From: Bernt Budde <bug@arachne.udac.uu.se>
Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Re: The "civilized" west
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 20:57:28 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: UDAC, Uppsala, Sweden

mathew <mathew@mantis.co.uk> writes:

>In case you missed it, the point of the article was to explain why Moslems
>feel that the West is being two-faced about the Rushdie business.  Moslems
>consider state and religion to be the same thing.  If the USA can bump off an
>enemy of the state like Gaddafi or Castro (or JFK?), why can't Iran do the
>same thing and bump off an enemy of the state like Rushdie?
and
>But that's the whole point.  For Moslems, state == religion.

OK. Valid point. I'll discuss it in the last paragraph! :-)

>>                                                        This
>> discussion started with a critique of Islam as barbaric and
>> primitive even for a religion.
>I'd go along with that for Islam as *practiced*.  I reserve judgement on any
>ideal theoretical Islam that people may know of.

They'll probably start to reinterpret their religion to suit the world
instead of the other way around, like the Christians do nowadays.

>> What you are complaining about for the first pages in your
>> article, is that some western countries (USA and France,
>> mostly?) aren't following their own laws (not to say, UN
>> Human Rights) in handling people when having international
>> "problems".
>I'd say that's a pretty fair complaint myself.

Yeah, me too.

It was so much to comment (and my answer to read?:-) that I might not have
made myself clear enough.

If there is a defence, I'd say that if todays super powers are bad, I'm
quite sure that what we see of (non)western countries would make them
worse. No it's not a defence. If we look at a few Muslim countries
you'll find some disgusting things too. (I can dig up references if you
HAVE to ask. Turkey, for instance. Muslim mass murders in Africa quite
recently, etc.)

>> Laws about how to handle individuals are not applicable to
>> groups or countries.

>What exactly are you saying here?

Sigh, yes it was short. Consider morals. Before we had a working police
force, killing people that was a bother was more a question of how many
(and rich) relatives the would-be-corpse has. Our present worldview
make it "obvious" that it's wrong to take the law in your own hands.
Nothing obvious about it, really. Morale dependes upon the world and
the society.

(The classical Viking/medieval ting was, according to modern research,
more a way to have SOME regulations for clan feuds. Would be hard for
me to find English references on this, but if you ask a Swede to check?)

>>                                    Trying to kill Gadaffy is, of
>> course, not a nice thing to do; quite an aggressive one, really.
>> On the other hand, to be blunt, you shoot mad dogs too.
>If there is a clear and succinct response to H. Siddiqui's complaints about
>the West's hypocrisy it's "Two wrongs don't make a right".  Yet here you seem
>to be saying that because Moslem countries are prepared to carry out
>terrorist acts and murder their opponents, that somehow makes it OK for us to
>do the same.

What I'm saying is that local, moral ways of viewing things aren't
applicable when you have international groups so organized that you'll
never be able to send the cops down the street to pick up the cuplrits.

I don't like it either, of course. But that kind of crime has to be met
somehow. And there are ooold traditions about how to handle nations that
do state terrorism. Most of traditions has to do with cannons.

This is more of a philosphical discussion, but I'd rather call it game
theory. The fact is that as long as some countries or groups seriously
break international law, other countries will break international laws
to get back at them (if it doesn't cost too much or is too dangerous!)
if they are immune from normal attacks. Of course, Gadaffi is claiming
that this is what he is doing. I'm not an expert and I read local
papers -- he might be right! That is the way the world is and the way
it'll be.

>>                                                      If a
>> country support terror organisations (which Libya did and
>> probably does) and is an oil nation and in that way is quite
>> immune to international trade sanctions, war is the only
>> alternative.
>There's nothing about an oil-producing nation which makes it inherently
>immune to sanctions.  The problems are that (1) the USA and several other
>countries squander far too much oil and are therefore way too dependent on it
>and (2) the western countries cannot trust each other to carry out sanctions.

That is WHY you can't get at them any other way. But the international
community HAS to get at them somehow. Not an easy problem and no easy
AND moral solutions.

>> > In the 1960s the Americans also conspired to kill Fidel Castro.
>> 
>> Yeah, USA behaviour in Latin and South America is quite dirty.
>> Not that Castro is any better. They didn't like Soviet influence
>> in their "back yard".
>Ah, that must be one of those "good reasons".

No, those aren't good reasons. I didn't mean it as support.

>> > All these simply because the tyrant in Baghdad has become too
>> > uncontrolled (don't forget this was our friend whom we armed
>> > to the teeth prior to his ill-advised aventure in Kuwait).
>> 
>> When a country, through it's own actions, obviously is at fault
>> starting a war, the people in it is in the same boat as the
>> leadership.
>Oh, I see.  So presumably you think we should just leave the Yugoslavians to
>die.  After all, the groups concerned were obviously at fault in starting the
>war, and the people are in the same boat as the leadership, huh?

>You talk as though Iraq was a liberal democracy.  How many Iraqis wanted
>Saddam Hussein to go to war with the USA, I wonder?  Maybe it was a majority,
>maybe they didn't realise what the inevitable result would be.  But to talk
>as though it was a decision made by the people is foolish.

If you happen to live in a country that starts a war and get killed, it's of
course not fair if you didn't support the government. That's life -- though
but unfair. The only thing you could have done would have been to get a
better government. Yes, it's hard work to change the government in Iraq.

Not all countries got an easy shift to democratic governments and not all
countries got Australian weather. In war innocent people dies. That is one
of the reason wars aren't nice and that it's the last solution. If you
have such a better way without people dying of handling dictators you'll
get the peace price. Or are you just complaining about the unfairness?.)

>>                                           Could someone else
>> comment on the '100 000 civilian dead' part? I haven't heard
>> anything about that.
>Perhaps you should read better newspapers.
I got the impression that the alliance had shot and bombed that many civs. It
might have been my mistake; at least I was unclear.

>Perhaps also we should try and draw the political discussion to a close, and
>get back to the point:

Yes! (Just let this answer get through!:-))

>Moslems equate church and state.  They can't understand why they're condemned
>so strongly for trying to bump off an enemy of the state when every other
>country is busy doing it.  That's the point I think H. Siddiqui was trying to
>make.

Killing people for voicing opinions is barbaric from a western viewpoint. If
you can't have enough space to discuss things openly from all sides, you'll
never get a good understanding of the problems. That MUST the Muslims under-
stand from even a short glance at our western traditions. The arguments I've
seen for offing (idiom OK?) Rushdie starts with what a lousy *person* he is,
how bad his book is and that blasphemy is a *bad* crime in Islam law. For
Pete's sake, he doesn't even live in a Muslim country!!


Bernt Budde                            |Religion, n: A daughter of
bug@arachne.udac.uu.se                 |Hope and Fear, explaining to
UDAC (Uppsala Univ. Computing Centre)  |Ignorance the Nature of the
                                       |Unknowable.
Don't for a moment believe UDAC,       |
while being a nice place, have         |-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's
opinions like me!!                     |                 Dictionary