[966] in peace2
Re: NO WAR!!!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mateusz K Malinowski)
Thu Sep 13 14:20:38 2001
Message-Id: <200109131820.OAA05314@buzzword-bingo.mit.edu>
To: Daniel Collins <daniel_@MIT.EDU>
cc: peace-list@MIT.EDU, mattxmal@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 13 Sep 2001 13:40:17 EDT."
<200109131740.NAA26034@jimi-hendrix.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 14:20:35 -0400
From: Mateusz K Malinowski <mattxmal@MIT.EDU>
In his last email Daniel Collins writes:
"Very true, but not all 'blood baths' are economically- or politically-driven.
Some may be in the interests of peace."
Have we become so inundated with pro-war propaganda and media newspeak
that this statement does not bother us, or worse, seems like a logical
step in pursuing an argument.
I invite Daniel to seek out a person who has seen a murder and
ask him or her how it felt afterwards. I guarantee him that "peaceful"
will not be one of the adjectives used by the respondent.
It is time to eschew the portrayal of slaughter and violence as
something cathartic, a la "Taxi Driver." It is also time to adopt a
less ethnocentric view of human life. Arab or Turkish or Vietnamese
lives are no less precious than Americans, no matter the GDP per
capita.
To see the world from just one perspective is a grave error - the
United States has been for many years supporting the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which unequivocally
amounts to a state of war. According to Daniel's statement, then, it
is completely admissible for anyone negatively affected by this
situation to attack the United States, since "Peace is a 2-way street;
if the other group [the United States, in this case] doesn't want it,
it doesn't exist.
Matt
