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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Sol System: [QB] (I sincerely wish to apologize for the following. It is both dull and insulting, probably, and should not be read by anyone who actually knows something about the issues involved.) This discussion illustrates, I think, the Problem of Terrorism and How to Fight It. Consider: In the 20th Century, we had to adapt to the concept of a total war, eluded to elsewhere in this thread or perhaps another. That is, the someone chivalrous European notion<sub>1</sub> of wars being fought between two trained armies was abandoned by the reality of wars being fought between nations, where anything and everything within those nations became a target. This was cause for much concern. (Consider the casualty rates for WWII.) However, adapt we did, primarily because we didn't have a choice, but also because the ever-evolving concept of nationalism made it easy to confuse peoples with governments.<sub>2</sub> That is no longer the case. What has just been demonstrated so horribly is the influence of non-governmental organizations. Osama Bin Ladin is not a government. His organization is not a government. They have no physical territory. No GDP. But they do have an idea that many others agree with. I don't want to sound pretentious here, as that's a great pet peeve of mine, but it strikes me that the war we are about to fight is a memetic one.<sub>3</sub> Terrorism is fueled by ideas, and ideas can only be combated by other ideas. We've seen lots of talk about these attacks being attacks not just on the United States but on a somewhat nebulous batch of concepts; freedom, democracy, and capitalism included. This may be true. I think it's dangerous to speculate about motives until we have some idea of who all the players are. At any rate, assuming this is true, how can we respond? If the issue is, say, Liberal Democracy vs. Wahhabi Theocracy<sub>4</sub>, how do we go about fighting that war? We could smash every such government in the world.<sub>5</sub> But the idea would still exist. Of course, all this is somewhat seperate from the point at hand, which is the punishment of those directly responsible. This is a much less thorny issue, once all the investigations are completed. But the larger issue remains. 1: Of course, there were always atrocities lurking beneath the surface. Villages destroyed in an attack or pillaged afterwards. The main difference is that the technoloy of war at the time did not allow this to occur on a large scale. 2: This footnote is pretty irrelevant, actually, but there was something I wanted to bring up that didn't fit into where I was going. In WWII, and all modern wars, civilians die in great numbers. Specifically, how many Germans in Berlin or Dresden or Hamburg were actually soldiers or Nazi party members? The usual justification is that these people were nevertheless supporting the German war effort, and I think that's probably correct, as far as it goes. But it raises the question of what constitutes an acceptable civilian casualty. 3: Memetics being a sort of study of how ideas propagate, which you probably already know, but which is explained <a href="http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/overview.html">here</a> anyway. 4: Wahhabi being a particular, rather strict interpration of Islamic law, or Shari'a. The Jack Chick of Islam. 5: A difficult prospect, considering that there are only two such nations, one being Saudi Arabia, which is one of our closest allies in the region, and one being Afghanistan under Taliban (or Taleban) control, which is scarcely a government at all. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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