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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (135698)	6/4/2004 11:20:29 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<Do you really think the ideas of Islamo-fascism - totalitarianism, hatred of the "Jews and Crusaders", and a desire to drive out the modern word with religious fanaticism - are so powerful and attractive that they will win in the long term? Do you really? > I think it's Stockholm Syndrome on a very grand scale. Jim Jones, David Koresh, Heaven's Gate, Symbionese Liberation Army, the Korean Kims, Chairman Mao, Heil Hitler etc, we've seen the way humans in cults work. There's a male great leader and their acolyte high priests and the masses goose-stepping or kneeling to Mecca or waving their arms in Hallelujah mania. There's always enforcement, usually of quite barbaric style, such as burnings at the stake, cutting off fingers, hands, arms etc, burning in oil, and the Aztecs made a great show of cutting out hearts. The appeal of the way of life seems universal, at least to the bosses and main acolytes. Mqurice

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (135698)	6/5/2004 4:59:00 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Do you really think the ideas of Islamo-fascism - totalitarianism, hatred of the "Jews and Crusaders", and a desire to drive out the modern word with religious fanaticism - are so powerful and attractive that they will win in the long term? Do you really? I'm sorry that I didn't do a better job of explaining what I meant. I made the assumption that if you try to forcefully suppress big ideas with holes in them, they'll grow stronger, while if you take the pressure off they'll die a natural death. I'm so convinced of this aspect of human and political nature that it's too often an assumption in my thinking. If you use communism as an example, if we'd somehow invaded and occupied Russia the idea of communism would have survived and many Russians would probably be fighting and killing to achieve their "ideal" life as communists. Instead they tried it and now they've moved on because it wasn't what they expected it to be. I think you could say the same of many of my generation that tried communal life or, to stretch the point, maybe we'll say that of the neocons in the near future. Perhaps the best cure for radical Islam might be a few decades of living under radical Islamic rule. It seemed to me that in Iran the reality of several decades of radical Islamic rule was starting to work as a "cure," at least it was until we began to use the threat of force to create democracy. So my point was that you couldn't kill big ideas through the use of force; not that the big ideas couldn't be killed. Some diseases cannot stand the sunlight and pushing them into the shadows allows them to breed. Of course my "cure" involves a lot of suffering by those who will probably learn the hard way. That's unfortunate but it seems that every culture and every people learn those hard lessons for themselves. For Israel that may well mean building a fence between it and Palestine. A fence consisting of not only a nuclear and conventional military threat but also a physical fence on a fair line. It seems to me that trying to "kill" off those that hold dangerous ideas is simply giving the ideas more strength. As far as the "long term," I believe Israel will never be safe in our lifetimes, just as America will never be safe from terrorist attacks. We'll have to choose the least bad of bad alternatives and then we'll have to suffer and die sometimes, just as men have almost always suffered and died throughout history. If we don't look ahead and create a best of the worst alternative, we'll suffer more, not less.