Please excuse the late response. I needed to take a vacation from the internet.
RemusShepherd wrote:bustertheclown wrote:As far as the Howard Taylor take on the subject, I'm going to have to say that this later statement moves him from living within a realm of light and dark greys to straight black and white, which I'm not very inclined to support.
I'm all about subjective morality, believe me.
But you're not going to find a lot of support for the viewpoints of extremist muslims who want to kill people for drawing a cartoon. There may not be an objective morality at work here, but Howard has made a moral judgement with which a large majority of human beings would agree.
History has shown many times over that it takes a shockingly few steps to go between Howard's talk of cultural assimilation, and talk of ethnic cleansing.
Dude...we're there already. What do you think the ultimate outcome of the 'War on Terror' is going to be? There are only two outcomes, here. They destroy us (which becomes easier and easier as technology improves) or we destroy them. Now, 'Them' in this case means a narrow slice of muslim culture that has bought into their most extreme beliefs. We don't have to destroy them all, just the more loony sub-sects that refuse to peacefully coexist in our modern, global society. That's still genocide, just genocide on a smaller scale. That's the war George Bush has chosen to fight.
I'm not saying this is a good thing or that I agree with it! I'm against the War on Terra, myself.
I'm just outlining what I see, which is that this is a religious conflict and it will end as most religious conflicts have -- in genocide.
Honestly, I don't think that the reality of this situation is as extreme as your take. Yes, there is a particular sense of urgency that comes with this conflict, but how is it different from the importance given to any other conflict? "It's us or them" is the primary rallying cry to any war, because it serves to take the humanity of the situation, and provide a the proper sense of enmity needed to gain support for the destruction of nations and death of people.
In that sense, all war is really an act of genocide. Certainly, a war against an amorphous concept, like 'terror', 'drugs', 'religion x', 'obesity', etc., has more leeway given to just how much genocide is acceptable within the confines of the war. However, just because such things are sanctioned does not make them moral. Just because they are actions committed in the furtherance of a non-religious view doesn't mean that the view is lacking an equal amount of zealotry. Just because we've identified an enemy, and deemed his values and tactics as corrupt, doesn't make our own philosophies and actions just as dangerous as his.
As far as what I think the ultimate outcome of the "War on Terror" will be, I'm not in the predictions game. However, I would certainly say that there's more than two probable outcomes to our current conflicts, not the least of which would be stalemate. After all, this particular conflict has really been going on since near the end of WWII, and has reached several comparable points of escalation over that time. Neither democracy nor Islamic theocracies have fallen to the pressures of the other's "loony sub-sects" in the last six decades, and, in fact, both idiologies have grown in global power and influence over the last few generations.
To me, if this was a simple matter of "us or them", then one side or the other should have at least made some headway in the "assimilation" of the enemy by now. That hasn't really happened. I don't think it ever will, because the nature of the conflict is a thousand-fold more complicated than it's too often presented to be. More than that, history has shown time and time again that fundamentalism is an aspect of human nature. Try as we might to punish the overzealous and create a more moderate society, there will always be extremes, extrimists, and fringe groups poised to take power. We can't stop it from happening, no matter how hard we work at homogenization.
