"Fighting Words"
May. 17th, 2005 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsFor those of you who have been paying attention, there is a huge brouhaha over whether or not the military abused a copy of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay. There are a few things about this incident that really bother me.
The first is the constant use of the word "holy" by the Bush Administration when describing the Koran. Nobody I know consistently uses the word "holy" to describe the Bible or the Torah, and would probably gag applying that adjective to the Baghavad Gita or the Kama Sutra. I don't mean to imply that "holy" is never applied to those books, but in every press conference this week over the incident members of the Bush Administration consistently referred to the Koran as "The Holy Koran" (tm).
The Bush Administration has painted itself as a friend of the fundamentalist mindset in this country, one that believes that there is no "holy" book other than the Bible, and to consistently call the Koran a "holy" book when, supposedly, no one in the Bush Administration really believes that shows just how weak-spined they are when it comes to living up to their own rhetoric.
On the other hand, over in the Middle East when the story came out, the Islamic world went nuts and killed people. I'm sorry, but in a civilized world you might call the desecration of a mass-produced religious text the act of a cad, you might call it distasteful, you might beleive the perpetrators are hell-bound barbarbians, but that is no reason for murder. Can you imagine any Western nation where the maltreatment of an object would cause mass violence that leads to pogramage and decimation? I can't believe that we are so afraid of those people and their medieval mindset that we are willing to backpeddle, kowtow, and perform obesiance to make them stop. They won't stop.
And now that Newsweek has retracted the story, it doesn't matter. They don't believe that the incident may never have happened. The rioters are incapable of suspending judgement. They want an excuse to go on rioting, killing, and making the rest of the world suffer, and they're going to hang onto this one for a while.
Here in the United States and in the rest of the modern world, we have something generally regarded as freedom of expression. This is true not just of speech, but print, and in our modern world, recordings of audio and video. The idea of supressing another's right to speak his mind is not merely abhorrent, it is immoral. The right to expression often includes the right to make that expression with whatever tools are available, so long as those tools are your property. It really is time to apply those moral standards to the rest of the world. Because if we don't fight for the ideals of the Enlightment, we are going to let the light go out.
The first is the constant use of the word "holy" by the Bush Administration when describing the Koran. Nobody I know consistently uses the word "holy" to describe the Bible or the Torah, and would probably gag applying that adjective to the Baghavad Gita or the Kama Sutra. I don't mean to imply that "holy" is never applied to those books, but in every press conference this week over the incident members of the Bush Administration consistently referred to the Koran as "The Holy Koran" (tm).
The Bush Administration has painted itself as a friend of the fundamentalist mindset in this country, one that believes that there is no "holy" book other than the Bible, and to consistently call the Koran a "holy" book when, supposedly, no one in the Bush Administration really believes that shows just how weak-spined they are when it comes to living up to their own rhetoric.
On the other hand, over in the Middle East when the story came out, the Islamic world went nuts and killed people. I'm sorry, but in a civilized world you might call the desecration of a mass-produced religious text the act of a cad, you might call it distasteful, you might beleive the perpetrators are hell-bound barbarbians, but that is no reason for murder. Can you imagine any Western nation where the maltreatment of an object would cause mass violence that leads to pogramage and decimation? I can't believe that we are so afraid of those people and their medieval mindset that we are willing to backpeddle, kowtow, and perform obesiance to make them stop. They won't stop.
And now that Newsweek has retracted the story, it doesn't matter. They don't believe that the incident may never have happened. The rioters are incapable of suspending judgement. They want an excuse to go on rioting, killing, and making the rest of the world suffer, and they're going to hang onto this one for a while.
Here in the United States and in the rest of the modern world, we have something generally regarded as freedom of expression. This is true not just of speech, but print, and in our modern world, recordings of audio and video. The idea of supressing another's right to speak his mind is not merely abhorrent, it is immoral. The right to expression often includes the right to make that expression with whatever tools are available, so long as those tools are your property. It really is time to apply those moral standards to the rest of the world. Because if we don't fight for the ideals of the Enlightment, we are going to let the light go out.
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-17 06:58 pm (UTC)Besides, war is good for business. War means censorship and secrecy and a bazillion ways to make a fast buck when young men and women's lives are on the line.
As for standing up and applying our standards to the rest of the world... that's precisely what pisses them off so. What gives us the right to impose Pax Americana on the rest of the world? Nothing.
Of course, convincing the Empire to abandon the Middle East - with all that oil.... much less all the other power they've got...
no subject
Date: 2005-05-17 09:43 pm (UTC)If flushing paper down the john, or being interviewed by shorts-wearing women who have red paint on the inside of their legs (another neat trick used by the interviewers) will work, GREAT. Prisoners may have the right to not be physically tortured (which works poorly at best anyway), but NOBODY has the "right" to not be offended, no matter how severely.
The people who get murderous over symbolic offences are the true "cretins" here, and there are plenty of such cretins in Western society as well, and I am utterly sick of them.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-17 11:40 pm (UTC)On the other hand....
The Geneva Convention is actually one of enlightened self-interest. If you treat your prisoners well, word will get back to the other side, and it will actually make the other side more willing to surrender. If, however, you mistreat your prisoners, it makes them... quite bloodthirsty. As we have seen.
Besides. These people are fanatics. They'll either talk or they won't. If they decide they won't, Torquemeda himself couldn't make them. And trying to get them to talk is ultimately going to cost more GI's lives in suicide bombings.
As for not being offended: I as a free man have the right to not be witness to whatever offensiveness you care to commit. POW's by their nature can't run away. Furthermore, being offensive has consequences. Someone may come up and punch you in the mouth. If you offend someone badly enough, someone may blow himself up in your shopping mall.
I'm not saying we have to be uber-PC. If you've read me for long enough, you know my opinion of PC. *spit* I'm just saying lets not be egregiously offensive. You can call a man a low-down stuck-up half-witted scruffy-looking nerf-herder, but using the N-word is just a little beyond the pale. Same with POW's. If you want to convince them to talk, try convincing them you're not the devil incarnate first.
"Love your enemies, and drive'em nuts!"
-- Brother Dave Gardener