[lit-ideas] Re: Five Years Ago
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 13:19:14 -0700
Mike:
I won't take blame for misunderstanding your fairly anonymous statement
"that none of the root causes of 9/11 would be addressed." You didn't
explain what you meant so I had only your previous writings and the
construction of this sentence to go by. I have run across many other
Leftists who used the term "root causes of 9/11" to refer to the many evils
they fancy the US and Israel have perpetrated in the Middle East. So I
assumed you were saying the same thing. Anonymity with its attendant
vagueness does have its downside.
Actually, you hear almost nothing in the way of a reaction against the
colonists. It's as though no one in the Middle East wants to talk about
that humiliating period. They will say that the national leaders who
replaced the colonial governors were much worse than their predecessors. So
it is your imagination that is at work in this area.
I don't find any psychological vertigo either. The Islamists are absorbing
technology like sponges. They make a point of coupling technology to their
ideology. American culture is attractive to those exposed to it and Amis
amusing account of Qutb's exposure in Greeley Colorado is indicative. Amis
some place describes a Puritan of Qutbist stripe standing under an American
stairway and disapproving of the skimpiness of the under garments American
girls wear. You express sympathy for these "Wretched," but I would venture
to suggest that if a Fundamentalist Christian popped up here in Lit-Ideas
with just half of Qutb's moral Puritanism you would demolish him with "fury
and great anger" [a phrase from Pulp Fiction" ].
Ah ha, Qutbism would only be a symptom and not a cause if something like I
erroneously assumed were not so erroneous after all.
More than 100,000 have apparently accepted Qutbism at varying levels of
understanding. But like every other belief the believers pick and choose.
Not everyone chooses to become a suicide bomber. My nephew's wife's cousin
blew himself up in a Starbucks in Cairo; so I figure I've done my part.
Some of us have to stay behind and take care of the women and children.
It's not very noble or honorable I know, but someone has to do it.
Lawrence
_____
From: Mike Geary
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2006 11:36 AM
LH:
>> Well, let's look at how Mike intended the term "root cause." He didn't
specify, but I took him to be using the old Leftist idea that Capitalism
causes proletarian revolutions, and the "so-called" Islamist unrest is at
root just such an one. The U.S. was out in the world plying its greedy
Capitalistic trade and on 9/11, the chickens came home to roost. <<
There you go again. I wrote that 5 years ago I thought and still think:
"That none of the root causes of 9/11 would be addressed." How in God's
name you transformed that into "proletarian revolutions" and chickens coming
home to roost is beyond my wildest imaginings. First, let me congratulate
you on your vivid imagination. Second, let me point out that I wrote
"causes", not 'cause' because I suspect there are many causes for Islamic
terrorism as for any human behavior. Religious fundamentalism certainly
plays a part in that. So does the anger engendered by the decades of
humiliation suffered under colonialists. So too the psychological vertigo
induced by the sudden (for that culture especially) changes thrust upon them
by the world at large. And I'm sure there are many, many more reasons that
go into the making of a terrorist. Some of those reasons, I have no doubt,
arise from the basest aspects of human perversity, some terrorists are
terrorists because they are psychopaths, some, no doubt, are seeking their
own death and so forth. Your Qutbian jihadism, I would venture, is a
symptom, not a cause. I could be wrong, of course. Maybe hundreds of
thousands of people have been persuaded to go get killed. In which case,
Qutb should have been in advertising. Think what he could have done for the
Marines! But what disappoints me, Lawrence, is that the Bush Administration
doesn't seem to care why there are terrorists. They thought they could just
stomp them out. Instead they have created millions more.
Mike Geary
Memphis
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