Thursday, February 27, 2003

Hoping the Good Guys Win, But Preparing for the Worst I am a little at sea about what is happening on the Security Council.  I hope our side wins—that the U.S. is unable to get the nine votes needed, and storms out, declaring the UN is irrelevant.  Then the Labor party revolts in the UK, forcing Blair to withdraw from the war because it doesn’t have a UN mandate.   Meanwhile, the U.S. is spitting blood, and the little mini-titans in various government departments that have any foreign responsibilities are busy threatening friends, cutting off aid, and in general acting like Mafia.   Unfortunately, this won’t come to pass.  Instead, we will likely see the spectacle, in the end, of no country standing in the way of the U.S. war, and finally a fig leaf, where all rush to say “yes master” and return to sheepishly to the reservation, bowing and making little mincing steps like they never really meant to be obstructive.   Our world has gotten coarser and more dangerous since the U.S. has made this drive to war.   What can we do about it.  I don’t think the kind of bitterness that is being engendered by the President Bush will easily go away.    Most of the worst violence in the world today is the result of fundamentalist ethnic or religious conflict.  In India and Pakistan it is Muslims and Hindus, in Israel, it is Jewish extremists against secular Palestinians.    In the U.S. it is the evangelical Christians who are the staunchest in support of war.  Fully 85% of evangelicals support initiating war with Iraq, more than any other group according to the latest Pew poll.   It scares me because it is fundamentalism run rampant—those who believe in the rapture and Armageddon, who seem to believe that war is good.   Aggressive war is a sickness in society that must be nurtured by hatred and fanaticism.  Without the fanaticism, it is not possible for people to want to bomb and maim the other sides’ children, to kill them by any means necessary.   Once this sickness is encouraged and allowed to spread, as it has been by Bush’s invocation of his war as one between good and evil,  comparable to the last war between God and Satan described in the book of Revelations, it breeds more and more fanaticism until, after much suffering, the psychosis dies out.   What started out as a small effort by fanatics, who caused Sept. 11th, and a number of other smaller terror bombings, has now mushroomed into virtually a global conflagration that is ripping apart old alliances, destroying institutions, and all the while breeding more fanatics.  This is truly Osama’s war, and he must believe he is seeing the fulfillment of his prophecy.   I feel like the last liberal.   It is getting lonely. 6:47:05 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 3/3/2003; 11:24:21 PM.