BS: Sorry I just don't get it

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: michaelr
Date: 24 Jun 04 - 10:33 PM

CarolC and Guest -- I agree completely, and anything I would post on the subject has already been said by you.

JustaPicker -- I strongly suggest you travel outside the US, and talk to the people who inhabit the majority of the planet. It should be an eye-opener.

Cheers,
Michael

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST,Casual Observer
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 10:58 AM

I'd love to travel outside the US. But there's this thing called money, and they won't generally let you on a plane without it.

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 11:10 AM

Just to turn conventional thinking on its head for a moment, surely the deliberate beheading at least ackowledges that life is precious. they do it because of the preciousness of life and the impact that taking it away will have on their enemies. the abuse leading to death is just the opposite, it is saying that you mean so little that your death is meaningless. i dont care if you live or die. My pleasure in inflicting pain is more important.

just a different point of view, not necessarily one i totally agree with, but it just occurred to me.

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 11:22 AM

The danger is, to get into a frame of mind which says that one kind of killing (beheading hostages, for example) is really no worse than some other kind (such as dropping bombs on residential districts); or the other way round.

The truer way to see it is, to recognise that one kind is really just as bad as the other.

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: CarolC
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 12:47 PM

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040625/photos_ts/mdf608663

I just saw this picture for the first time today. I don't really have anything to say about it or the story that accompanies it, other than to note that the prisoner died during an interrogation that was being conducted in the presence of the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib. And to note the demeanor of the US soldier in the picture.

I just think we need to be very honest with ourselves about what our values really are.

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: Amos
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 01:33 PM

We've spent a lot of time being a not-very-nice country, haven't we, for all our superficial talk about values?

A

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: Metchosin
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 02:34 PM

sadly, if one were to draw a keffiyeh on her head and a black beard on that shining, white, smiling face, any differences in values would not seem all that significant.

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 04:04 PM

That picture was well aired in the UK media two or three weeks ago, Carol. The disturbing thing for me, and part of the reason I hold out for law and order and civilised values above my own gut instincts is that I might behave just as crassly as him if I'd been sucked into a similar situation. War and other violence does have a capacity to deprave, and I suspect we don't honestly know how we'd withstand that unless we've been there (and I appreciate that Mick, for one, has).

If I'd written that guest post at 2.50pm yesterday, I'd want to put my name to it, but maybe guest has his or her reasons. Also I couldn't quarrel with Justa Picker's last post, which is saying something, as quarreling seems to come quite easy to me....

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST,petr
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 04:17 PM

interesting point about the warporn, this is definitely a media war.
Internet and tv are used by the terrorists very effectively because they know there is a certain revulsion in the west to beheadings. It gets noticed a lot more than if someone is just shot.

the media attention is focussed so much on this region, however that no one notices the victims in Africa. Sudan probably has the worlds longest running war with countless thousands dead - and there is no media to report the victims. In India the previous year during the Muslim and Hindu fighting the number of people killed was in just two months was more than the last 15 years of the Palestinian Israeli conflict.

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 04:48 PM

There is also 'disaster pornography' too, though. Last week on NOW with Bill Moyers, British journalist Julie Flint talked about the problems with that too. In other words, there is a vicarious thrill factor people get from seeing these really pornographic images of violence, death, and suffering that doesn't result in anything changing. We just get to be disaster voyeurs, or war voyeurs.

Actually, a lot is being written about those kinds of things right now. I've mentioned these works in other threads too, but I'll list a couple of them again as they seem quite relevant to the thread:

'War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning' by Chris Hedges

'Regarding the Pain of Others' by Susan Sontag

'A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide' by Samantha Power

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Jun 04 - 04:59 PM

Sorry guest, petr. I meant to also mention that the interview with Julie Flint is about her very recent trip into the Darfur region in Sudan. She balked at the notion that it was too difficult and/or too dangerous for international journalists, who are currently amassed on the Chad border rather than going into Sudan to get the real stories, to get into Darfur. Here is the gist of her response (cant' find a transcript of her interview on the NOW site, so this is from memory)to a question about how she got into Darfur when all the reporters along the Chad border said they couldn't get in:

"I walked right across. It's easy. It's easy. I'm sorry, I'd like to tell you I did something terribly brave and dangerous, but I didn't. I simply walked across the border and found the rebels."

If you watched any of the documentaries on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Julie Flint's interview is eerily similar to the reports of the sole Western journalist (from the BBC) who stayed behind in Rwanda once the massacres began, to act as one of the handful (literally, only about 5 people) of Western witness to the genocide, after Western journalists, diplomats, and their families had left.

It just causes your heart to ache. It makes you so bitter that we are so weak hearted, that we are so cowardly.

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 26 Jun 04 - 11:53 AM

A most endangered species, indeed, is the folksinger. Strangely, those doing the endangering call themselves folksingers only while making their career. All while we do what we do in Iraq, and they, whoever thay are, behead their screaming captives---and both do it in the name of a God that, if you ever needed any clearer proof, never existed except to subdue His own followers and his/their enemies, and to make laws to keep the uppity people in line. Yes, heaven and hell are here on Earth---and both always ave been of our own making.

Art Thieme
(as noted in the Gospel Of Thomas too)

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST,Frankham
Date: 26 Jun 04 - 12:05 PM

One of the great aphorisms of all time is "you can't just do one thing".

There are reasons for the beheading. They are horrible but they must be put into context with how this Administration has dealt with foreign policy.

Saddam and Bush have one thing in common. They both ignored Al Quaeda and bin Laden.

Now, as Micheal Moore suggests, can an old man in a cave on dialysis have orchestrated the monumental tragedy on 911? What role did Saudi Arabia play since many of the hijackers came from that area?

Another question has to be asked. Does Saudi Arabia have designs on Iraq?

Frank

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST
Date: 26 Jun 04 - 01:27 PM

It should also be remembered that public beheading is the legal means used for Islamic judicial executions/the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, just as in the US we have the electric chair, hanging, lethal injection...

Kinda makes you wonder why the US media doesn't tell us that, and put these public executions being carried out against foreign nationals by the insurgents into a legitimate context, doesn't it?

Oh yeah--that might generate some public interest and debate on the death penalty in the US, and the ruling elite in the US want that debate to happen just as much as the Saudi ruling elite does...

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 26 Jun 04 - 01:36 PM

Frankham, I don't know about Saudi Arabia, but you can be sure that Turkey and Iran are keenly interested in any possibility of Iraq fragmenting - and in helping to fill any kind of vacuum that might develop in the territory.

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST
Date: 26 Jun 04 - 05:38 PM

Agreed, Peter K.

Turkey surely would like to appropriate Kurdish lands.

Iran would probably like a Shi'ite Iraq.

Saudi Arabia is interesting because of their power in the US.
Would they be in cahoots with the Bush dynasty? Oil again?

Where is the bin Laden family now? And have they really dissascociated themselves with Osama as some claim?

What about Wahabiism? Wouldn't it be very much alive in Saudi Arabia?

Is there a connection between Wahabiism and Al Quaeda and is that a rhetorical question or what?

Iraq is up for grabs it would seem.

Frank

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST,petr
Date: 28 Jun 04 - 01:10 PM

Regarding Sudan, 1.5 million dead mostly South Sudanese Christian and Animist mainly by the North Sudanese.
barely makes the news, mainly because there are no survivors to tell the tale, no newsmedia etc.

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: GUEST
Date: 28 Jun 04 - 04:42 PM

Not to trivialize the atrocities that are being committed by the "good guys" as well as the "bad guys" in this "war" (I stopped believing Americans to be the good guys in white hats who always rode in to save the day about the time I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy)...but since I stopped hanging out at this place so much to spend more time playing music, what people think about these important and solemn issues seems less relevant to me.

I would like to think that by focusing more on my music, I have trivialized the things that make me different from everyone else -those things that separate and isolate me from the rest of the world. The effect has been to make those differences unimportant. The world of musicianship is all-encompassing and highly tolerant. It's hard to hold someone's opinion against him or her when s/he is playing a jaw-dropping phrase or an incredibly difficult passage.

And to think it all came from making air molecules wiggle in specific ways....

Subject: RE: BS: Sorry I just don't get it
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 Jun 04 - 05:14 PM

It was that picture Carole just came across that I had in mind when I wrote this song a couple of days ago - Fishin' for Secrets