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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sweet Ol who wrote (7898)	9/14/2001 7:56:35 PM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 23153

I was thinking about northern Ireland, too, mostly the fact that only a few hundred active "soldiers" perpetuated a conflict for three decades that hurt the lives of millions of inhabitants in Ireland and England. Terrorism requires a level of cold-blooded rationalization beyond most of us.

To: Sweet Ol who wrote (7898)	9/15/2001 11:42:25 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

John R. Haley Re: <<No one can understand the mind of terrorists because they are so bent and twisted.>> John, I disagree on this. It seems to me that it is easy to understand the minds of terrorists because they are so singularly directed. All you need to know is that for reasons of anger, devotion, love or some other emotion, the individual sees things in absolute black and white. The ends always justify the means. There is little fear of death and the nobility of martyrdom and the respect and reverence of surviving persons far outweighs that fear. How many of our own have recieved our highest honors by self sacrifice and, in some cases, losing their own lives for goals and purposes we feel justify such sacrifice? How about the 300 firefighters that went up the Trade Center buildings when all others were going down and paid the ultimate price for it. What moved them to take what they had to know was an extreme risk to their own lives for the sake of others who they never even knew? How many men who threw themselves on grenades and were forever lost to family and friends for the sake of soldiers they knew for mere months, can we say made rational decisions? I imagine that most of us have had times and places in our past when we were prepared to DIE for a person, ideal or emotion that, at that time, outwieghed our own survival instincts. Perhaps even more difficult for some is that time when we were prepared to KILL for the same kinds of motivations. Each requires a terribly strong emotion and conviction. The fact is, however, that almost all of us are capable of the same acts as the terrorists committed, given the right set of "realities" as we saw them. In fact, some of the religious views of the Palestinians, coupled with some of their personal experiences might well make their acts understandable, even if not condonable. (As a side note and interestingly enough, the reluctance to kill may be even stronger in some than the reluctance to die. The military has done studies that showed that a large percentage of US soldiers will not shoot to kill in combat situations even when their own lives are threatened. They will either shoot into the air or not shoot at all. In some of the wars the figures for combat soldiers were reportably over 50%. From this came more training on dehumanizing the enemy. Go figure?) We can stridently disagree with the factors that motivated the 19 people who knowingly and deliberately sacrificed their own lives in these terrorist acts. We can feel repugnance that they took the lives of truly innocent victims with them. Their intensity of their beliefs, the conviction of their acts and their personal courage seem, however, clear to me. While we take appropriate and legitimate steps to identify and punish those that committed such acts and those that encourage and aid them, we should also take care that we learn to understand their motives. To the extent that there are inequities and injustices that contribute to the motivation and creation of such fanatical hatreds, and to the extent that those inequities and injustices are within our power to address, we should act appropriately and legitimately to correct them. We should not exercise our power to the fullest extent possible to show how resolute and tough we are, we should exercise our power with restraint because we are the keepers of our own morality. Maybe we should all remember that this country has a long history of doing things that are foolish. Foolish in the sense of inefficient, ineffective and inappropriate for the immediate needs of our own people. Foolish in the sense of being based on ideals and values that the rest of the world did not share and sometimes ridiculed us for. Things like rebuilding Japan and Germany after the war. Things like going to war with England to declare our own independence and freedom from foreign rule. Things like providing 1st, 4th and 5th amendment protections for minority interests at the expense of the safety and protection of the establishment and the majority economic and political interests. Foolish notions that over time became the gold standard for civilized nations all over the world and came to define the words freedom and civilization. Foolish notions that pave the way for a safer, saner world where one day our children, their children and the children of today's fanatics will be safer. Foolish notions that will hopefully result in a world someday where people who perform terrorist acts can safely be said to be truly insane people whose motives cannot reasonably be attributed to ANY justifiable motives. Ed