a period of many years, without the knowledge of most members of the Blogg family, but – it is said- with full knowledge and even approval from the head of the family. Nothing that members of the Smith family did stopped this raping, or even convinced most of the Bloggs that the raping was going on.

So, one day, two brothers from the Smith family kidnapped two young Blogg girls – girls too young to know anything much about the feud between the families, let alone about the rapes. They tortured them horribly, killed them, and left their atrociously mutilated bodies in the middle of the town where the Bloggs lived, with a note pinned to the corpses which promised torture and death to all the Bloggs.

Jane, one of the Bloggs – one who knew little about the rapes that had been carried out by members of her own family – vowed, when she saw the corpses, to hunt down the dogs who did it and bring them to justice. Given the horrible violence of the crime and the innocence of the girls, everyone in the Blogg family – and many of the Smiths - agreed. However, one of her brothers, John, took her aside and tried to explain about the raping that members of her own family had been involved in; he tried to tell her that unless that raping stopped then there would always be some in the Smith family ready to retaliate, or ready to condone such retaliation. In her anger, Jane responded, ‘No! Any attempt to restrain our brothers now, or bring them to discipline – in fact, any admission from the head of our family that this raping has been going on – is impossible. It would be to condone what the torture of our sisters. We must stand firm.’ Whether she was refusing to believe that her family included rapists, or that the their actions were condoned by the head of her family, or whether she was so angry that she did not care, nobody could tell.

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Jane is, I would want to argue, wrong. She is wrong because she makes the wrong done by others to her family a reason for perpetuating a real injustice committed by her own family. Had the Smiths carried out their torture in order to extort money from the Bloggs, or had they carried out their torture in order to gain land from the Bloggs, she would have been right: to give in would be to condone the murders. However, to condone, protect and encourage the rapists in her own family because of the more horrible crimes committed by those in the other family – that seems to me to be terribly, terribly misguided.

Now, I know that this parable is relevant to the situation in which we find ourselves only if the US is, like the Bloggs, has truly been involved in ‘raping’ members of the constituency from which the 9-11 terrorists came, and if the US administration has condoned that ‘raping’. If this is an unjustified claim, then the parable I have told is irrelevant, and my condemnation of ‘Jane’ gives no ground at all for arguing against Erin. I admit that.

However, in order to answer that question, we need to do precisely what Erin seems to be ruling out: we need to examine ourselves to see whether the description fits. If it does then we will still not condone what the terrorists did: not one bit of it – we will still mourn the lives of all those who died in the attacks, and we will still be resolute in seeking to bring the terrorists to justice.

However, we will
(a) combine that quest with a long hard look at our foreign policy, and take seriously the possibility that we need to change too before we can look the families of the victims of the attacks in the eye. We will also
(b) think hard about the ways in which we pursue the quest for justice, and make doubly sure that there is as little as possible about our response which resembles the crimes of which we are accused. This might mean we look rather differently at the possibility of ‘collateral damage’, and will certainly mean that we look askance at the rhetoric of righteousness our side is using. Otherwise, we might as well be training new terrorists ourselves.

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No, the "war on terrorism" does not include Northern Ireland. Bush explicitly stated in his address to Congress last Thursday that they would be going after terrorist organizations with a global reach. Internal and regional terrorist organizations will not be tackled.

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One could extend your analogy to say that prominent 'Smiths' have treated the women in the family like third class citizens, taught the young males the techniques of killing others (particularly those who do not go to the same place of worship as them) and taught them it is a good and blessed thing to kill oneself in the process of killing as many non-Smiths as possible.

You miss the main point I was making, though, and perhaps I was not clear enough: my main claim was not that the parable was a good one (i.e., not that America was a 'rapist') but that given that this is the kind of claim being made by many in the constituency from which the terrorists came it is a grave mistake to refuse even to ask about America's culpability.

Let me put it more directly: If the constituency which is unwillingly and appallingly represented by the terrorists has genuine and just grievances against the US and her allies because of injustices perpetrated by us, then we need to repent of those injustices. That is a moral obligation, and we are not absolved of it because some in that constituency have taken absolutely and terribly unjust and uncondonable forms of retaliation for those injustices. If we refuse to repent of those things, then we are stoking the fires which will fuel the terrorists; we will bear some responsibility for the next attack.

Further, if, in our pursuit of the terrorists, we fail to realise that many in the constituency which the terrorists would claim to represent believe that we are the perpetrators of gross injustices against them, we risk acting in ways which turn that constituency more sharply against us.

Furthermore, I would argue that the only course of action the US and the rest of the West can take to avoid pissing these people off is complete isolation from the world outside of North America and Europe. They want us out of the Middle East. ObL stated before that the presence of Western troops in Saudi Arabia is what did this. The Palestinians have gone on record as stating that he couldn't care less about them and their plight. While the policy in Israel may have something to do with why other people are pissed off at us, for this guy and the people who work for him it's simply the fact that we are there.

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Originally posted by Alaric the Goth:
...'raping' (your word, and a rather strong one at that, IMO)...

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It is not too strong for describing the claims which are made about US foreign policy. The leader in this week's New Statesman (a left-wing British political magazine), for instance, puts it this way: 'To them [i.e., the 'constituency' I mentioned, not just the terrorists], the US is an imperial power.... It has left a trail of grievances around the world. American-made weapons pound the Palestinians; an American-sponsored war creates misery for the Colombians; American-led sanctions lead to the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children. In the past, an American-supported dictator perpetrated unspeakable cruelties in Indonesia; an American-prompted coup overthrew a legitimately elected government in Chile; an American strategy...built support for Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. The US ideology of market liberalism has led to obscene global inequalities. US national interests block agreements to control global warming and arms sales and to set up an international court of justice. US companies block the manufacture of cheap anti-Aids drugs. US banks demand interest payments that cripple the economies of around 50 countries.'

(Hosts: I hope this quote is not too long for copyright purposes?)

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Originally posted by Erin:
It makes sense, Mike, but I think that analogy is flawed. If the policies are unjust, then they are unjust regardless of whether or not more than a dozen flights are targeted for hijacking. If we are looking at foreign policy BECAUSE of this attack and for no other reason, it is complete and utter capitulation and they have won.

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What if, though, one believes that even if ObL is killed, even if his finances are wrecked, even if the training camps in Afghanistian are destroyed, the hatred of America fuelled by US foreign policy will lead to others filling the vacancy as fast as we cut them down? In other words, what if one thinks that the only way permanently to reduce the likelihood of more such terrorist attacks is to reconsider aspects of that foreign policy? It seems to me that our main response to 9-11 must be to ask how we can prevent it happening again.

(I am not suggesting letting ObL off, however; I fully agree that he and any one else involved should be brought to justice - although I personally would rather have him brought to trial than simply bombed, if at all possible.)

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Furthermore, I would argue that the only course of action the US and the rest of the West can take to avoid pissing these people off is complete isolation from the world outside of North America and Europe. They want us out of the Middle East. ObL stated before that the presence of Western troops in Saudi Arabia is what did this....

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There's a difference between what ObL says and believes his reasons now are, and the way he and his supporters came to have those reasons. So, yes: ObL is not going to buy a US flag the day America cancels some more third world debt; nothing we can do is going to stop him hating us. And yes, that means we need to stop him forcefully. But that does not mean that we can do nothing to make it less likely that others will grow into similar views.

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American-led sanctions lead to the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children.

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I know this isn't the debate at hand, but with all due respect, this particular claim is complete and utter bullshit and I cannot let it stand a minute longer without being challenged. Iraq has gotten more than enough food and medicine in exchange for its oil. It is Saddam Hussein who has turned around and exported it for a profit. So the blood of those Iraqi children is on his hands, and his hands alone.

Battered Wife Syndrome.

The developing ideas about justice in domestic violence have led to this concept. That a woman can be so disempowered and frightened that the only way she can think of to help her self is violence.
Male dominated courts for years ignored the violence done to women by other men. This male violence was the normal way for men to control their wives. To the courts it was invisible.

So the courts put women in prison for stabbing their husbands after the husband had been punching, burning, threatening, manipulating them for years.

When women stared speaking out and saying this is not just it was said that we cannot change the law in response to this female violence. All that would do is give women a carte blanche on killing their male partners.

Male violence is largely perpetuated by men's refusal to examine themselves and see the violence that they do.

This is often a feature of powerful groups in society. They can afford to avoid self-examination because they are able to absorb retaliation from the weaker group. Indeed arguements that support non-self-examination are common because they allow members of the powerful group to feel innocent and even to feel like they are the offended against.

How many men do you know that feel like feminists are male-bashers? It easier to blame than to self-examine...

Splinters and logs.

Again -- policies do not create terrorists, they only create targets. Terrorism is a pathological mindset that is independent of its chosen target. We can examine foreign policy from now until the judgment day. That knowledge, however, is ultimately useless in addressing terrorism.

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Originally posted by Erin:
[QB]One more time -- if killing nearly 7000 civilians in any way makes the US change its policy in favor of what he wants, that is total capitulation.
QB]

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What if what needs changing is not what Mr Bin Laden wants but the policies that make young muslim men easy pickings for people like him?

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Originally posted by Erin:
We can examine foreign policy from now until the judgment day. That knowledge, however, is ultimately useless in addressing terrorism.

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I can't quite agree with this.

The fact that criminals react to policies by taking matters into their own hands, and killing thousands of innocents, does come pretty close to invalidating their objection to the policies. I agree that it would be pretty wimpy to react to these terrible bombings by saying, "Well, that sure got our attention. Someone doesn't like what we're doing. We better change our ways."

Nor is it possible for any country to be completely free of policies that make some people hopping mad.

At the same time, however, the more policies that a country has that people around the world object to, the more likely it is that someone will be angry enough to do stupid things.

Large and powerful countries can't help causing problems and facing resentments from other countries. Obviously they try to minimize that kind of thing, but it certainly happens. You cannot say, however, that there is absolutely no relationship between national policies and the incidence of terrorism.

I do agree with Erin that the national reaction should be to apprehend those reponsible in order to prevent further crimes - and not self-flagellation over possible past foreign policy mistakes.

Erin, I disagree with the idea that if we re-examine our foreign policy in response to this terrorism we are capitulating to the terrorists. We would be capitulating if we withdrew all support of Israel and pulled our troops out of Saudi Arabia immediately and without much discussion. We could have and IMO should have re-examined our foreign policy long ago -- it is a measure of our leaders' pigheadedness that there only seems to be serious consideration of this only after over 6,000 civilians are killed at once. The terrorism can be the catalyst for considering change, I think, with the real reasons for making changes being that some of our foreign policies have been short-sighted, to say the least.

[edited so it would make sense]

(i) Hypothetical question: Would your principled stand against making changes in foreign policy as a result of the terrorist attack be altered if you were convinced that such changes would make future such attacks less likely? (I'm talking about the kinds of changes that bleedin-heart liberals like myself have been suggesting, of course.)

(ii) Suppose that a Palestinian suicide bomber were tomorrow to bomb a cafe in Tel Aviv, killing fifty Israelis; suppose that the Israeli government started using the same rhetoric as Bush about the need to root out and kill the terrorists and wage war against those communities that harbour them; suppose then that an Israeli were to post on this board saying that any softening of this policy, or any attempt to 'understand' the Palestinian point of view, any attempt to deal with the claimed injustices which fuel Palestinian anger, would be a 'capitulation' to the bombers. Would you support this Israeli's line? If not, what is different about the situations that justifies the difference in your response?

These aren't meant to be rhetorical questions, by the way - I'm genuinely interested.

[edited to fix UBB]

Cannot the lessons learnt from the mistakes (e.g. the Versaille Treaty) and success stories (e.g. the Marshall Plan) of the past be remembered, and applied?

The history of the 20th. Century shows clearly that combatting terrorism solely by the use of force does not work, and has never worked!

This is not a statement of liberalism, or "The New Statesman constituency", it is cold hard fact, (as Margaret Thatcher found to her cost, John Major faced up to, and countless others have experienced).

It must be remembered that terrorism is a label applied by the opponents of a movement using force against an established order.

The supporters will use terms such as "freedom fighters", "revolutionaries" or "liberators", and will refer to "the armed struggle".

Former terrorists are now in gorenment in many countries in the world. Let's look at how they got there, and what lessons we can learn from the past. Because it has a direct relevance to the present, and the future.

(i) is moot, since you will never, ever convince me that giving in to terrorists' demands will stop their attacks.

(ii) yes, I would support this response.

Again, you have to understand something: these wastes of carbon killing 7000 civilians doesn't suddenly make any particular foreign policy bad. If it was bad, it already was bad. Don't you see the difference?

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The history of the 20th. Century shows clearly that combatting terrorism solely by the use of force does not work, and has never worked!

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Originally posted by Ham 'n' Eggs:
It must be remembered that terrorism is a label applied by the opponents of a movement using force against an established order.

The supporters will use terms such as "freedom fighters", "revolutionaries" or "liberators", and will refer to "the armed struggle".

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The distinguishing characteristic of terrorism is that it is directed at unarmed people, frequently civilians who are unfortunate enough to be in a certain place at a certain time.

When it is directed against soldiers it is carried out when they are off-duty.

I think that the use of arms to target unarmed people is the essence of cowardice.

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Originally posted by Erin:
(i) is moot, since you will never, ever convince me that giving in to terrorists' demands will stop their attacks.

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First - even if you think I will never convince you, that doesn't make the question moot. Let me put it differently: do you hold the line you hold because you think it will make future attacks less likely? Or do you uphold it irrespective of whether it will make future attacks less likely - even if you happen to believe that this is one effect following your principle will have.

Second, who on earth is talking about 'giving in to terrorists' demands'? The changes in foreign policy I would suggest are not based on giving in to demands, but on recognising that unjust things the US has been doing have helped fuel terrorism. Can you see the difference?

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(ii) yes, I would support this response.

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Are you really telling me that, in the light of the terrorist bombings which have taken place in Israel, you would support the Israeli government's decision to 'wage war against those communities that harbour them', that you would rule out any 'attempt to "understand" the Palestinian point of view, any attempt to deal with the claimed injustices which fuel Palestinian anger?'

And do you really believe that such a policy would make future terrorist attacks in Israel less likely?

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Again, you have to understand something: these wastes of carbon killing 7000 civilians doesn't suddenly make any particular foreign policy bad. If it was bad, it already was bad. Don't you see the difference?

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I'm not saying the attacks 'made' any foreign policy bad, or even necessarily that the attacks will make anyone in government realise that things which they had thought were okay were in fact bad. It might just be that the attacks help those in charge of US foreign policy realise that they can't carry on with impunity: that the injustices they have supported somewhere a long way away, out of sight and supposedly out of mind, have contributed to all-too-visible effects back home.

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Originally posted by Qestia:
What can we do to make them happy? I DON'T CARE.

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Imagine living in a nation where if you're a woman, and you're raped, you can be stoned for adultery. Imagine being a woman and not being allowed to learn to read. Going about with every inch of your skin covered. Any errors of our foreign policy seem miniscule in comparison with the hells they've set up for themselves. We send them millions of dollars of humanitarian aid, they jail the Christian Aid workers that were mentioned earlier. What can we do to make them happy? I DON'T CARE.[/QB]

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I wonder if african americans reading this might find this familiar. Sounds like the country their grandparents grew up in and that some of them are still living in.

I wonder what the US would be like today if Martin Luther King had advocated violence in return for violence? How many more black men and women and children were killed than in those towers? Mr King had provocation. Yet he refused to call white people, even the white people who did those terrible things, anything less than human.

In his words,
"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."

Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1964

Mr King is and will remain forever one of my heroes.

It was slavery which denied education to black women and treated them as sexual chattels - and a war in which thousands of Americans died was fought with this as a main issue.

The war did not end discrimination against black people but it did stop slavery which allowed masters to deny education to their slaves and use them as sexual chattels.

Are you saying that the slaves would have been better off if the Abolitionists had preached non-violence and let the slave masters get on with doing whatever they liked to their 'property'?

I hesitate to venture into this as there will be Americans with a greater degree of historical knowledge about this (and strong feelings!) but I think your argument suffers from an extreme lack of historical perspective.

Can anyone closer in touch with US internal affairs tell me whether the government's commitment to bringing justice to terrorists and their backers has extended as far as taking action against NORAID yet, whose financial support of the IRA been responsible for killings and bombings in Northern Ireland and in England for a matter of decades?

Since there is a persistent tendency on this thread for those of us who are advocating 'changes in foreign policy' (or some such phrase) to be vague about what we mean, and for those who disagree to assume that the vagueness simply covers a desire to 'give in to the terrorists' or 'make them happy'), I thought it might help if I tried to spell out more concretely and positively the sort of thing I mean.

(i) We've heard a lot of talk about 'building a coalition' against terrorism, and some quite remarkable pledges of international co-operation; that's a good thing. What I would like to see, though, to back this up, is a larger investment by the US in international law and the institutions of international law. And that will include institutions of international law which are able to hold the US to account as much as any other nation. At the moment, many in the world see America as using 'international law' only when it suits it.

(ii) Back in 1997 in Britain, there was a lot of talk about an 'ethical foreign policy' - and ever since there has been a lot of back-tracking. I would love to see my own government, and the US, making a real commitment to supporting democracy, freedom, and human rights around the world, and making that a prime objective of foreign policy. If you think this is already true, you've probably not been looking very hard. However, even if we'd made this commitment, we would have to work very hard not to substitute a different objective for it: the extension of market liberalism, and of a Western brand of political liberalism, throughout the world. This is a difficult balancing act, and would need to work hand in hand with (i) above if it is not going to be imperialism by another name.

(iii) A recognition by the major Western economies that global inequalities are a bad thing - that major economic inequalities are likely to add fuel to fires which will burn us - would be useful. And this could also be made an explicit goal of foreign policy. Sounds reasonble, doesn't it - but when we still take far, far more out of the economies of the poorest countries each year than we ever give back in aid, you have to wonder. And, funnily enough, this is not the same as making sure that there are ever more global markets for our own goods: that may be a partial consequence, but should not itself be the goal.

What about dealing with the immediate threat? Yes, I think that the perpetrators are going to have to be forcibly brought to trial; yes, I think that in various ways existing terrorist networks are going to have to be broken up (financial freezes, destruction of training camps). But a 'war on terrorism' that thinks that the longer term problem will be solved by these means is massively mis-guided. The only kind of war on terrorism that will work in the long term is, as I have been trying to say, a war on inequality, a war on various forms of imperialism, and a war on the abuse of and lack of international law.

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Originally posted by Louise:
Scuse me Ferg, but what was that thing called 'the American Civil war', in which thousands died, about?

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Well I think that is a bit more complicated actually. Many people think that people like General Lee were fighting for ideals to do with the independance of their states from Northern control.

I would like to hear an answer to this question from an african american though:
Which did more for Black americans, the civil war or the 60s civil rights movement?

I have not studied this formally so I can't give quotes but I seem to recall hearing that the civil war changed slaves into waged slaves...

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Originally posted by Ferg:

Well I think that is a bit more complicated actually. Many people think that people like General Lee were fighting for ideals to do with the independance of their states from Northern control.

I would like to hear an answer to this question from an african american though:
Which did more for Black americans, the civil war or the 60s civil rights movement?

I have not studied this formally so I can't give quotes but I seem to recall hearing that the civil war changed slaves into waged slaves...

Ferg

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I am one of those who believe that the Civil War was fought about states' rights, but one
result of the war was to give the slaves their freedom.

There is an enormous difference between actual slavery and wage slavery. A wage slave has some choice in where he will live and what kind of work he will do. A real slave has no choice.

Moreover, one of the greatest evils of slavery was that families were torn apart. Husbands were sold away from their wives, and children were sold away from their parents. This was very evil, and it stopped happening one hundred and thirty-six years ago.

At the time the Civil War ended, there were people in Britain who were wage slaves to the same extent that the newly-freed blacks were.

I agree with you in deploring American help to the IRA and its supporters.

The problem is that American politicians with many Irish-Americans among their constituents have a strong incentive to support the Irish republicans. For the politicians, it is a way of getting political support without having to pay anything for it.

Most Irish-Americans have formed their attitudes from stories handed down from their great-great-great-grandfathers. They want to avenge the wrongs done. They don't realize that it's impossible to avenge a wrong when both the perpetrators and the victims are dead, and the situation has changed greatly.

I have heard that the IRA was founded in New York city. I wouldn't be surprised if this is true. The average Irish-American bears far more rancor toward the English than the average Irishman does.

I am ashamed of my government's collusion in this terrorism.

on july 30, 1863, pres. lincoln issued the "eye for an eye" order, warning the confederacy that the union would shoot a rebel prisoner for every black prisoner shot, and would condemn a rebel prisoner to a life of hard labor for every black prisoner sold into slavery....this had influence on conf. government, but not on individual commanders and soldiers.

different time, different technologies, but interesting indicator of how policies don't mean a damn at the gut level.

May 17, 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. (that's almost 100 years after abolition)

from Richard Wright's Native Son: "When men of wealth urge the use and show of force, quick death, swift revenge, then it is to protect a little spot of private security against the resentful millions from whom they have filched it, the resentful millions in whose militant hearts the dream and hope of security still lives."

that is the voice of a black man, oppressed man, whether we agree with him 100% or not, it would behoove us to try to imagine his position as it relates to countries like afghanistan and the middle eastern countries where we get our petroleum

1870 right to vote regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude

1920 right to vote regardless of sex

i don't like that women's rights typically lag behind. (i'm a woman) but in afghanistan where everyone is desperate it seems unhelpful to single out women's plight...(yet)

and the more i think of bin laden being killed, the less i like it...too quick...what about building a glass panopticon on the wtc rubble...a kind of terrorist zoo...we could put falwell in there with him, pump in upbeat christian rock and put 50 naked virgins, separated by unbreakable glass, next door to them...proceeds to education. is there a hellhound on my trail?

i do not like the flag hysteria in my country at all. and my husband served 6 years in the navy and we have a flag on our house (by coincidence)...i'm actually tempted to take it down...does it prove who is a good american? or the sudden band-wagon religious hysteria... our country was founded for many freedoms including religious freedom. lack of religion does not make one a bad american. much of what the media is pumping out smacks of mob mentality.

I think you and I are a lot closer than we first appeared. What I disagree with are the calls to change foreign policy because they killed 7000 civilians.

There are unjust policies. I'd be willing to bet that you and I would not agree on what those policies were, or (if we did) how they ought to be changed. But they were always unjust, and it didn't take 7000 dead Americans to make them unjust. I would venture to say, though, that there was absolutely nothing we could have done to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

The world looks the way it looks today because the USSR and its allies were in a race with the US and its allies to spread ideologies. Now, I happen to think that a lot of what we did was necessary at the time. Even though communism has failed miserably, and would have even if the entire world had been transformed into the worker's paradise, having to rebuild an economy in its aftermath is an almost Sisyphean task. So I think it was necessary to fight it wherever possible.

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Originally posted by blackbird:
i do not like the flag hysteria in my country at all. and my husband served 6 years in the navy and we have a flag on our house (by coincidence)...i'm actually tempted to take it down...does it prove who is a good american? or the sudden band-wagon religious hysteria... our country was founded for many freedoms including religious freedom. lack of religion does not make one a bad american. much of what the media is pumping out smacks of mob mentality.

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I've gone back and forth on the sudden patriotism thing... on the one hand, I am horrified at how many times I've seen the flag displayed incorrectly the past couple of weeks. But then I stop and think about what I see on the Fourth every year and I realize that the patriotism really IS there all the time. It's just not always this in-your-face. But when we're celebrating the founding of the US, or when some outsider is marshalling forces against us, then it reasserts itself.

And maybe that's a good thing. I am sure that part of the goal of the 9/11 attacks was to fragment our society along social, political and economic lines. Instead, he gets 280 million pissed off Americans whose only squabble is where to drop the bombs. I wouldn't want to piss off 280 million anything, much less the population of the richest and most powerful country in the world.