"best revenge is to use our technology"
Well said. I believe this to be true on a broad, cultural scale as well. A friend wrote this last week. Very constructive as I see it.
Dear Friends,
While our government thrashes about looking for an appropriate diplomatic and military response to the WTC tragedy, let’s take some steps of our own. This is not a conflict that calls for a measured, careful response; this is a conflict that calls for an overwhelming, careful response, and a continued commitment.
The so-called “enemy” of Islamic fundamentalism has announced their intentions to perpetrate a war of cultural annihilation. Either they remove us, or we will remove them.
Thus they have defined the goals of the conflict. But the enemy is
just as vulnerable to these objectives as we are. More so, in fact.
The enemy builds his force on ignorance, on the Big Lie.
The enemy's greatest fear is that the prosperity of the West will
seduce the generations after this one. That the memories of old blood
feuds will fade when presented with McDonald's and computers,
and cheap cell phones. Every call they make to recruit is against the
decadence of the West destroying their way of life.
Should we punish the enemy with bombs and bullets? It is my opinion that we must salt the soil in which the twisted trees of intolerance and fanaticism
take root. We must change the hearts and minds of the young.
We shall salt them with small computers. With internet access.
With a telephone in every village. With puerile novels and
encyclopedias translated into Arabic. With teachers who speak their
language, and who teach them to use these tools to answer questions for
themselves. Yes, some of those teachers may be killed. They are
soldiers in this war as much as anyone who wears a beret, or carries a gun (Thomas Payne declared that “Sometimes the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.”) No tyranny can long survive with an informed and educated populace.
The organizations they declaim as the mouthpieces of the US
should be USED as the mouthpieces of the west. We will tell their children
that there is a life beyond subsistence farming and blood feuds. We will
tell their wives and daughters that there is a life where they are
valued as individuals and people in their own right, not as chattel.
We will give them the tools of bilateral communication, rather
than unilateral indoctrination. We will give them the Internet. We will
declare a great work, of making certain that every corner of this globe
has access to fast Internet access. Not just the US. Not just Europe.
The world.
They will see pornography sites. They will also see sites
discussing engineering, and simple improvements to agriculture. The
curiosity of children will be piqued, and their questions answered. With
each question asked, and each answer given, we slowly wean them
away from the culture of intolerance.
They'll be able to ask questions without censure or
censoring, and get answers they might not otherwise have.
I would sooner carpet bomb with Game Boys and Pokemon, and
an Arabic translation of Monopoly, than Fuel-Air-Explosives and cruise missiles.
The adults may be beyond our reach. The young MUST be reached so that 20
years from now, the thought of piloting a captured airliner into an
office building full if innocent bystanders meets with revulsion and
horror.
I fear, in the haste for vengeance, that the nature of this
conflict will be forgotten. Make no bones about it -- this is a
culture war. It can only end with a declaration on the order of Cartago
Delendo Est.
We cannot win this war with bombs or bullets, although we
can accelerate its prosecution by those means. We can only win
this war through a generational conflict; we must win the war in the
hearts and minds of the children now growing up in the Middle East.
Winning that longer war will be costlier and perhaps less
gratifying than CNN replays of gun-camera footage and laser-guided bombs hitting their intended targets.
It can, however, be a profitable war.
If you are an author, recording artist or someone who creates media, contact
your publisher about translating your works into Arabic. Insist on meaningful distribution of these works in the Middle East. There are many secular states in the region where commerce can be pursued; and where “pass-along readership” will cross borders into Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Libya.
Osama Bin-Ladin has declared this a cultural war. Let's show him what a cultural war TRULY looks like. Let's send in Shakespeare. And Heinlein. And Harlequin Romances, Pokemon and The Simpsons. Now is the time for Oprah to wield the saber of freedom! Mariah-u akbar (”Mariah is great”)? |
