Selective Memory

The Great Quail quail at libyrinth.com
Thu Dec 13 09:02:34 CST 2001


Arne writes,

>Seems you want the US to be judged by her intentions and everybody else
>by their actions.

Not true at all; I think both must be taken into account. However, 
once you accept a military response, that almost automatically 
entails "accepting" the fact that there will be civilian or innocent 
casualties. Sometimes this fact alone may stop one from making a 
military response, and sometimes it does not. I have no problems if 
Barbara "judges" the US military response by the amount of 
casualties; but to label the production of Afghani casualties as our 
"official" goal is just asinine.

How many civilians died in WWII? How many civilians or innocents were 
killed by Americans in WWII? I can't help but think if this was the 
1940s, people like you and Barbara and Doug would be on the side of 
inaction and appeasement. And I say that NOT because you are critical 
of the US military action -- I for one was critical of the Gulf War, 
and remain convinced that Vietnam was a horror -- but because the 
basis of your rhetoric is grounded only in the uncritical, emotional 
response of the body count.

>When you are bombed you don't ask whether or not the bombers had a noble
>motive. You just ask where the bomb lands.

Well, of course. When nations and other such entities go to war, it's 
horrible, isn't it? I for one had a bomb land a mile away, and it 
didn't endear me to the Jihad. And so, I advocate the use of force to 
destroy the al-Qaeda network.

Hell, to be honest, I advocate the use of force to remove Saddam 
Husayn as well and the end of these horrible and ineffective 
sanctions against Iraq. I also advocated choking off all aid to the 
Isrealis until they stopped their brutal occupation and illegal 
settlements, I advocate putting more pressure on our Arab allies to 
grow the fuck up and enter the new millennium, and so on. The only 
other alternative I see is that we just pull out of the Middle East 
altogether, develop new sources of energy, and let the who area 
descend into chaos. (And frankly, let's face it -- who hasn't 
occasionally felt the same?)

Our favorite Owlmirror writes,

>You can't reason with these people, Barbara.

Well, who knows? So far she hasn't really tried to reason all that much!

>to see the words of truly wise people like Gandhi & Chomsky 
>ridiculed and picked at like carbuncles.

Has anyone been ridiculing Gandhi? I have seen some sharp criticism 
of his views on the Holocaust, but no real ridicule. Of course, 
people like you and Barbara might rather pretend the Holocaust was a 
natural result of karmic debt, and maybe would have stopped all on 
its own without the use of violence and force.

>These people have the same mentality as the leaders like Bush, 
>Rumsfeld (real charmer, with eyes like a serpent), bin Laden 
>(another charmer), usw.

What kind of idiot are you to make such a statement? God, it pisses 
me off that the so-called forces of "humanitarianism" and so on 
around here are the ones who squawk the most that there are people on 
the List who *dare* disagree with the "party line," and then 
attribute the quality of militant conformism upon *us.* Like Roger 
Mexico, I piss all over your dinner.

And who are you, anyway? Besides some self-appointed List gadfly? Why 
hide behind anonymity? I mean, any one of us could just as easily set 
up a hotmail or aol account under some pseudonym and than make 
arrogant pronouncements upon everyone. It's not cute, it's not even 
all that clever or provocative, it's just annoying.

--Quail
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20011213/20c37656/attachment.html>


More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list