GG: Political positions

[Mary Jo Watts <mwatts@rci.rutgers.edu>]

All,

I do not want this to become a political discussion heated or otherwise--
a discussion which would be best served in other forums on the web. I may
agree with some (or many) of your points Sven, but I believe this is not
the best place for such discussions.  There is much much desolation and
sadness right now and I appreciate people on the list expressing their
feelings.  I specifically would like to keep the on-topic as much as
possible in this weird time and it is for those reasons that I have asked
people to share with me and others the *music* that they choose to listen
to in times like this.

Please everyone join me in maintaining the spirit and purpose of the list.

Thank you,

Mary Jo Watts
listowner, f_minor
mwatts@rci.rutgers.edu


On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Sven-S. Porst wrote:

> >There is no one in Germany who doesn't consider this assault concerning
> >the whole civilized world.
> 
> I didn't want to get into this, but I can't stand hearing this nonsense
> anymore that everybody has been repeating since Bush and Blair first said
> it. Why is it an assault on the _civilised_ word or even _democracies_.
> The situation would be equally bad if it happened to uncivilised people
> (whatever that means - I guess we assume ourselves to be civilised
> then...) or in a dictatorship.
> 
> Even if you believe that killing people is a good thing to do in
> retaliation (as Mr. Bush certainly does, for example), killing thousands
> is definitely wrong, be it in New York, Bagdhad or Kabul. Stating this as
> an assault against the whole world or humanity would make much more sense
> (but in all the interviews and press conferences I've seen so far, this
> terminology has only been used once).
> 
> Unfortunately - even in a situation of great misery as this one - the
> 'leaders' of the Western world cannot stop being righteous about
> 'civilisation' or democracy. Instead they have nasty rhethorics à la
> 'hunting down' and 'war' in order to justify whatever actions they are
> going to take. (And Israel seems to want to jump the bandwagon making
> their Palastinial terrorists an international terrorism problem - which
> it most likely isn't these days).
> 
> Also, as the people who have done this were clearly well organised,
> skilled and intelligent, none of the officials seems to waste a thought
> on the fact that if people kill themselves to do this means at least that
> they must feel very strongly about something, most probably the USA and
> (judging from thee targets) the behaviour of its businesses and military
> in the world. The fact that their action of killing thousands of people
> is wrong doesn't imply that there is no issue. I can very well imagine
> that further failure to notice this on the side of the governments will
> give rise to further frustration and possibly violence.
> 
> In the end, whatever the terrorists wanted to achieve (I can't really
> imagine any goal that you could reach by doing this...), they for sure
> managed to make this world a worse place once again, by allowing the
> politicians to be a bit more bastard than usual. It will mean tighter
> security (although from reports on TV, security on US domestic flights
> seems to be extremely poor right now) and increased paranoia leading to
> less personal freedom. It may very well lead to less tolerance towards
> muslims and Palestinians because they are demonised by the media and
> possibly the politicians - although most of them don't even think about
> shooting or bombing anybody, let alone do it.
> 
> In the end, it is a great _personal_ tragedy for everybody involved and
> it is causing a great deal of agony to relatives and friends. Sadly, once
> we leave the personal frame, even the horrifying death toll of this
> attack is dwarfed by those deaths occuring regularly in other parts of
> the world. I am not very optimistic on this (partly because of the
> rhethoric on 'civilised' and 'democratic' countries) but let's hope that
> this attack reminds people of the vulnerability of human beings and
> raises the esteem of human life, wherever.
> 
> Sorry for this longish off-topic rant. But watching all this on TV
> yesterday and today accumulated quite a few thoughts that were triggered.
> 
>         Sven
> 
> P.S. I couldn't agree more on the 'this can't be real'-factor mentioned
> in the e-mail Jost forwarded. At first I yawned thinking it was another
> Hollywood catastrophy film, until the bad lightning and the 'BBC News
> Live' Logos caught my attention... sad but true.
> 
> --
> Sven-S. Porst . PGP: 0x0085ABA3 . http://homepage.mac.com/ssp
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