Friday, January 22, 2010
But it's not a religious war...
No matter how quickly and easily the American and perhaps even the Western world will brush this off, there is no way that the Islamic world will simply let this go - nor should they. We can claim its one company doing it, and that it doesn't indite or even indicate an entire society or country. But three hundred thousand rifles used by the US military that have biblical references as the first / last thing a soldier sees as s/he targets and shoots at someone? Just that sentence there picked up abroad is all we need to let hatred further fester and to foster more militants and more militant responses. We just emboldened and enlarged the small percentage of militant islamists out there that are fighting against the West. One stupid company, one stupid government acquisitions officer... yet still, it went 'unnoticed' (or unobjectionable that is) to the entire US fighting force and had to be spotted by the British. Therefore, I guess the US and its military - through non-action - have in fact sent a very 'actionable' message abroad that this is in fact a holy war. If this was a sporting contest this would be called "bulletin board material". The West and American in particular, just keeps creating its own enemies...
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Fighting over symbols? Yep, that's quite important. But lately I see no big difference in this symbol-fight, as actual power and amount of arms (and an ability to use them against whatever and not held responsible for that, of course) matter more resulting in actual dead bodies and destroyed cities. The symbol without proper material and power base is... kinda nothing. We don't care what chiefs in Uganda think, but we do care what US and North Korea think of what's good and what's bad.
ReplyDelete(just watched the movie "Redacted" - that was fun) People were like this during the history of humanity, yep, social beasts.