“Let’s ask the white man, he’ll know.”
“Sir, will my arm grow back?”
I caught Lord of War last night. No other film except Hotel Rwanda emphasizes the point so well that the perceived value of human life is often very low. This film and Syriana both push the concept that Western Europeans and Americans move through Africa and the Middle East, corrupting it completely, and rarely personally facing the consequences of the corruption they spread. Yuri says, “They say, ‘Evil prevails when good men fail to act.’ What they ought to say is, ‘Evil prevails.’” Evil does prevail, because men are animals before they are philosophers. Americans and Western Europeans, here in our relatively safe world, are no less animals than the peoples of the Middle East and of Africa. The difference that separates us from them is need. Though we may not descend into barbarism in one generation, given significant time and significant shortage of our basic needs, we could be killing each other with equal zest. The people there in the hot parts of the world have known need forever. There is no longer any memory of civility. We strip the natural resources of the place, and we redistribute the wealth of the region. We take it out of the ground and place it in our own hands and the hands of those bloodthirsty enough to control barbarian politics. We provide massive amounts of weapons, so that the various factions of alien life can more effectively kill each other, for that is what they are to us. To our greed, the Middle East is like a dangerous planet, and the people are like aliens, mostly docile but occasionally violent, and primed for elimination, and the riches are lying there waiting in the ground. Is it any wonder that some of them have decided that perhaps the real enemy is not the people on the other side of the wall or the river, but perhaps the people on the other side of the world?
“Sir, will my arm grow back?”
I caught Lord of War last night. No other film except Hotel Rwanda emphasizes the point so well that the perceived value of human life is often very low. This film and Syriana both push the concept that Western Europeans and Americans move through Africa and the Middle East, corrupting it completely, and rarely personally facing the consequences of the corruption they spread. Yuri says, “They say, ‘Evil prevails when good men fail to act.’ What they ought to say is, ‘Evil prevails.’” Evil does prevail, because men are animals before they are philosophers. Americans and Western Europeans, here in our relatively safe world, are no less animals than the peoples of the Middle East and of Africa. The difference that separates us from them is need. Though we may not descend into barbarism in one generation, given significant time and significant shortage of our basic needs, we could be killing each other with equal zest. The people there in the hot parts of the world have known need forever. There is no longer any memory of civility. We strip the natural resources of the place, and we redistribute the wealth of the region. We take it out of the ground and place it in our own hands and the hands of those bloodthirsty enough to control barbarian politics. We provide massive amounts of weapons, so that the various factions of alien life can more effectively kill each other, for that is what they are to us. To our greed, the Middle East is like a dangerous planet, and the people are like aliens, mostly docile but occasionally violent, and primed for elimination, and the riches are lying there waiting in the ground. Is it any wonder that some of them have decided that perhaps the real enemy is not the people on the other side of the wall or the river, but perhaps the people on the other side of the world?
posted by Brinton
3 Comments:
Two points:
1. Our INDECISION with respect to the situation in Darfur is costing more lives than our DECISION to intervene in Iraq.
2. You come close to excusing those who strap bombs on their chests and blow up innocent people. "No wonder a few are fighting" I believe you wrote. But who are they fighting? Who is dying by the dozens in Iraq at the hands of the apparently aggrieved? More innocent Muslims than anyone else.
We should work to close the loop in terms of tolerance, a free economy and democracy, not abdicate.
Other than that I like your blog.
Johnathan Gay
Wolfe County
I certainly hope that I don't come too close to it. That kind of violence is inexcusable, but in order to eventually make it stop, I think that we DO have to understand what is going on and why. We may partly to blame for the hhatred inflicted on us. That doesn't make it okay, it just means that part of protecting ourselves might mean trying a little harder to stop offending people in other nations with our policies that are designed to economically exploit them.
Brinton:
Agree with your point about our need to reach out to these groups. From JFK to Nixon to Carter to all the others, our foreign policy wasn't really cognizant of the problems it was storing up. But those problems were principally one's of realpolitik. Now we're trying to do good things in the region, like promote democracy, and we're getting slammed.
There was a really good article in the New Republic you should read about our abdication of responsibility, in the form of NONINTERVENTION, in the Darfur, and how that was actually MORE represntative of the type of exploitation previously seen under colonialism than our policy of INTERVENTION in Iraq. I can send it to you if you can't get it... most of their content is paid only.
Finally, if these people just have pent up rage why aren't they railing against the French, the Persians, or the Turks? Why did they hit America before they hit the Brits? Colonialism and Imperialism were perpetuated on the Arabs by others long before America came to exploit them by buying their oil from Arab leaders.
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