Don,
I'm mystified and somewhat disappointed by your latest post.
Let's start with the last item first:
Re: QUESTION: How do 5 people gain control of a plane with 80 people on board? ANSWER: By boarding a plane loaded with pacifists.
Generally, for the last 50,000,000 or so commercial flights, the five people who gain control are the people we hire to fly the plane and act as stewards. We trust them to do the right thing. When you call paying passengers "pacifists" as a means of derogatory speech, I take offense. Civilization isn't possible if every plane flight is occupied with warriors in excursion class.
As a fellow skeptic on the events of 9/11, I'm disappointed that you would express such a hostility to "pacifists" when it is obvious that when confronted with an outlier situation such as a hijacking that there is no cohesion among the victims, no organization and that individually most are not pacifists, but more correctly described as dis-organized. That is why the Beamer message of "Let's Roll!" resonates so much with the herd.
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Re: There's a difference between being strong enough to defend one's self, coupled with a moral responsibility to refrain from using that strength to attack the innocent, and the concept that all conflict is morally wrong. The very fact PNAC exists proves the fallacy of the latter.
I've read this sentence five times now. It still isn't making any sense to me. What do you mean? Can you break this into component thoughts? What I read from what I see is this succinctly stated as:
"PNAC proves that not all conflict is morally wrong."
Is that what you intend to say?
Because if it is, then we will have to disagree. I've read large sections of PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses". I've read the articles in the Atlanta Constitution-Journal and the Scottish Sunday Herald describing the goals of PNAC.
I agree with millions of people that PNAC is a vile force of evil that wants to impose an Empire on the planet based on military superiority. And I agree with millions across the planet that this is the same evil scheme that Hitler proposed for Nazi Germany, Hirohito for Imperial Japan, the Brits in the 19th Century, the Ottomans, the Romans, etc.
There is no morality being discussed by the PNAC crowd. They are merely the latest iteration of human greed, hubris and unmitigated use of force to impose their will to have gotten to center stage.
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Re: Where I part company with what I tend to view as the typical philosophy of peace movements, is the concept that war is never justified.
In the aftermath of WW II, the Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party insisted on creating the United Nations. This was the most brilliant creation of the 20th Century, IMHO. What we face today is a confusion among people who otherwise seem sane. For you to be questioning whether war is justified is a good example of this confusion. The U.S. has engaged in about 200 military incursions into 70 nations since the end of WW II. Almost all of them have been undertaken for the sake of commercial/corporate interests who control the U.S. government. Can we say that their war-making is justified? Of course not. Not from the perspective of the citizens of the U.S. But these excursions are fully justified by the corporations who thus achieve commercial advantage. Is this moral? Is this just? Or is this just-in-time run amok?
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Anahoo, you've really confused me about your views regarding PNAC. I view them as an unmitigated evil. Et tu? |
