The Definite Article

I had said that I understood where Timothy McVeigh was coming from. I do understand where he was coming from. America stands for something, and what it means to me is freedom. Not unlimited freedom, a lawless anarchy where might rules and power flows from the barrel of a gun, but where the government uses its monopoly on violence to pursue policies that leave the most people free to pursue a lifestyle that meets the Jeffersonian criteria of swinging thier fists so long as they don't connect with someone's nose.

Waco didn't change all that; there have been other cases of blatant abuse: the internment of Americans of Japanese descent and the confiscation of their worldly posessions, the systematic disenfranchisement of Black Americans in the Jim Crow south, the Know-Nothing party, the anti-semitic climate that led to the formation of Israel, the subtle persecution of non-Christian faiths, the Woodrow Wilson's open racism that led directly to the Vietnam war - no system is perfect, and, like many others who see injustice, I'll accept a bit for the greater good.

What was different about Waco was that, first, it happened on my watch. It was within modern times and, like many others, I can remember exactly where I was when I heard about it. Second, unlike the other situations that I've mentioned, society as a whole has just accepted that the Branch Davidians were evil and had to be destroyed. It was no great loss that they all died. No one is interested in whether or not they were murdered by our government. No one cared.

At least, no one in power cared.

But a few people did. My blood boiled when I thought about them, burning to death in a fire started by government troops, simply because they believed in a different way of life. My blood still boils. What happened was an outrage.

In the argument with my friends, I said that if the U.S. was serious about stopping these kinds of acts of terrorism, it had to seek the moral high ground. That it had to learn the difference between right and wrong.

They were both horrified. There was no way that anyone other than a traitor could actually understand the Oklahoma city bombing. I felt then that I just wasn't conveying my point correctly. But there's two sides to every coin, and I know also think that this is something difficult for the average American to grasp. The average American wouldn't die for anything, beyond maybe their children. They have no sense of justice.

Furthermore, I said that unless America wanted to see acts like these again, it had better get serious about understanding the difference between right and wrong. If it didn't, then massive death was guaranteed to happen again. And again. And again.

When the twin towers and the Pentagon were attacked with our own planes, I spent a long few months reading the Koran. I tried to have a discussion about what the Koran said, about the enemy perspective, and about how what Osama bin Laden was saying was thoroughly internally consistent. His arguments are far better than anything we're saying to the Muslim world.

I was flatly asked if I was an al-Qaeda symaphizer.

I sighed, and again decided not to speak of it again. Eventually, I moved to another country. It's not true that the only reason I left was to flee a culture so stultified that it couldn't see how it had sown the seeds of its own demise, even as they sprouted and bore violent and bloody fruit, but it would also be a lie to say that this played no role. It's part of why I left.

Now I've picked up this article, and by God, here's some folks who think like me.

Let me see if I can put a few pieces together.

First, the most comitted side wins. To see this more clearly, go and watch The Siege. There are a lot of problems with this film, mostly in the sense that the CIA has never been even vaguely as competent as Annette Bening appears. Not even close. But it will help to understand the idea of "the most committed side wins."

Second, we have cognitive biases. There's a great book on correcting for cognitive biases that I can't rember the title of (it's Chris', and the last time I saw it it was sitting on the coffee table. We have a perspective and we bring it to all of our observations. In Physics, this is the ideal observer problem.

Third, the freedom we're selling is anarchy, disorder, cacophany. In places where the mosque is the state, Western freedom is sedition. Anyone who thinks people in Afghanistan or Iraq are better off is blind. The people of Iraq are much worse off than they were before the invasion, by virtually any measure - and Jim Fallows has the courage to say so.

Fourth, know your enemy. I can't stress this enough. If you don't know your enemy but they know you, you lose. We not only don't know our enemy, we refuse to learn. We don't read their newspapers, but they read ours. They study in our universities...

Okay, I have to cut this off and go to bed. I'll re-edit this tomorrow, and write a bunch more. Goodnight for now.

Our leaders won't appear on al-Jazeera, we dismiss Islam in countless casual ways, our every word a mockery and an insult.