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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (6938)	9/24/2001 4:47:05 PM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 93284

The terrorists' attack wasn't so much an act of war against the United States as it was an assault on the modern world austin360.com .... Conflict associated with modernity isn't the exception, according to these scholars, but the rule. The American Civil War, Ray said, was largely a conflict between the modernizing, urbanizing, industrializing North and a feudal, rural, agricultural, slave-holding South. The continuing religious fundamentalist movements in this country are the lingering reaction against modernization that began centuries ago. The reaction can be peaceful, as in the Shaker communities found in 19th century America. Or it can take the form of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. "You can relate major chunks of violence in the world in the last 200 years to particular cultures and countries being done in by modernization," Ray said. In advanced industrial economies, the fundamentalist response to modernization gradually diminishes, according to Ronald Inglehart, a University of Michigan political scientist who has been tracking individual values in more than 60 countries for the past two decades. Economic growth eventually overwhelms the traditionalist reaction. In the Muslim world, however, the fundamentalist movement is fed by "economic failure and national humiliation" in the continuing conflict with Israel, Inglehart said. "There is a general revulsion to modernization," Inglehart said, because "the central values of traditional society are being eroded." Especially, Inglehart said, these societies fear "women who go where they like, sleep where they like, do what they like, have jobs equal to men -- there is a general revulsion against that, and they see the U.S. as incarnate of all of this. It's not something we're doing, but we are the visible manifestation of modernization." The Sept. 11 attack wasn't an attempt to destroy the United States; it was "about attacking the symbols of modernism," Ray said. "It was entirely a symbolic effort." There is nothing new in this reaction except, of course, the degree of its brutality.