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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (52197)	9/15/2001 3:32:03 PM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

forced conversion (or for that mater, seductive conversion) will no longer be an acceptable tenet of any religion Couldn't agree more. Looked at through their eyes, I think that the perceived threat of "decadent western values" is precisely the "seductive conversion" that Fundamentalist Islam is so strenuously trying to avoid. And seduction may be the wrong word, considering the drought, dislocation, starvation and foreign invasions. Rather it must appear to them as extreme duress. And where did the seduction-conversion to western values get their immediate neighbors, Iran and Pakistan? Not exactly Paradise. Ditto the former Soviet Union. These are fiercely independent mountain people who love their land and just want to be left alone. They are just sophisticated enough to have figured out that they do not want to be in hock to the World Bank for the next three generations. Perhaps the only foreigner who has seduced them was bin Laden by proving to them earlier on that he was one of their own in fighting by their side against the Russians. Loyalty runs very deep among these people and it must be very hard for them to turn him over to the USA. I doubt that the Taliban have much understanding of how they in turn have been used by him. They say he is just the latest excuse for an outright invasion, and it would be wrong in my view to dismiss this perception as mere rhetoric. ...the wide gap in standard of living between "consumer societies" and "subsitence societies" will have to be filled. That is a lengthy process, but it will eventually be completed. There is a temporal destabilizing factor due to the rapid development of communication and media means, making the economic gap so visible and thus instilling great resentment and envy which is exploited... Very perceptive, Zeev, but if you are implying that countries are like beads along a string, from the most "developed" which happens to be us, to the least developed, and the answer is that they will all eventually have to become more like us with "consumer cultures" like ours, I don't buy it. It is a chauvanist prescription of development and it is probably a myth to believe that such a foreign-inspired model could work even if local elites wanted it to. It excludes the human and cultural element in the process of development. In my view, they need to figure it out by themselves with a minimum of interference by outsiders. If such a cultural change were to arise as the result of a long and indigenous process then fine, but these attempts at "conversion" by force, duress, or seduction are ill fated in my view. It may be seductive to think that the wide chasm in standards of living can be easily crossed by a modern foreign-built engineering marvel like the road that was built through the Khyber pass, but it would be a big mistake IMO to think that Afghanistan can be easily converted into a client state of the West, or that they will emulate us. Sam