It's easy to see how the Mumbai terrorists need to be fought, because we're over here and they're over there.
The lesson is simple, obvious, and it tastes like bile if you're being told to administer it. It's precisely what we didn't do after 9-11, and precisely what led us down the road to today.
- Use police methods to decapitate the leaders.
- Use media to expose the methods.
- Use popular will to improve security.
- Use social methods to reduce the foe.
How would you have felt like if some Indian told you that after
9-11? How would you have felt if you were told not to go to war
precipitously, that going on your gut instincts was going to make
things infinitely worse, or that transparency would succeed and
paranoia fail?
Some tried to say just this. They were instantly exiled from the discussion. Anyone who questioned the path of madness was then exorcised as well -- whether in the media, or in entertainment, or even online.
In fact those who made things worse by disregarding these obvious truths remain in power today, and remain influential even within the incoming Administration. They are said to be the "grown-ups."
If the last 7 years have taught us anything, it should be that these people are not grown-ups. They were grown-up children. They were infantile, acting out paranoid basement fantasies of how to fight while sending real heroes to die. I remain angrier at our own leaders than even those who perpetrated the Mumbai attacks, because we should know better.
You don't fight hate with hate. Your victories doing so are only temporary. I look around at my own state of Georgia, 140 years after the hate-filled Confederacy was abolished, and I still see the same racist attitudes, the same racist objections, the same backwardness throughout the Deep South which existed then. So how do you expect the struggle against religious extremism to be quick or easy?
That's the real enemy here. Religious extremism in all its forms. Love of God can so easily be perverted into hatred for man, of the other, and thus into blasphemy. Every religion is susceptible. Absolutely every religion. Anyone who denies this obvious fact is a liar, and self-deluded.
Yet every religion at its heart teaches the same things. Kindness, temperance, living in ways that will grow society, not tear it down. It is the hearts of our religious leaders that need to be reached, and it's our religious leaders who need to be rejected when they teach hatred or intolerance of anyone. (Yes, I'm thinking here of both Mormons and Catholics, as well as our own Protestant Fundamentalists.)
This is not a battle of civilizations. This is a war between civilization and the simple teachings that bound people together before there was such a thing as civilization. Faith is fine and lovely, but we must distinguish between that and blind obedience to dogma, in all its forms.
Easy for me to say. I'm comfortable. Try telling that to an Indian Muslim who may be treated as less than an Untouchable, and whose only source of education is the blasphemy of war. Or any oppressed people in the same situation, anywhere in the world.
We are in a race, worldwide, between the forces of civilization and
those who would tear it down, and it does our side no good when we
become The Other, as we have, here in America, this decade.
There are
times when you must defend yourself, when civilization must fight back.
But civilization can only fight back effectively when it knows
precisely who it is fighting, and what its objectives are. The
objectives in any fight are notoriously limited.
Wisdom is needed. Wise acts and wise leaders. But more important, wise citizens who know the difference between what needs to be done and what our lizard brains want to do.
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