camwyn | (no subject)

(no subject)

*eyes the LONDON news this morning*

Oh, fucking hell.

NOT COOL, YOU HEAR ME? NOT COOL.

quintus? May I have permission to come over there and exercise my prerogative as an American to be an arrogant violent bastich at the people responsible until they whimper and bleed from new and innovative places?

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Once again I am forced to revert to the two questions that were biggest on my mind after about, oh, 10:15 AM on 11 Sept. 2001:

1. Why the hell did you do this to these people, Mr. Idiot Bomber Persons? What did the people on those subway trains ever do to you? ... yeah, yeah, their country supports people who're trying to kill you, whatever, you're just going to give me rhetoric, aren't you.

2. What the smeg did you think this was going to accomplish, other than making people want to see you die?

*mutters*

That's the nature of terrorism I don't understand. It engenders sheer, spitting hatred for them. Oh, there's some fear, yes, but even the more peace-minded people start thinking of carpet bombing.

As one of the volunteers who was at my Red Cross chapter on 11 Sept. put it while watching the smoke billow on the TV screen that first day: "I fought in Vietnam for years. I never in my life thought I'd see something that would make me angry enough to make me want to pick up a rifle again."

That's it, precisely.

See, that's the thing. You can't assign a rational ideology to people willing to kill to make a political point. Those are great questions. Sadly, they're also the wrong ones. Because they wouldn't answer you with words. They'd answer you with bullets and bombs.

They're serial killers. I put 'em in the same mental category as Chuckie Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer and the Unibomber. (Hey, that rhymed.) And whenever we catch serial killers, we slap 'em in a cell until we can stick a needle in 'em. That's what we need to do with these people, too.

Urf. Here I must revert back to my LJ entry of 19 April:

...men who thought that by unleashing ammonium nitrate hell upon a building full of people whose only crime was being part of a System, they could change this country for their idea of the better. I'm told they were under the impression that striking at the government in an openly violent manner would cause people all over the rest of the country to rise up alongside them and overthrow that System. Could be that's what they thought. Could be they thought other things. I dunno. All I know's what I read in the papers, and see on the Web, and hear on the radio and see on TV. I've never been inside those two heads. I've seen a lot of vileness in my life and I don't much want to add more if I don't have to. I do know this, though.

The men who did this thought they were accomplishing a very great thing. Or at least a very important thing, whether it was particularly big o great or not. They thought they would be part of making something critical happen. Maybe they thought they were heroes for it, in their own way. Heroes get remembered.

These guys don't deserve to be.

These men were brass-balled cowards. They weren't afraid to kill for what they thought was right, but did they kill people who had offered them violence? Nope. Did they pick a target that was capable of defending itself? Nope. Did they attack someone whose death would stop some kind of critically important policy, or whose absence would make it immensely difficult for the System to continue doing the stuff that they thought was so wrong? Uh-uh. The Murrah Building was stuffed with bureaucrats and families. Important bureaucrats, maybe, but not exactly the kinds of people who could set national policy forward or back by their actions. Lousy target. Lousy tactic. Lousy strategy. And the guys who blew it up thought they'd be starting off the most important war of their time by doing it...

Find the killers, un-speak their names, remember the deeds.

Hear hear. Remember the deeds, so that they are never repeated again.

I wish I could find it - I posted on plastic.com a while back in a discussion about this sort of behavior a comment that people found incisive.

Basically, they think they're playing a negative-sum game. (Work with me for a moment.) They can reduce the number of players on the other side until such time as the other side simply forfeits. They assume that their terror activities will cause their opponents to simply collapse into surrender rather than fight back. Most of these belliefs are based on highly radical, verging on apostate, interpretations of their scripture, but to them, it's the holy gospel.

The Quran states that a man who kills a woman or a child cannot pass into Heaven, yet they continue to put bombs in places where women and children, not just men/soldiers, are killed. Moderate Quran scholars discuss 'jihad' as an inner struggle against the baser nature, a holy war against your darker urges; the radicals imply that the base nature and dark urges should be turned outwards for the true Jihad.

Well, like I said, it's not a matter of whys. Anybody who willingly murders fellow human beings in the manner they do have completely abrogated rationality. And for us to try to assign a rational reason to their actions after the fact is granting them a legitimacy that they definitely do not deserve. (woo run on sentence!)

You can't make sense of the senseless. All you can do is assure that the senseless has no hold on society, by removing those who commit senseless acts.

And, man, I *SO* should not be discussing philosophy this early in the morning. Gives me the collywobbles.

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