From: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org (alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest) To: ammf-digest@smoe.org Subject: alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest V5 #315 Reply-To: ammf@fruvous.com Sender: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest Thursday, November 29 2001 Volume 05 : Number 315 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: his point [SugarFly26@aol.com] Re: his point ["A.J. LoCicero" ] Re: his point [Lori Martin ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:51:47 EST From: SugarFly26@aol.com Subject: Re: his point Thanks for posting that. I was wondering why I hadn't heard anything about Jian's opinions on everything. Ln ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 05:14:18 GMT From: "A.J. LoCicero" Subject: Re: his point Lori Martin wrote: [stuff] Lori, I pretty much agree with you. But the thing you have to remember is that we Americans always wait until there is a crisis and then go crazy looking for "The Solution". We are like that as a culture. We have billions to spend on war when we are threatened, but nothing to spend on peace when we are not. It is a sad state of affairs, to be sure, but it seems to be the American way. BTW, the questions you raised about why didn't we do something before all of this also can be applied to the second world war (and probably the first). If we had had the right policies in place back then, then those wars might not have happened. Unfortunately people are greedy and short-sighted, while hindsight is 20-20 A.J. - -- "I am here to make an announcement that this Thursday, ticket counters and airplanes will fly out of Ronald Reagan Airport."--G.W. Bush, Arlington VA, Oct. 2, 2001. Email:aj@locicero.org ICQ: 13117113 AIM: locicero For some of the best Long Distance and Calling Card rates around visit http://www.ld.net/?sensible. Cheap rates and *I* get a commission! ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:37:26 -0500 From: Lori Martin Subject: Re: his point Angela Anuszewski wrote: > I didn't write him after the Rochester show, but I was deeply offended and > am seriously considering not going to see him again. I don't want to kill > innocent people either, but a lot of the people there are NOT innocent, and > when he commented that because he could understand hat the Taliban reps were > saying on TV without translation and it made them into human beings to him, > I'd like to politely remind him that these people enslave their own > countrymen, killing people who dare to listen to music like the stuff he's > playing on stage. Those people that will starve to death? chances are they > would have starved anyway under the unjust rule. The Taliban are not human > beings to me, not if they inhibit those inalienable rights of life, liberty, > and the pursuit of happiness in the people. Thanks to Jian's article and Angela's response I'm finally figuring out something that has been bothering me for the past couple of months. That is, I've been feeling it's somehow hypocritical to voice "dovish", dissident, anti-war views, when the hovering, accusing question to which I have no answer is "well then, what should we do instead?" Assuming we have to do anything is a honking big assumption on the philosophical level, but given that I do think some action is in order, the answer that now is crystalising in my mind is: "what we should have been doing all along." The travesty isn't so much in taking warlike action as in suddenly deeming a humanitarian disaster worthy of of our attention mainly because these folks are threatening us, not just people in some far-off land most of us have no reason to ever contemplate going anywhere near. Angela points out the human rights abuses of the Taliban -- but face it, they've been guilty of them for years, without a peep from, or even the knowledge of, most Americans. The only reason we can knowledgeably discuss some facts about Taliban now, or can locate Mazar-e Sharif on a map, is because some of their pals attacked us in a way no one on the planet could ignore -- even insular, geographically-challenged Americans. Those people that will starve to death because of interrupted international aid, but who would have starved to death anyway under Taliban rule? How many North Americans knew or cared about their plight on September 10? What is hypocritical about this war is that it has been carried to the scale of combat. The use of bombing runs and ground forces have been spun by our military, and much of our media, as justified in order to depose a regime whose stock in trade is human rights abuses, which denies its own people rights and befriends those who advocate guerrilla war against western values. Yet we ignored this disaster until it affected us, and then belatedly we decided to "solve" it with military force. Might makes right, after all, and it's a lot quicker than a systemic fix. Especially when as a nation we haven't had the slightest interest in being proactive about the situation (or about many other situations, but I digress.) What if, instead of acting only after September 11, we had implemented from the get-go all of the non-combat, diplomatic, globally focussed measures we've since taken against a regime practically every nation has always considered a pack of thieves? What if we had mounted a coalition, an internationally cooperative law-enforcement and financial and diplomatic and intelligence effort against known terrorist operatives and their networks -- and against the human rights abuses we're now using as justification for deposing a government -- before we were attacked, instead of investing in dirty al-Qaeda gemstones, enabling their banking, and giving the Taliban tens of millions of dollars in financial assistance? Our intelligence services knew perfectly well who these "bad guys" were 3 months ago -- they knew it 6 years ago. It just wasn't as pressing a problem, because it was half a world away, because there isn't a politically active Afghan community in the US, and because it didn't affect American civilians. Never mind that it affected civilians in Afghanistan, in Israel, in Saudi Arabia, in Germany ... never mind that al-Qaeda has posed a distinct threat to our own military and diplomatic corps for half a decade. Before we dislocate our shoulders patting ourselves on the back for "liberating" the people of Afghanistan, I'd just like to hear a serious, honest discussion of the reasons we permitted them to languish in the "enslavement" of which Angela speaks for the better part of a decade -- and why from 1981 until this past summer we enabled, trained, and supported the forces which ultimately became the Taliban and al-Qaeda. With the brilliant insight of Monday-morning quarterbacking many now acknowledge that this was a strategic mistake -- but no one really wants to consider that it was a moral mistake as well, that the answers have more to do with politics[1] and economics[2] than some fine notion of human rights or American ideals. We're not righting wrong because it's the right thing to do here, we're righting it because the wrong now threatens us. And that's the hypocrisy -- the unnecessary obscenity -- of this war. - -- Lori [1] USSR. Iran. [2] Oil. ------------------------------ End of alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest V5 #315 ********************************************