Hannah Arendt was right.
We're facing the Attack of the Killer Dorks.
The Banality of Evil
Hannah Arendt was right.
We're facing the Attack of the Killer Dorks.
It must be tough wondering if God is with you as the first step into infinity is taken triggering the detonator. Why else do they bungle so? Surely not the fear of the Bailey. Our dialectic gives us few aces to hold in these matters of jihad, leaving us to whisper our secret dialogue, never shouting it. I fear we are scriveners of the absurd ourselves, make code and symbols for the unfolding clash of cultures that can leave but one standing.
Sometimes I think educated folks are more susceptible to ideology than other folks. But maybe I've been hanging around universities too long. Frederick Crews once described the academy as "a kind of heaven for ideas that have slipped their earthly moorings."
I do confess to involuntary shock when I learn how educated some of these people are, but then I usually think "of course they are."
Killer dorks...very much so.
Last edited by Nat Wilcox; 07-07-2007 at 04:08 AM. Reason: dorks, geeks...whatever.
If learned men of science are susceptible to the murderous jihadist ideology, how susceptible then are the uneducated Islamic masses to the Western counter-message? This is a caveat to the COIN philosophy IMO. We know how to grapple with this dilemma but that assures not an adequate understanding of it nor ready means of abatement.
An army of individual mass murderers
Setting aside the overall ideological leadership of an insurgent movement, is it possible to conceive the individual actors (like these doctors) more more along the lines of how we think of individual mass murderers, rather than as political ideologues themselves? In other words, if social conditions are so disrupted that berserkers are being generated within a society in large numbers, all it takes is an ideologue to point them all in the same direction.
For example, here is an interpretation of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech mass murderer, that sees him as a PTSD-generated berserker:
http://collegiateway.org/news/2007-virginia-tech
Supposed you had 50 of these, and could point them all in the same direction. It would make quite a suicide army.
Bob
"Amid all the terrors of battle I was so busily engaged in Harvard Library that I never even heard of ... [it] until it was completed." —A student a few miles up the road from Bunker Hill, 17 June 1775
Originally Posted by RJO
What you suggest, I think, totally undercuts President Bush's strategy against terrorism. The central assumption of that strategy is that frustration born of the the lack of political and economic opportunity generates terrorists. So if you take that away through democratization, to stop or staunch the flow of terrorists.
But if the flow of terrorists is simply a reflection of a pathology that we can do nothing about, then democratization is irrelevant (thus taking away the very last shred of justification for the Iraq intervention). The only effective strategy would be aggressive defense (which might include very strict controls on people from Islamic countries who want to come to the West, and some sort of punishment for those who glorify terrorists, perhaps economic and political sanctions against government officials, media, family members, etc).
Personally, this idea appeals to me because I think the roots of the terrorist offensive is not a lack of democracy or, as some contend, misguided Americans policies, but rather a pathological, subrational combination of perceived victimization, a warped hypersensitive sense of justice and honor, and a desire for death on the part of some segment of Islamic societies. Even though it is a minority position, we cannot alter it. As with the Cold War, all we can do is contain it until it burns out.
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