doctorteeth

The following is an email that I've sent (for what it's worth) to President Bush (president@whitehouse.gov) and Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs John Manley (manley.j@parl.gc.ca). If you agree with it, I welcome any and all to copy or adapt it and send it in kind, in order to increase public pressure for a resolution to the present strife that would defuse the cycle of violence, instead of escalating it.

peace /mmcc
-----------
Subject: with sympathies for America, a plea for non-violent resolution

Message:
Dear President Bush,
First, permit me to offer my deepest condolences and sympathies for the American people in this time of anguish. I grieve with the families who have suffered losses and laud all the brave people involved in the rescue and recovery efforts.

On this day of mourning, I'm writing to you -- and to Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, John Manley -- not just to express my agreement that the perpetrators of these crimes must be brought to justice, but to articulate my fear -- a fear shared by many of my fellow Canadians -- that violent retaliation will bring not justice, but further violence, with potentially more catastrophic consequences.

I urge you to consider the opinions expressed in the following article, which has appeared in today's _Globe and Mail_ (Canada's national newspaper). While admittedly critical of US foreign policy, this article presents a creative strategy for resolving this strife that, I believe, may ultimately prove more productive than a massive military operation, which risks not only more loss of human life, but also greater exacerbation of the problem posed by fundamentalist extremism (of any faith).

Please consider these words as you consider the steps which your administration and nation will take in the coming hours and days. The future world we leave for our children will depend on it.

Yours in solidarity, peace and love,
Mark McCutcheon
Toronto, Canada
---------------

from _The Globe and Mail_, Sept. 14, 2001 (p. A25)

"One way to beat the bombers"
by RICK SALUTIN

As I began to waken on Wednesday, the events of Tuesday started to
seem more dream than reality, the kind you stir slowly from, and with vast relief as you realize what you thought had been real was not. If only.

What marked Tuesday's attacks was not "sophistication," a word I've heard enough since then. Certainly not in the sense of technological sophistication: They used plastic knives! Nor logistics, cost or co-ordination. It was all relatively simple and stripped down. That's what's scariest. Once it's been shown to be doable, it becomes redoable, with relative ease. Except for one item, harder to duplicate and on which it all depends: the willingness of those involved to kill themselves. This is what marks these attacks as 21st century rather than 20th.

The great motivator of political action in the 20th century was
ideology: socialism, fascism, national liberation. In its name, people were ready to murder massively and, in a better version, to die for their cause, their fellow humans and the future. But willingness to die for a cause is not the same as a deliberate choice to kill oneself for it. Political ideologies are secular and thisworldly; their horizon of hope lies in this world, where their followers want to build something better; all of which will be lost to them if they die, though not to others who may benefit.

The world-view that motivated Tuesday's events is different. Its
horizon is otherworldly. It sees this world in the frame of another world, the supernatural and an afterlife. It is, in other words, religious; not just religious but fundamentalist and simplistic. Robert Fisk, the British journalist, says it pits theology against technology, the only force that has shown an ability to equalize. This is religious, as opposed to political terrorism; and the difference is the choice not just to die if necessary but to willfully commit suicide. It sees its cause not in social change but in a cosmic "titanic struggle between good and evil," according to experts quoted by The Globe's Marcus Gee. In an eerie parallel, President George W. Bush said this week that America was in a fight between good and evil. There are
days when it seems that George Bush and Osama bin Laden deserve each other.

Bizarrely, the rise of fundamentalist religion as a political factor in many parts of the world owes something to American policy. The U.S. chose to nurture Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan in the 1980s, to undermine Soviet control there; in the course of which it worked with, armed and trained -- Osama bin Laden! In a similar way, Israel chose to encourage fundamentalism among Palestinians to undermine secular left-wing forces. I point this out for two reasons. As a wise reader wrote to me recently, "There is a fundamental principal of Vedic philosophy (Hinduism) that asks one to examine, when confronted with adversity, what one 'owns' in it." And if the West had some role in creating this force, perhaps it can do something to uncreate it.

It won't be easy. It truly feels -- pardon this cultural reference -- like a genie you can't stuff back in the bottle. You can't hunt it down because no country is its home; its home is despair, delusion and faith in values such as cosmic war and an afterlife. You can't "make them pay"; they're already dead. You can't threaten their families and communities; that's what started the cycle. But if you can't destroy it, you can try to defuse it.

By that, I mean deprive it of the soil it lives in. Take a precursor: Japan's kamikaze pilots during the Second World War. They were dependent on the emperor's blessing, their nation's applause, its mythology etc. Remove that and it would have been hard to find candidates. Today's soil is the despair and sense of injustice in places such as the Mideast. Communities have been created that laud these gestures, as one sees at Palestinian funerals. "Terrorism experts say the approval of the community is an important reason why terrorists do what they do," wrote Marcus Gee. You defuse this by eliminating the worst cases of wretchedness that sustain it. An obvious example, since Palestine has been a tinderbox of religious terror, and the Israeli occupation has been the tinderbox of the tinderbox, would be to end the occupation and hand those lands back to Palestinians. It would be hard, because of the settlers, but it would eliminate the tinderbox. A similar case would involve ending sanctions against Iraq that have led, the UN says, to the death of a million children.

The fanatics themselves wouldn't vanish. And fanaticism itself may be a human perennial. But there would be massive relief among huge numbers who yearn mainly to live decent, unharassed lives. The despair, mania and hate that sustain the fanatics would largely be withdrawn.

Would this mean "giving in to terrorism"? No, it would be a strategy to cut off its oxygen. It would also be the right thing to do, but think of that as merely collateral damage.