Finn dAbuzz wrote:It is not, at all, true that the international and (especially) American press does not pay attention to violence that is not born of violence. Offer your proof if you can.
What on earth are you on about? Where did Dag ever say that? (and what is it even supposed to mean?)'t
Taken a while to find this unanswered post.
Actually I can only imagine that my post involved a typo because I can't explain what it meant either. I can, however, explain a comment that reads: "It is not, at all, true that (the press) does not pay attention to violence that is not born of Islamic extremism."
Finn dAbuzz wrote:Obviously, violence is an integral part of the human experience and it is happening every which way around the globe, but should the press report on a isolated incident in Zimbabwe over a systematic run of killing perpetuated by extremist muslims?
Well thats where perspective comes in, or should come in, at least to some elemental degree.
You compare a hypothetical "isolated incident in Zimbabwe" with "a systematic run of killing perpetuated by extremist muslims".
In truth, of course, what has been taking place in Zimbabwe has been a systematic run of torturing, killing, and starving of anyone deemed a potential part of any future protest; the bulldozering of entire city parts deemed potentially unreliable.
In
truth, more people have suffered in Zimbabwe alone by the one petty dictator's totalitarianism, than have in all of Europe combined by Islamist terrorism. 700 000 people have lost their homes, their livelihoods or both, in Zimbabwe, in just the last two years. Seven hundred thousand people.
Good point. My argument was obviously flawed.
Now does this mean that Islamist terrorism is A-OK? Course not. Or that it is a mere trifle? Course not.
What it does mean is that you are, in your post here, showcasing a school example of the kind of myopia that Dag may have tried reflecting a saner sense of perspective against.
Those, like you, who describe Islamist terrorism as a Black Death-like scourge of today's mankind that makes all other organised political terror shrink to mere "occassional violence of other extremists" in comparison, have not just gotten imprisoned by a ludicrous loss of perspective. They are also showcasing the exact incredulously limited horizon that Dag was describing re the US media. You proved her point.
I mean, for God's sake, listen to yourself:
Finn dAbuzz wrote:When Nazi Germany engaged in it's unholy and violent attempt to subjugate the world, it was not the only source of violence on earth.
Would dagmarka, then, have bleated about how the press focused only on germanic violence?
Anyone who equates the current crop of Islamist violence with the havoc wrecked by Nazism has lost all and any sense of perspective.
Not necessarily. What seperates the Muslim Extremists from the Nazis in means, not intent. Would you be so quick to scoff at someone warning of the dangers on the Nazis in the early 30's?
The Nazis killed six million Jews alone. Osama bin Laden had three thousand Americans killed. I'm sorry, but let's be brutally cold-minded here. Add the thousands of London, Madrid, the hundreds who were killed in terrorist attacks in Turkey, Morocco, and you still have fewer people than were killed in any of the myriad civil wars that accompanied the Cold War throughout the developing world. Even the Taliban in Afghanistan, in all their brutal primitivity, did not murder more than a range of brutal dictatorships on the left and the right did in their time during the Cold War.
F*ck, more people have died in the Congo over the past decade, than at the hands of all Islamist terrorist attacks across the world added up. Do you know how many people have died in the civil wars in Congo over the past decade? Care to make a guess? Do you perhaps think it's comparable to Iraq, the bloodiest of all war grounds of Islamists yet, if you would choose to frame the war there as such? Think again.
In between three comma seven and four comma six MILLION people died in the civil wars in Congo, during the last ten years. And not an Islamist in sight. This is what you're trying to describe as the pesky "occassional violence of other extremists" that, whether it is Zimbabwe- or Germany-bound, pales in significance compared to the one Big Battle against Evil we face.
Believe it or not, but even today, Islamist terrorism is
still responsible for a mere minority of the victims of state and non-state terrorism across the world. Does that make the actual horror of its attacks any less? No. Does it make the brainwashed hate of their perpetrators any less venal or fearsome? No. Does it mean we need to be any less alert to their networks, their plots, their propoganda? No.
But get a grip, for chrissakes. It's hardly suddenly the only game in town. It's hardly the only thing we should worry about or focus on, to the marginalisation of all "occasional" violence from other camps. We've seen worse, a lot worse. The Yugoslav wars were worse to the nth, in sheer numbers of victims, than anything the Muslim terrorists have done in Europe and the US combined.
Islamists seek to conquer the West. Should the West fall, imagine the chaos. True enough that numerically there are greater incidents of slaughter than those perpetrated by Islamists, but as tragic as it may be, endless Congolese deaths will have nary a perceptible impact on The World. More's the pity and such is hardly an endorsement of The West, but imagine a world where the values and virtues of The West do not, at all, come into play.
Men slaughter one another with obscene ease. This is as it has been and as it, tragically, will be. However, when the slaughter is focused on ideals rather than on more profane considerations of personal power, tribal interests and pure sadism, the stakes are much higher and the numbers of casualties are of disproportionate signifigance.
Now I know that the US had not encountered mass terrorism on its own soil before, in the way that Europe has had a long tradition of having to counter. So I realise that the trauma hit all the harder. But you had three thousand people dying and you're equating it with
Hitler
You forget the vast number of Americans who died in the effort to rid Europe of it's internally nurtured cancer. Spare me the European angst of localized WWII death and destruction. Tell me why my grandfather needed to die on the beaches of Normandy. Tell me why my uncle lost his leg in the same battle. I think America has earned the right to judge the importance of idealogical struggles.
In your eagerness to reduce all the world's chaos, suffering, and political fanaticisms to one, huge, all-overshadowing, all-explaining epic struggle between Good and Evil, you have succumbed to outright hysteria now.
And you have succumbed to defusing the impact of Evil as some sort of mindless natural element. Sit back and enjoy your broad perspective that allows you your sense of superiority, and when you no longer have the freedom to post on this forum, perhaps you will remember the hysteria of Finn./quote]
