At 10:08 28-04-2002 -0500, John Horn wrote: > > How hard did the American population try to join the fight against > > terrorism after planes crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon last year? > >What exactly did you expect us to do? Fly over to Afganistan and join the >fight? We haven't been exactly "hiding in the basement"! That is a >terribly insulting insinuation. We are going on with our lives as best we >can. That's the ONLY thing that I can do to show the terrorists that they >didn't and can't win.
Gautam apparently believed all Europeans should have stood up, grabbed something that could be used as a weapon, and go fight against the Nazis. The purpose of my post was to point out that while he expects that from Europe, there were several cases in the US where the population should have done the same but did not. Hence the "he who is without sin". He scolds Europeans for not doing what (in his opinion) they should have done, but I do not see him criticising Americans for the same lack of action. After the September 11 attacks, the entire US population called for action against the terrorists. But how many of them did actually go out and join the military so they could fight? One in 10,000? One in a 100,000? Jeroen Me: You know, I don't actually believe that you believe any of this. But, on the off possibility, you do understand that there's a difference between popular resistance to an aggressor and fighting a war 6000 miles away? France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway were nations under enemy occupation. Popular resistance to the Nazis was a moral obligation there. Guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and passive resistance were all possible, and practiced in the case of the Serbs and the Russians, which certainly demonstrates that it was possible. It would be difficult to currently conduct guerrilla warfare against Al Qaeda for reasons that should be obvious even to you. When a nation has an army in the field fighting a just war, the obligation of its people is to support that army. Which we are doing. Of course, you have previously argued that we are not fighting a just war, but, well, that's your business. If a nation has been occupied, then its people should resist. When the members of a minority in a nation are being picked out and exterminated, then the other people of that nation should try to resist and protect them. It _was_ possible to do that. When you fail to do that, it tells us something. When the same countries that failed to make even token attempts to protect their Jews today tell other Jews that they shouldn't protect themselves either, it tells us something else. Your examples actually work rather to the benefit of the United States. I have never denied that we have major problems in our own history. What is striking, however, is the extent to which we have worked to solve them. Even you have heard of the American Civil War. The most devastating war in our history - fought, in the end, because the nation decided to free its slaves. The Civil Rights movement was an internal movement. No one forced us to change. There was no external coercion. We did, because it was the right thing to do. It took too long, but in the end it was our choice. Contrast that with Europe, where millenia of anti-semitism culminated in the extermination of Europe's Jews. After the defeat of Nazism the United States forced the European powers to confront this fact. It wasn't by choice, or an internal realization of injustice. As time has passed, though, instead of continuing to face that history, much of Europe has gone right back to hating Jews. Now you can demand Israel's destruction in France by the light of burning synagogues, and be thrown out of the Norwegian Parliament for wearing a Star of David. You parodied Pastor Neimoller's poem - it also says something that you would use a poem describing the last extermination of the Jews in Europe to help justify the current level of European anti-semitism. Well, this time first they came for the Jews. But the Jews fought back and protected themselves - despite the efforts by those who assented to their death last time to prevent them from doing that. Then they came for the Americans. And the Americans are in the process of finding them and making sure that they will never attack anyone, ever again. This time the story will be different. But it will be different _despite_ you. Gautam
