Fighting fire with fire

July 7th, 2005

What happened today in London is just more proof that you cannot hope to stop violence by using violence. The US, Britain and their allies will continue to face the consequences of their actions in the Middle East. Their selfishness and hypocrisy will only make things worse in the years to come. Isn’t it ironic how they fight for freedom and peace, by taking those very same things away from millions of people? You’d think they would also know that:

“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” – Albert Einstein

As long as countries on this planet have an army, that means they expect war to happen at some point in the future. It will also remain tempting to settle disputes by using force, as is the case in the Middle East. That’s why:

“The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service.” – Albert Einstein

We even try to humanize war by creating all kinds of rules and conventions, pretending there can be a good way of waging war, and a bad way of waging war. Almost too stupid to comprehend. Can’t they understand that:

“One does not make wars less likely by formulationg rules of warfare…war cannot be humanized. It can only be eliminated…” – Albert Einstein

Indeed those rules, which everyone seems to ignore anyway when it is to their advantage, will not make war less likely, because:

“As long as armies exist, any serious conflict will lead to war.” – Albert Einstein

“Violence sometimes may have cleared away obstructions quickly, but it never has proved itself creative.” – Albert Einstein

Violence solves problems quickly for the short term, but never for the long term. Sadly, this is how world leaders today try to solve issues. They have to realize that:

“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” – Albert Eintein

There should be a whole new approach to solving global conflicts, and conflicts in general. Not one where you demonstrate your might, and try to be more powerful than everyone else, ignore the rights of the other, and generally not have any respect for them. Because:

“Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.” – Albert Einstein

Instead of bombing the Middle East to the stone age for example, the US should probably ask itself, why those problems exist, why those Arabs hate the US so much, instead of fighting the fire with even more fire. All that does is create an even bigger fire. The US and their allies try to solve the issues by using the exact same methods that created the issues in the first place. They fail to realize that:

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

It all comes down to respecting the other side, trying to understand where they’re coming from, and then try to correct your behavior towards them. Unfortunately, this is not the tactic arrogant and selfish leaders use. Because:

“Only understanding for our neighbors, justice in our dealings, and willingness to help our fellow men can give human society permanence and assure security for the individual.” – Albert Einstein

Until most people on this planet realize all of the above, bad things will continue to happen, and will keep getting worse.

Comments

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outsignia July 7th, 2005 at 6:00 pm

I totally agree with you.

I mean, for what ever percentage of the world that think the US (and their allies) are the good guys, there are even more people who know they are the bad guys.

They just need to realise that themselves.

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Vincent July 8th, 2005 at 2:58 pm

The question to answer is:

why innocent people??

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Richard July 8th, 2005 at 7:56 pm

If we stopped fighting in the Middle East, it would be a sign of weakness and an open invitation for more of these attacks. Our armies have the terrorist leaders in holes in the ground cowering in fear of the knowledge that the moment they poke their heads up, they’ll die, with their followers being slaughtered by the dozen. They are not able to mount a significant number of attacks and the only way to ensure that they will never be able to mount a number amount of attacks is by bringing them to justice. These people are evil. They do not want peace and do not feel that they have been wronged in the sense that your mind works. There is no I’m being evil because of this and if I get this I’ll stop being evil. Have you forgotten the events that unfolded after Chamberlain “brought peace to our time?” Have you forgotten Pearl Harbor? Have you forgotten 9/11?

Diplomacy only works when your opponent is one who truly cares about you. If your oppenent allows things get to the point where bombs are going off, he does not truly care. If he did truly care, he would have sought to resolve the situation long before such events ever occurred.

These people we are fighting are not people who you can reason with in any way, shape or form. They might say they are but they say that only as a means of furthering their goals of eraticating democracy and freedom from earth. If those weren’t their goals, they would not bomb embassies, they would not target civilians, they would not preach messages of hatred and evil, and they would not resort to any form of violence. You might wish they are of your caliber and wish for peace but no matter how much one wishes for such a reality, it will never exist. They are not people who seek peace, shape or form. Martin Luther King was a man who seeked peace. He did not take up arms and spread hatred. Mohandas Gandhi, was a man who seeked peace. He did not avocate munitions and war.

Each of Albert Einstein’s sayings only holds true if everyone follows them. I see not our enermies following them. If they loved peace as much as you and he, why do they not follow them? Isn’t that what they would do if they truly seeked peace?

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Richard July 8th, 2005 at 7:59 pm

It seems I have a typo:

“They are not people who seek peace, shape or form.”

The above sentence should have been the following:

“They are not people who seek peace, in any way, shape or form.”

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Karel Donk July 9th, 2005 at 7:51 am

Richard, in this particular case, of the US and the Middle East, I can argue that the US was the first to start all of this. Prior to their involvement in the Middle East, you didn’t have arabs flying planes into buildings and blowing themselves up in Britain. And all they want, is for the US to get out of their countries, respect them and leave them alone, as far as I can tell. I seriously doubt that if the US were to get out of the Middle East, that the arabs would continue to fight against them.
But as we all know, the US can’t get out of the Middle East, nope, there’s too much at stake. And their arrogance won’t allow them to get out, so that the arabs can declare a victory either. Instead, like you are saying, they want to show their power and pretend they have the terrorists cowering and hiding, while they try to secure their interests there. But if you think you’re winning, you’re fooling yourself, as you saw in London, and a few years ago in New York.
And I agree with you that both sides have to want to follow the Einstein quotes for them to work, but someone has to start. And given the situation, the ones who should start are the US and their allies. They are the ones intruding in other countries after all.

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Richard July 9th, 2005 at 1:06 pm

Karel, the US and Britain are the ones that “should” have started with Martin Lurther King and Monhandas Gandhi, but it wasn’t them who started was it? Martin Lurther King and Monhandas Gandhi seeked peace, and they were the ones who started with the idealism you hold so highly. If the arabs truly seek peace, they will be the ones starting with the idealism you hold so highly.

Until then and only then, there shall be no indication that they will ever stop as being left alone is not good enough for them. Containment didn’t stop communism. Why would it stop them? Hate speeches such as theirs, didn’t lead to the changes that Martin Lurther King and Mohandas Gandhi led to, why will they now? Appeasement didn’t keep Hilter from becoming stronger, why would it keep today’s evil from growing stronger?

The US people have always wanted to be left alone. That didn’t stop Pearl Harbor, that didn’t stop 9/11. These terrorists don’t target the military, they target random civilians, these terrorists don’t declare war, they just set off bombs. No good person would ever seek change, in the world, in this way. No good person would ever want change, in the world, in this way. Why would they? Is this something that is acceptable? Is this that is okay? Is this something that figures, who truly seeked peace, would do?

Prior to WWII, Albert Einstein thought much like you. Then he realized that there was evil, that that evil would never settle, that that evil would never be satifised, no matter how much it was appeased. Such thinking led to an enormous loss of life. If good men had acted sooner then, that loss would never have been known. If good men act now, this loss will never be known. A great man once said, “intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.” Another man once said, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

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Richard July 9th, 2005 at 1:09 pm

Geez, I try to make my comments perfect and I can’t win. 🙁 In the last paragraph, the phrase “such thinking” refers to yours.

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Karel Donk July 9th, 2005 at 2:14 pm

Richard:

– You can’t want the Arabs to start with the idealism, they are not the ones invading the US. It’s the other way around. If you invade the house of your neighbor tomorrow, will you expect him to be the first to want peace, and leave you in his house? You’re going to have to leave his house first.

– Being left alone is all they want, apparently. When they defeated Russia in Afghanistan, that was it for them. They didn’t follow the Russians into Russia to continue fighting, did they?

– 9/11 was a result of US’s foreign policy. Yes, the people in the US may want to be left alone, but their government doesn’t seem to want to leave others alone…

– The US attacks and sanctions kill more civilians every day in the Middle East than the terrorist attacks. MUCH more.

– Terrorist do declare war.

– Terrorism is not acceptable, but it is the only way they can fight back. What the US and their allies are doing, is also not something that people seeking peace would do. In fact, the “civilized” way the US are waging war, as apposed to terrorism, has killed far more innocent people than the terrorists.

– I like your quotes. But I have to conclude, according to your quote, that the US government are neither intellectuals, nor geniuses. By their current ways of dealing with things, they don’t solve problems and they don’t prevent them either. On the contrary.

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Richard July 9th, 2005 at 8:33 pm

Karel:

– The Indians weren’t the ones invading India either.

– If they wanted to be left alone, they wouldn’t target civilians. They wouldn’t target anyone. They would just ignore everything, like I used to do. Its not like we’re going into the mountains to attack hermits or anything, and it is not like the people we’re fighting are anything more than a small minority of the arabic population, which by the way, sees the palestinians as a subspecies.

– We didn’t do anything to them. They see the palestinians as a subspecies and they have depised them for centuries. What the minority in the Middle East we’re fighting wants is control, of everything. This minority is composed of the same people (in reference to mentality) who were around when the raids on the Roman and later Byzantine empires began. They’re the ones that conducted the raids. They are not people who want to be left alone and they are people who will come after us. Unless you suggest deporting every arabic person in the country and locking down immigration like China did under the Ming dynasty, leaving them alone is not an option.

– That depends upon what you consider to be civilians; personally I don’t consider people holding guns or making bombs to be civilians.

– I suppose they do:

Website Link

– It isn’t the only way they can “fight back.” It doesn’t take much to assemble an army and wage a war. Napoleon assembled an army upon his return from exile and fought the British and Prussians during the hundred days. He didn’t do too badly until 42,000 reinforcements arrived from Prussia. Also, no one ever said that civilians don’t die in war. In WWII, over 800,000 civilians were dead in the Pacific theater prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

– Of course the US government is composed of neither intellectuals or geniuses. If it was, we would have been at war a long time ago.

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Richard July 9th, 2005 at 8:34 pm

By the way, Karel, you need to do something to trim urls posted when they exceed a predefined character limit.

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Karel Donk July 10th, 2005 at 8:47 am

– Huh?

– It’s kindof hard to ignore an invader, don’t you think?

– You didn’t do anything to them? Check your facts.

– Women and children are civilians.

– Yes they do.

– Right. The terrorist’s army would stand a chance against the US army. That’d be suicide. The way the are fighting now is smarter and more effective.

– And the problems would be much worse now.Iraq is a good example. Prior to the invasion, Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, contrary to the beliefs of the US government. But they do now!

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Richard July 10th, 2005 at 10:46 am

-Karel, I’m not your typical liberal that says something and then doesn’t care what it was five minutes later. I’m not even a liberal. That was a reference to my references of Monhondas Gandhi.

– After the fall of the Roman empire, people started moving into the mountains and left everyone alone. Anthony of Egypt is one such example. If they want to be alone, they can do that, but they don’t want to be alone, what they want is control, over the masses. We cannot live free here while our fellow human beings are in chains there. If we allow them to be in chains, one day, we will be in chains.

– No we didn’t. The minority in the middle east that we’re fighting had not been affected negatively by anything the US had done. You seem intent on pushing the theory that we’re fighting because of the actions in Israel, when the terrorists couldn’t care less. To them the palestinians are a subspecies. Complaining about them is a method of helping themselves achieve their goals than actually caring about the palestinians, who I might add, were upset because the rich arab land owners who owned the land they lived on sold it to the Jewish people and the Jewish people told them to get off the land. The palestinians then resorted to terrorism, and the Jewish people didn’t respond nicely. Things went back and forth until the situation in Israel we have today.

– Did you take a census? The number of women and children that have died in any US military action is miminal. Far more have died at the hands of terrorists attacks targeting crowds, school buses and roads, than have died at the hands of US soliders. Any who have died at the hands of US soliders, died because the terrorists made military action necessary. If it had not been for the terrorists, the incidents would have never happened.

– Did you read what they declared war against? Democracy, every democratic country in the world is now at war with the terrorists in Iraq. In WWII, we lost over 300,000 men fighting in our allies’ neighborhoods, in our allies’ streets and in our allies’ homes, while our allies lost tens of millions of men fighting in their neighorhoods, in their streets and in their homes. If we do not fight the terrorists there, in Iraq, and accept the casualties, one day we will fight the terrorists here, in our neighborhoods, in our streets and in our homes, and the loss of life will be much more severe.

– So do you support what they’re doing?

– If we had invaded the Soviet Union in 1945 like General George S. Patton had wanted us to do, we wouldn’t have had any of these problems. The Soviet satellites would have never existed. The Soviet Union would never have existed to catalyze the spread of communism to China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam. We wouldn’t have given the terrorists we’re fighting weapons and training. Saddam would never have been in power. And the world would be a better place. However we didn’t act and instead thought that by not fighting, we would be fine. With bombs going off domestically and abroad as well as the build up of terrorist networks and of the red armies, I don’t think we’re fine. We’ve let these problems go unchecked for decades, and now that we’re finally doing something about them, you want to go back to the thinking we used when we created these problems. As Einstein said, ?the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.��?

By the way, there was a terrorist training camp in Northern Iraq that Saddam had established. In the 2003 invasion, our troops shut it down. If you think that there never was one, you need to get a visa.

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Karel Donk July 10th, 2005 at 12:32 pm

– Richard, I’d like to see you play Ghandi when a burglar breaks into your house, and is taking everything away. What are you going to do? Sit down and watch? Do you expect people to sit down and watch as the US invades their countries, lays all kinds of sanctions on them, installs puppets as the new government who simply serve to sign agreements for the benefit of the US, taking their resources away? What are they going to do? Strike?

– See above

– Once again, see above

– Minimal? http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

– Again, I seriously doubt Arabs would be flying planes into buildings in the US if the US was not involved in stuff in the Middle East. You don’t see Arabs fighting democracy in Brazil, do you?

– I understand why they are doing it, and I think they have a lot of courage for doing it.

– What you’re doing now, is what you were doing when creating the problems…

And Iraq was invaded for having something to do with 9/11 and for having WMDs. Today we know for sure none of those were true.

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Richard July 10th, 2005 at 7:06 pm

Karel, this is a minority we’re talking about. The majority of the Iraqi people want us there and they want us to help them establish a democratic state. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t hear about simply one or two terrorist attacks in Iraq a day. You would hear about utter chaos. I’m talking hundreds if not thousands of terrorist attacks a day. If you assembled a map of Iraq that showed where bombs go off for x day as red and everything else as green, you’ll find that at least 99.9% of Iraq is green. No one is stealing anything, no one is laying sanctions. All that is being done is the elimination of a terrorist organization and the liberation of the masses.

That website you linked to is not an accurate source of information. They have no method of systematically verifying claims and any claims were there actually was a death could have been in regard to a terrorist. The site itself says “Reported civilian deaths resulting from the US-led military intervention in Iraq” and lists suicide car bombings. I don’t know about you but the US military doesn’t conduct suicide car bombings, nor are they a US military action. Car bombings are a terrorist action and they would happen regardless of whether or not we’re there. They are also because of the terrorists we’re fighting rather than us. The terrorists declared war against democracy, remember? As for Brazil, they’d be one of the last to go. After the US and NATO are gone because people were too incompetent to stop them, Brazil would among the next targets. It isn’t like Brazil is a threat to their plan to one day control the world, is it? Another thing about that site is that it doesn’t list the circumstances under which a death occurred. While an Iraqi police officer is not a US solider, it would be interesting to know the circumstances under which he had fired.

In reference to “I understand why they are doing it, and I think they have a lot of courage for doing it,” do you support what they’re doing? You say that “Terrorism is not acceptable” but then go on to say that their actions are okay. If you’re going to support their actions and in turn terrorism, just say you do already and stop tip toeing around the subject.

In reference to “What you’re doing now, is what you were doing when creating the problems,” why is it that by not being willing to get our hands dirty in the first place, we created these problems and now that we are getting our hands dirty, we’re doing the same thing?

By the way, you can’t truly be sure of anything. Life itself could just be a computer simulation for all you know. Assuming that it was, there would be no way for you to ever find out. So how can you be sure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, especially when the President gave Saddam 5 months to bury them, hide them, destroy them, give them away and so on and so forth? They were there. You were right when you said “I have to conclude, according to your quote, that the US government are neither intellectuals, nor geniuses. By their current ways of dealing with things, they don?t solve problems and they don?t prevent them either. On the contrary,” as by not going into Iraq in November 2002, they created these problems. Now we have to worry about where the weapons are now.

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Karel Donk July 11th, 2005 at 5:47 am

Richard, I don’t think it is a minority. What’s a minority is the number of people in Iraq who are extreme enough, or have enough courage, or are crazy enough, depending how you look at it, to fight by using terrorism. The majority is passive. They don’t like what’s going on, but they don’t want to fight either. Most of them say they were not happy with Saddam, but what Iraq has become now is far worse. Even Allawi, who is a supporter of the US has doubts now. And frankly, he’s a bit too late.

Here is a better website, which splits the number of deaths from other things like car bombings. 12000 is still much more…

I never said the actions of terrorists are OK. All I said is that I can understand what makes them do what they do.

You are mistakenly assuming that the US government did nothing to create these problems. The fact is, that their exact same policy now created the problems years ago.

Richard, Iraq did not have WMDs. The president of the US himself said so before 9/11. Rumsfeld said so. Powell said so. Check your facts. The war in Iraq is for entirely different purposes.

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Richard July 11th, 2005 at 5:30 pm

~ Karel, people will always complain more when they can speak their minds. It is the beauty of freedom. The people of Iraq are free and a majority of them support us, thus they complain about us more. Get used to it, that is what happens when there isn’t someone running government with an iron fist.

~ I’d like to see that website but it doesn’t work.

~ In reference to “I never said the actions of terrorists are OK. All I said is that I can understand what makes them do what they do,” are you a terrorist sympathizer?

~ The mistakes of the past and of Congress created the problems we face today. If they hadn’t, General MacArthur would have never said “if we don’t win this war in Korea, we’ll fight another war—this time in a place called Vietnam.” Why do you insist on fighting yet another war, one that will be far bloodier and far more severe than the one we see now?

~ Karel, a man once pointed out a blue SUV to another man. The other man insisted that it was a red sedan. No matter what the man said, the other man would insist that it was a red sedan. Finally the man gave in and said it was a red sedan. The other man then replied that it was never a blue SUV, despite that all along, the vechicle had been a blue SUV.

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Karel Donk July 12th, 2005 at 3:30 am

– We weren’t talking about freedom, Richard, but if people liked the current situation in Iraq. And they don’t. Most of them want the Americans go away.

– It appears they removed the story or something.

– I’m a sympathizer of human beings.

– The mistakes of the past created the problems today, sure. The mistakes of the present, create the problems of the future, as you should be able to see from Iraq.

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Karel Donk July 12th, 2005 at 8:16 am

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=3287
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Reply
Karel Donk July 14th, 2005 at 10:45 am

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=1565

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