Beheading Victim 'Loved Adventure and Risk'
By Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 14, 2004; Page A01
he found it
Let's be fair: there are lots of nice people who get killed. I think some of them are Iraqies. And some Americans and their corporations are carpetbagging opportunists. And getting your head chopped off vs fried in an American electric chair or being on death row for 15 years when you are not guilty or when you are just generally fucked for being black... ah, but don't get me started.
Berg was clearly exceptional: and there was work to be done at home.
5 comments:
Let's also be clear that the killers are unmistakably psychotic. Some speak of this atrocity as a reason that we are there. It's like saying England or France should have invaded the U.S. during the Son of Sam killings. This is not to say that the Arab world does not have a LOT of work to do, they do and quickly.
psychotic? I think not. Dedicated, ruthless, etc. We just had some kids in DC cut of the hands of another kid (gang related)... their actions are relative to their experience, their culture, and what you need to get on the news.
Bush is psychotic, but he doesn't cut heads off so we don't count that? Bush lies, gives away the treasurey, believes in the end of days, lies, plans for nuclear weapons expansion, anti missle defence, lies, but, until he cuts a head off, is not psychotic?
Cutting off of heads is not a litmus test for anything except, maybe, your wetstone.
If cutting off a person's head to prove a point is NOT psychotic I'm not sure what is. Ruthless is what some want this act to be, insane is what it is.
cutting a persons head off to win, to save your own life, to have it your way: seems like shock and awe, no? in a very low tech way. like terrorism.
We have sophisticated weapons. And we insist that the other side fight "fair". I think that is simply silly. We are going to crawl all over them. They are going to do what they can to keep that from happening. We will then call them animals, and kill more of them in justification. (We call it "justice". And of course, it is the Christian way. As were the crusades, slavery, etc.)
I would NOT be anything but western, but I do not wish to give up thought and reason. Rather, being western and enlightened, I would think we could look back, see where they are, where we came from, and help things along.
Shock and awe. And it works.
Unless one is using psychotic as a name calling device, it is anything but psychotic.
Well then we disagree. Was it thought out and planned and for a political purpose? Yes, but that does not make it less psychotic. I'm not calling people names and I am not say there are not equals in the West. But cutting off a person's head (be it for the cameras or not) takes someone convinced of their "rightness" and detached from their "fairness" and sense of empathy. Did we drive them to this point of psychosis? Perhaps, but none-the-less they are there, wallowing in their psychotic state.
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