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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BigBull who wrote (21491)	3/16/2002 5:24:18 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

A "poisonous pedagogy" has once again arisen in the world. Like it or not, for now, it has found a home in failed Islamic cultures. Imo these cultures are virulent and dangerous in the extreme. They must be fought ideologically, psychologically, politically, culturally and militarily. Yes. I've said so for a long while now. I've been calling it devotion to The Perfectly Stupid Idea. But then I'm something of a polemicist by nature. Imo the ME has reached this ghastly point of inflection. It is only a question of time before most acknowledge that a military solution is necessary to remove many a regime in that part of the world. Afghanistan is mere prelude. Afghanistan is a necessary side show for a number of reasons and it's likely lots of military action will be needed before this particular strain of totalitarianism is put back to sleep. But military action isn't everything as your post indicates. They must be fought ideologically, psychologically, politically, culturally The chapter from Bellanger's book that you posted is interesting for its insights. The various authors discussed give us "cross sections", as it were, of human psychology. What an anatomical cross section shows us is dependent on what part of the organism it's cut across. Similarly with "psychological cross sections": that of child's early upbringing (Miller); existential experience (Becker, Sartre); spiritual experience (Kierkegard); etc. If the observers are reasonably acute they will describe something true and useful in certain contexts. Sometimes we can make connections between them The roots of violence, then, can be sought in the dynamics of personal growth, rather than in a static aspect of the finitude of the human condition. ...and Each of the authors just surveyed focuses on an aspect of human relationality. For Miller, the key relationship is that between parent and child. Staub stresses the person s relation to his society at a particular time, his age. Jung evokes the inter- relations of the parts of the self. Becker paints a picture of human beings existing before Death, the transcendent limit of the ego. But none of these authors, from Kierkegaard s point of view, has discovered the most important relationship, the one thing needful: the relationship between the individual and God. p15 All of the authors may have caught some aspect of human psychology but are they the one's we need to deal with islamists? The discussion of the nazis and how they came to support Hitler's evil program/pogrom is insufficient in it's details and certainly doesn't touch upon how many came to give up the support. Also what may be applicable to the nazis might not be all applicable to the islamists. At the start of the chapter Bellanger quotes Kierkegard: The more I pursue the matter, the more I see that the confusion is not only in Denmark, not only in Protestantism, and not only in Christendom, but the confusion is in the nature of man. JP, 3: 2333 (1854) For sure, part of our nature is we think more than any other animal, but we're not very good at it. We get attached, sometimes the brightest of us even, to ideas that are stupid, evil, and deadly and nothing will break our attachment except the most extreme shocks or death. For many folk however, a clear view of alternatives induces them to give up the error. And many never get attached at all. I'm not sure that ethical or moral discussion of islamism in psychological or philosophical depth beyond a certain point is necessary or desirable. Once it's clear the movement has its roots in nostalgia for mythical time of golden age and that it says destruction of those who don't share or submit to the vision is desirable, then what the modern world has to do is pretty self evident, I think. Kill the leadership, dismantle the organizations producing the message, provide an alternative vision for those trapped by the false message and do enough to make the the alternative believable and acceptable because we can't kill them all. Even if we could kill them all, and did, it would be bad for us.