Here we are on the eve of another war, do you have any feelings about this one?
I wish we didn’t have to do it, but I think it’s the best chance we have for making some sort of turnaround in the Arab world. That means forcing a settlement to the Palestinian question. Iraq, before Saddam took over was the most secular and educated nation, and it is the one that has the best chance, despite the difficulties, of moving into something we would recognize as democracy.
If that could be done, it might mitigate, to a great extent, a lot of the street hatred of the west. It really is hatred. We let women think, we let them drive cars, we let them get jobs…we tolerate Jews…we do all of these things that are nasty…and we are nasty ourselves. There’s a great deal of hatred that stems from something that we in the US haven’t seen since the Civil War, and possibly not even then. It’s something that the Western World really hasn’t seen in the last three of four hundred years.
It’s a hate of the other, because they are the other…and not like me, therefore we will kill them.
Where does the hate come from?
A lot of it comes from awareness. Satellite television has made a lot of places in the world aware of Europe and the US, that thirty or forty years ago were barely aware of us.
And we undermine their authority.
Yes, by merely being here we threaten them. An expert was asked after 9/11 what we could do to wipe out these people’s hatred of us…and he paused a moment and then answered, “We could move off the planet.”
It’s something we need to be concerned about. You may say, why do we care if a third world nation has a few A-Bombs, but you know, the Soviet Union was a third world nation. Once the wall came down, we realized we were looking at a Third World Nation…that had held the world in the Cold War for all that time simply because they had nuclear weapons.
I don’t even want to think about a world in which North Korea and Saddam Hussein have nuclear weapons. Both of those governments have people which would be quite willing to use these things.
And yet, we often are ugly Americans. Our biggest ambassador to the world is “Baywatch”.
Well, yes, but our TV has been moved to the wee small hours. Movies are still popular, but the people aren’t watching it…unlike a government edict…they just seem to want to watch something else.
Possibly cheap video technology has allowed them to make their own content.
Possibly.
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