Pamela aka Atlas shares a brilliant insightful essay on yesterday's events from fellow hawk Ben L;
The one city in the world that can rightfully be called a "Sister
City" to New York City is London. New York is closer in spirit and
style to London than it is to Chicago, and Los Angeles isn't even on
the same planet. It's clear to any New Yorker whose ever been
there. Times Square and Leicester Square are really part of the same
place, just separated by an inconveniently placed ocean. To
paraphrase some French guy who spoke after 9-11, we are all British
today; but if you've ever swiped a Metrocard it goes deeper, and if I
may speak for this subset we are all Londoners today
.
We therefore have an even greater burden to understand what has
happened, what is going on, and what may occur in the future. It is
our culture- Western Cosmopolitan Urban Culture- that is the object
of the enemy's hatred. There are a lot of armchair explanations as
to why- "they hate our freedoms", "they want revenge for our support
of Israel/ Invasion of Iraq/ Support of corrupt middle eastern
monarchies/ support of rights for women and homosexuals/ whatever".
They have a new excuse every week. But it's an answer that begs a
further question. Why? Why are they in such need of a cause to kill
for? And to answer that, we need to know them, and know their own
goals.
Killing is not their end goal. Power is. The enemy is a
theocracy.
Currently, a theocracy with limited political capability and control,
but a theocracy none the less. This Theocracy wants power.
Like all Theocracies, it faces some fundamental problems. Any ruling
system either allows itself to be open to change, consensus, and
instability, and allows for these things- note well that there are no
limits at all placed on the contents of an Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States - or it does not. Reality has a
very bad habit of being an unruly, chaotic thing lacking in clear
boundaries and definitions. It shifts. When a ruling system chooses
to pin itself to a fixed and immutable Truth, it runs into trouble
when Truth collides with Reality. Monarchies began to crumble when
people let ideas run loose, and the Truth of "Noble Blood is Better
than Common Blood" collided with the Reality of "No it's Not".
A Theocracy needs its Truths, because without them it has no reason
to exist. A priest, rabbi, or imam won't get very far adding "or
maybe not" at the end of a line- the "amen" is there just to make
sure no one slips in the "or maybe not". Any social order needs its
Truths or it will risk a Hobbesian struggle of all against all, but
a Democracy can get along just fine with just a few basic, friendly
ones putting no burdens on people: the Truths we hold self evident.
But a democracy allows society to change, Tomorrow's general
consensus may be different. Different values may exist. Okay, we'll
deal with it. A Theocracy can't allow that. Theocracy is founded on
a set of complete, self consistent, Truths revealed to and
interpreted by the self appointed Holy.
Today, the enemy's Theocracy has certain key Truths, and one of them
is "God has promised us wealth, power, pride and glory in return for
obedience." And it doesn't deliver this in Reality, which turns
things around and hands wealth, power, pride and glory to a bunch of
undisciplined, unclean, wildly fornicating infidels. When Truth and
Reality collide, it's a problem.
Most of the big time religions have to deal with the fact that people
really, really want wealth, power, pride and glory. Religions can't
deliver this, and Theocrats know it. So each learns to deal with the
demand. Christianity: You'll get it after you die. Judaism: It
will happen, someday, really, trust us. Buddhism: Stop asking, your
desire for wealth, power, pride and glory is the cause of your pain.
There are branches of Islam that adopted all three of these, but
Fundamentalist Islam never came up with a good answer to the
problem. All it could ever come up with was "Let's take it!"- and
from the launch of the Jihad in the 7th century, to the Barbary
pirates in the 18th and 19th, to today, there have been plenty of
believers trying to do just that.
Because, the other inevitable question a Theocracy has to answer
about wealth, power, pride and glory is: "Why did God allow the
unbelievers to have so much more of it"? Again, there are different
answers, but fewer this time. In most cases, the answer is "Who
cares, Earthly wealth, power, pride and glory are Not important."
But not Fundamentalist Islam. Having already adopted "Let's take
it!", "Not important" is not available as an answer.
Another unavailable answer is "because that society has some really
good ideas pertinent to the generation of wealth". Can't happen.
The one thing that is toxic to a Theocracy is the idea that another
society generates good ideas that they don't. That would be bad.
That's why Theocracies do the book burning thing. We can also
eliminate "Dumb Luck", because that really undermines the whole "God
rewards the Faithful" message that Theocrats need to attract a
flock. "God Rewards Whoever Rolls the Right Dice, Faithful or Not"
is a crummy message to start a religion with. So "God Rewards the
Faithful" is Truth, even if "God Rewards the Clever, or the Lucky"
might be Reality.
Having eliminated "Not Important" and "Generated by Good Ideas"
and "Luck" all we are left with is "Generated by Bad Ideas".
Fundamentalist Islam is forced by own premises and inflexible logic
to assume that the western superiority in wealth is entirely based on
Badthink. The thriving, vibrant, colorful, noisy life of New York
and London with impressive buildings, expensive real estate, shops
full of the world's goods, and glorious expressions of every human
art imaginable must be based on things like greed, theft, deception,
wickedness, etc, etc, because we've eliminated all the other
alternatives. It's no coincidence that Prophets have been denouncing
urban cultural and economic centers since the first prophet walked
into the first marketplace. I don't think there's a single religious
scripture on Earth where a Holy Man walks into a busy, prosperous
center of culture, says "how wonderful, people are getting along so
nicely!" and leaves. And not surprisingly, this dim view of Urban
Cosmopolitanism dovetails nicely with the "Let's take it!"
philosophy. Easy to take something when you believe the guy who has
it doesn't deserve it.
It also dovetails well with the long discredited "zero sum" theory of
economics, which holds that there is a fixed sum of wealth in the
world and all we can hope to do is redistribute it. But that's
another story.
What we have is something now akin to Greek Tragedy: the accepted
paradigms lock the characters into certain thought modes, and drive
them inexorably towards tragic conclusions, and only a Deux ex
Machina can set things right. They hate us because their philosophy
demands that they do, there is no other logical choice. Not hating us
would undermine the whole system. The moment a Jehadi looks at a
place like New York or London, without hatred, he is lost to the
Theocracy, for a fundament has failed in the structure of his
belief. God promised the faithful wealth, power, pride and glory,
infidel London has it, the faithful Islamic World doesn't, and that,
at the base of it, is the reason why London was attacked.
I think the reality of this is clear in the reaction of the Spanish
government to the attack. Security has been stepped up across Spain,
as it has in many Western nations. Why is this necessary, one would
ask, when Spain did what was demanded of them the last time they were
attacked? Isn't Spain off the hook now? Not at all, and the
actions of the Spanish government prove that they know it, or at
least suspect it. Appease the enemy, and at best, you are safe only
until a new excuse is dreamed up, because you have not dealt with his
philosophical need to hate you.
Thank you Ben - Atlas
