At 2006-08-16 11:01:53 +0530, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > That is exactly why I said (I repeat): "We the public have a duty to > choose which side we want to be on"
I think you're confused about what the sides are. As time goes on, we'll figure out what happened in this particular case: were these guys actually planning anything, and if so, was it a plausible plan? And we'll be able to figure out if it was the security agencies crying wolf, or a real success. I want to talk a little about the bigger picture, though. Most of the world consists of decent people going about their ordinary lives, mostly consisting of beneficial interactions with people they know to some degree or other. Commerce, love, friendship, quizzes at the pub, work, medical treatment. No relationship is perfect, and most have some element of animal dominance games mixed in at some level, sometimes escalating to the level of actual violence, but by and large they're positive, and the sum overall is what we call "society" or "culture". There are a small number of people who choose to live lives of dominance contests, perhaps including violence. For example, career criminals, policemen, litigators, or soldiers. Most of them are not very successful, because the decent people perceive their activities as a threat to society and put limits on how much they can take, by not cooperating with their attempts to dominate others, or only cooperating up to some limit. (For example, we're not very tolerant of policemen who go around shooting innocent people.) There isn't really a word for this class of people in English, so I'll call these guys "militarists" for this discussion. The most successful militarists are those who can get large numbers of decent people to identify with them. For example, Hezbollah is fundamentally a militarist organization, but large numbers of Lebanese people support them financially and by cooperating with them, for several reasons. One important reason is that they feel threatened by Israel, since Israel could invade at any time, and they feel that Hezbollah is "on their side". Other reasons include the hospitals and schools Hezbollah has built. Ariel Sharon was certainly a militarist, and he was able to get elected because large numbers of decent Israelis identified with him --- partly because they felt threatened by the intifada. As a result of large numbers of decent people on the two sides of that conflict siding with their pet militarists, against the ordinary people on the other side with whom they have much more in common, the militarists are able to pursue their conflict with each other with little interference from the decent people. The militarists on each side are only able to persuade the decent people to side with them because of the attacks from the militarists on the other side. Similarly, the BJP has persuaded large numbers of India's ordinary Hindus to identify with them, to the point of sometimes getting elected and perpetrating mass slaughter. We, the public, have a duty to choose which side we want to be on: the side of decent people, or the side of fear-mongering militarists who abuse the trust of decent people to start wars. The war is almost never in the interest of the decent people, from either side; it benefits only the militarists. Historically, there's been a widespread belief that some injustices could only be rectified by violence, with the accompanying problem that the violence gave power to violent militarists who could then abuse it. Sixty years ago, in her struggle for independence, India led the world to a new way of rectifying injustices without letting militarists run amok, and followed it immediately by demonstrating the depths to which ethnic hatred inflamed by militarist opportunists can sink a noble people. In the United States, fifteen years later and inspired by India, we began to heal ethnic hatred among our "black" and "white" people by the same means, hatred that had simmered for centuries, fueled by decades-long campaigns by terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers. There were times in that decade when it seemed that the militarists might get the upper hand and plunge our society into another bloody civil war. Today racism still afflicts the US, but it's a pale shadow of the evil that formerly kept a sixth of our population paupers. If you side with your local militarists against some set of decent people they have chosen to target, you make those people less safe, and frighten them into the arms of their local militarists, who get stronger. So it's not a matter of siding with one ethnic group or religious group against another; it's a matter of siding with militarists (in both ethnic groups) against decent people. So which side do you want to be on? The side of slaughter, or the side of satyagraha?
