rhoenix wrote:Ok, I can even agree that him acting in the manner of a petulant child in grabbing and distributing what he could didn't and doesn't help his case, or the larger idea of whistleblowing.
I'm certainly not condemning all of the armed forces everywhere, or even just the American ones.
However, that Apache helicopter video was pretty damning, in that unarmed civilians were gunned down, reporters were killed, and even first responder medics were. This is the main point for me - that fact that this happened, and got buried.
I can agree with you that Manning grabbing the tens of thousands of other documents without bothering to read them were at best unhelpful actions for his case, and for him personally, and at worst were a form of apathetic treason. But I keep coming back to that video, which bothers me as an American citizen to see American soldiers killing unarmed people. It's an emotional reaction, I'll grant - but it's there nonetheless.
This is not the place to have round 19 of the argument over that video. I did not see war crimes in that video, and if you did, then that's fine, but we can call one another fascist or idiot until the sun burns out and resolve nothing from it. There are ten thousand interpretations for what was in that video, and I'm not going to claim that yours is right or wrong, but it was not mine, at all. And even if it was that, in no way does that excuse what Manning did. He did not leak that video except as a tiny element of the aggregate total, and as I read it, only latched onto the video after the fact when looking for justification. Indeed, if all he wanted to do was draw attention to that incident, then he did himself a terrible disservice. Burying it within the metric tons of information he leaked ensured that nobody ever heard of the incident at all.
No, I'm sorry. Some Afghani informant whose name was divulged in those papers would not find the brutal beheading of his wife and children justified by the fact that Bradley Manning was outraged about a video taken in another country five years earlier that had nothing to do with him. Even if that incident was everything you claim it was, which I do not for a moment believe it is, then it would be no justification for what Manning did, nor present any credible rationale for unleashing hundreds of thousands of documents of contents unknown and unread, 99.9% of which had nothing to do with the matter in question. As far as I am concerned, this man performed an act of high treason out of petulance, and then dredged up a justification after the fact to make himself look like a hero.
Many terrible things happen in the world. They do not offer a carte-blanche excuse to commit crimes, let alone an ex-post-facto one.
I cannot take people like the Taliban or Al Queda seriously as a threat to this nation, or to any nation that isn't utterly rife with corruption and utter incompetence.
I simply cannot.
These are the people who file the sights off their guns, because their bullets will obviously be guided properly and unerringly by their higher power. These are people who honestly think that trying to act like a gently rebuking wise father to a little girl who got shot in the head will somehow earn them political points and sage nods.
These are people without a country, without a military, without an official anything - except maybe a website. Wow, that makes them a real official thing, alright.
These are ignorant fanatics that only even have what they have because there's instability and uncertainty to be taken advantage of in certain parts of the world among the poor and illiterate.
Are you seriously attempting to claim that these regional terror groups are in any way a threat to America? The only possible way they could be is through sheer incompetence on America's part.
Yes, I
am claiming this. Outright.
This has nothing to do with websites and nations and who has a national anthem and who does not. This is a clash of civilizations. Between a philosophical movement that I hold in such contempt as to
beggar description, and the rest of the civilized world, moslem and otherwise, which is to be their victims. In an interconnected world such as the one where we live today, this is a worldwide war against a fundamentalism so dark and absolute that its mere description invites ridicule to the one giving it. I understand the desire to simply write the Taliban and their gang of assholes off as barely-competent knuckleheads who live in caves, fuck goats, and generally eke out a stone age existence in a world that has written them off, but I cannot do so, because the Taliban, whom you think are so out of touch for their comment after-the-fact towards that girl they shot,
shot that girl in the first place, just as they shoot, mutilate, burn, or behead many other girls for such crimes as going to school or refusing to marry at the age of 12. Which is a mere fraction of the hundreds upon thousands of individual crimes committed by the Taliban and a hundred other like-minded groups monthly across a wide swatch of the world. The fact that 99% of the victims of these crimes are other moslems living in third world nations is utterly irrelevant to this, as is the fact that many of these individual groups are small and isolated and fighting losing battles against their local authorities. The groups are not the issue. The overall movement is the issue. As Fascism and Communism were ideological movements that represented real threats in aggregate, even if their component parts did not, so does Islamic Fundamentalism.
I recognize that beating the drum of 9/11 is an old one that nobody wants to listen to anymore, but you asked for my position on the "realness" of this threat. There you have its most damning, though certainly not only example. The Embassy bombings in Kenya and Egypt, the Cole, the London underground, the Madrid train bombings, every terrorist action you've
ever heard of in relation to fundamentalists blowing a bunch of people up are merely a
fraction of one percent of the total toll, most of which happens in faraway countries to people you've never heard of. The endless cycle of fundamentalist violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Nigeria, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, and a hundred other places besides, is what this is about. Yes, in every case we can point to local issues or other, long-standing grievances that inform the violence. But in every case, it's radical, fundamentalist Islam confronting any other
conceivable system of thought, including other forms of Islam itself, with ceaseless, endless,
senseless annihilation. That is what the Taliban and Al Qaeda represent, and even if those organizations are themselves destroyed, the ideological struggle will go on, likely for our entire lifetimes, and probably those of our children and grandchildren as well. And the consequences of losing that struggle can be seen in microcosm in Timbuktu and Bamyan and Waziristan and every story of the most grotesque atrocities conceivable leaking out of the endemic war in Syria. They can be seen in the rules by which everyone is required to live in Saudi Arabia, the consequences for walking about unveiled in Grozny, or the savage brutality of "anti-apostatical" groups on Flores or other non-moslem islands in Indonesia.
Make absolutely no mistake. There are large numbers of people in the world right this second who desire to murder you because their philosophy of Fundamentalist Islam requires that they do so. Many of these men's efforts to murder you would be laughably impotent, even comical. But not all. We have seen that over and over again and will continue to see it over and over, whether it be in the guise of some well-crafted plot by an Al Qaeda analogue or homegrown radicals with a pressure cooker and a handful of nails. This is not an invitation to live in fear nor to accept blindly any steps suggested towards staving these men off, but I
do invite you to explain to the family of the eight year old boy who was murdered by those homegrown radicals in the Boston Marathon bombing that there exists no credible threat from Fundamentalist terrorists. Tell it to the families of London or Benghazi or Madrid or New York or largely any person in Somalia, Afghanistan, or half a dozen other countries.
And if that's not particularly possible, tell it to me.
Salman Rushdie wrote an impenetrable book over thirty years ago in which certain passages were deemed offensive to Islam. He has been under a death sentence from these "laughable" and "unimportant" fanatics ever since, unable to show his head or even visit his home country. A dutch filmmaker made a movie about the oppression of women in Islamic countries, and was murdered in the streets in broad daylight by a fundamentalist fanatic who pinned a note to his chest with a knife threatening to exterminate the Jews and other Pigs. Another one of these laughable people "with nothing but a website" walked into a primary school in France just last year and shot a pack of six-year-olds in the head because they were Jews, while several years before, a Danish newspaper editor was attacked in his home by a man with an axe because he published cartoons critical of Islam.
You'll forgive me if I'm citing elements of a personal interest to me, but as an aspiring author dealing in religious fantasy and iconography, and as a Jew, they're the ones that come immediately to mind. Many thousands of others could be found. Of course there are still other atrocities that are perpetrated by the believers of other religions, or which have no relation with fundamentalism of any stripe. But the mere fact that one bad thing exists does not eliminate the other bad things that exist, nor render them less important, nor render those who choose to pay attention to them stupid, or alarmist, or seeking excuses to impose fascistic control of journalists over the rest of the world.
These are people who wish to kill me. Who wish to kill every value I have ever held, not through debate or the marketplace of ideas, but through brute force of the most brutal possible to conceive of. Who will bend every effort possible, no matter how impotent, no matter how small scale, to render me and mine (and you and yours)
utterly extinct. Who will never, ever,
ever stop doing so, not while the sun shines in the sky or the rain falls from the clouds. How many of them there are, and where, and what local purposes or grievances they hide their rhetoric in varies, but their fundamental existence does not, and their existence distorts all around it, until it is not even permitted to offer criticism thereof without being called an islamophobic, bigoted, or racist. The Satanic Verses, Rushdie's book I cited above, could never be published today. Nor can my story of angels and demons which employs several Islamic spirits and names for purposes other than what is found in the Koran. If either were published today, and read widely (far more likely in the case of an author like Rushdie than anything I could ever write), the result would be
worldwide riots and attempted assassinations. Embassies would burn and men and women would die screaming because of fanatical mobs whipped up all across the Earth. A man in Los Angeles makes a film on Youtube that purportedly insults Islam, and a friend of mine burns to death in the ruins of his consulate in Benghazi, along with a US ambassador. A bigoted idiot in Florida announces that he's going to burn a book, and fifty people are hacked to death in north Africa by frenzied mobs. A man in Denmark makes a stupid statement about Islam being a backwards religion, and his young children must live under police protection for the rest of their lives, lest they be beheaded and hacked apart by fanatical killers, all while sober, reasonable people go on television and discuss in serious tones how his crime (insulting people) is morally equivalent to its response (hacking children to death with machetes).
And you have the temerity to suggest that I'm an idiot for taking this threat seriously?
On 9/11, I watched three thousand people die because those ignorant chuckleheads in the caves of Afghanistan felt like they should, and then spent the last decade watching them twist the society of the world into a place where my very existence as a writer or a Jew, secular or otherwise, is reputably regarded in large portions of the world as an insult to Islamic fanatics that merits a response. I watched them slaughter tens of thousands of people in an effort to extirpate largely everything I consider worthwhile from large swatches of the globe, and selectively murder scores of people who objected to such actions. I also saw myself and others who made our fears known at all stigmatized as fascistic, racist, islamophobic, hypocritical, pro-genocide war criminals, and lumped in with such people as Jerry Falwell and Anders Breivik. I
fully expect to receive a similar response now. You yourself, in response to my announcement that the perpetrators of this philosophy were indeed our enemies, asserted that this was an argument that was
only used for censorship and governmental fascism, and strongly insinuated that I was not merely stupid for feeling this way, but arguing from a basis of desiring to eliminate freedom of the press.
And you're welcome to think or even say these things, but I've simply watched too many people die to sit down and pretend these fuckers do not exist, just so that someone can take a cheap shot at their political opponents by gesturing at a conspiracy that does not exist. I regard Bradley Manning as a traitor, and though he did not provide aid to them, I regard the threats he was accused of abetting to be very real. And I will not stop regarding these things as such just because someone thinks that makes me a contemptible shit.
Gaze upon my works, ye mighty, and despair...
Havoc: "So basically if you side against him, he summons Cthulu."
Hotfoot: "Yes, which is reasonable."
