Massacre in Paris - a dozen newspeople shot

Parent Cafe
261

You’re actually being very contradictory here. One of the basic principles of controlling and understanding economics among ruling governments and elite has always been deciding on how the given national/societal resources are to be allocated to different groups within their jurisdiction.

Ruling government and elites who have been determined by a critical mass of people/groups within its jurisdiction to be doing a crappy job of that or playing favorites too heavily have found they could maintain their rule only with the most severest difficulties with heavy use of state-sponsored violence in the form of military/police crackdowns or in extreme cases, find themselves overthrown…sometimes with fatal results as the French and Russian Bolshevik Revolutions have shown.

Incidentally, still recent memories of the latter and fears of it spreading to the US was one key factor in the implementation of the “New Deal” during FDR’s early administration.

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The answer might be here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KufFjcWOUQ

But what is truly impossible is for Cobrat to indulge us with an answer to a precise question! What a great history teacher he would be at Stuy!

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@Hunt, remember when an organization composed largely of Jewish lawyers (ACLU) defended the right of the Nazis to march through Skokie, Ill, a primarily Jewish neighborhood where 1 out of 6 residents was a Holocaust survivor?

To me, that’s a profound lesson in first amendment freedoms, and whenever someone asks the question you posed in #255, I immediately think of ACLU and Skokie.

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I thought about Skokie, too. But I will say that the question of whether the Nazis should be allowed to march, and the question of who should pay for the increased police presence, aren’t necessarily the same question. In the final analysis, I guess I go with not making the Nazis pay, at least, not if other groups don’t have to pay.

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ISIS and Al-Qaeda are another variant of religious, nationalist, or other extremist ideologies where “we’re 100% right and you’ll conform or else at sword/gunpoint!” we’ve had in history. Whether we’re talking Christian Crusaders in medieval period or the Spanish Catholic Christians from the inquisition to the reformation periods from religious angles or the virulently aggressive xenophobic nationalism of Fascist movements in Japan and Germany…they shared many commonalities in the essential frameworks of their ideologies.

One can make a reasonable case that ISIS and Al-Qaeda share more commonalities with xenophobic nationalistic ideologies like Imperial Japanese militarism which did have religious overtones or European Fascist political movements which were in vogue during the '30s.

In this respect. Islam shouldn’t be singled out as their early history and current extremists share much in common with early history of other religions like Christianity other extremists with “we’re 100% right and you’ll conform or else at sword/gunpoint!”

Take a page from how we dealt with Germany and to a limited extent, Japan* after WWII. Find ways to separate out and isolate the actual extremist ideologues from the majority of people who just want to live and get on with their personal lives like the vast majority of humanity.

Build bridges and befriend the latter group. Make sure one has measures in place to focus harsh treatment only on the former who are actually responsible for their horrific actions without painting a broad brush.

It’s one of the key reasons why Germany is for the most part no longer highly nationalistic xenophobic nations desiring revenge on the US and other countries for their defeat with the exception of a tiny lunatic fringe who are constrained in their abilities to gain a popular following. The US and its allies here learned the lesson from mistakes in the harsh Versailles treaty and its indiscriminate harsh treatment of all Germans and decided to take a different tact in 1945.

To some extent, the same could be said for Japan though the purging of extreme right wing militarists wasn’t nearly as thorough due to Cold War political considerations and the fact the US had overwhelming control over Japan under Gen. MacArthur so other allies including Britain weren’t able to exert their influences to ensure deeper purges in Japanese political, civil service, and key industrial posts…like current Deputy PM Taro Aso’s family’s wealth derived from control over the cement conglomerate which employed well-documented slave labor from colonized peoples and Allied POWs(Mostly British and ANZAC).

It also plays a crucial part in why there are still issues ranging from senior government officials downplaying or even issuing apologia in favor of Imperial Japan’s horrific colonial militarist legacy or how many Japanese are wary about criticizing/denouncing that legacy. Understandable considering those who do so risk terroristic death threats from Japanese extreme right wing groups. Especially considering some have been carried out as shown here:

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-01-18/news/mn-323_1_nagasaki-mayor-shot

What about his “free speech”.

Especially considering that mayor had a valid point as found in more recent research from more recent uncovered archives found Hirohito wasn’t nearly as passive about his role in directing the war as he, his supporters, and the American Occupational authorities/US have been contending for decades. Herbert Bix’s “The Making of Modern Japan” published in 2001 references those documents/

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Except that such history is about how to deal with a nation that was showing signs of belligerence on a repeated basis. Nations that had armies and were devastated by the war.

Where is the parallel with a war that is led by fanatics hidden in a remote part of the world and an insidious presence in our own cities? Where is the parallel with the current clash of culture and religion that is growing exponentially in places that have offered acceptance, integration, and tolerance?

The only history that is worth looking at is the failure of the Western world to understand the limitation of its open border policies and the forced acceptance of threatening cultures and religions in its midst.

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Yes, it should be singled out because that is the threat we are facing RIGHT NOW. No one is arguing that this is the first time religion has been used as rationale for misdeeds.

Exactly.

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“In this respect. Islam shouldn’t be singled out as their early history and current extremists share much in common with early history of other religions like Christianity other extremists with “we’re 100% right and you’ll conform or else at sword/gunpoint!””

Oh, dear sweet Jesus, and I’m Jewish.

The fact that Islam is not the ONLY religion that has been used as a justification for terror is irrelevant to the fact that it is what we are seeing NOW.

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The thing about terrorism is it is so easy for parties on both sides (not political parties , ideologically) to simplify it. To the left, terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, it is all because of foreign colonialism, oil, the bad old western world “forcing” their beliefs on the natives, Israel-Palestine, you name it…it is full of guilt and a lot of frankly leftist pseudo intellectual discourse that is quite honestly as surface as anything.

The right promotes this as a religious war, of Islam versus the “Freedoms of the west”,how muslims are trying to export Sharia and so forth.Among other things, it is the right promoting this vision of Muslim uniformity that doesn’t exist, and what it leaves out is that many muslims, especially those in the US, were fleeing the radicals, because they were an oppressed minority. Sufis are hated by everyone in the Islamic world, Sunnis hate Shiites, and the radicals hate the moderates, they have experienced what radical islam and sharia law do, and don’t want it (and yes, I have the acquaintance of more then a few Muslims, and they say these kind of things). It is especially ironic hearing it from the GOP, who have their own fundamentalists who have been trying forever to create a “Christian” US, with their laws in place, read up sometime on Christian dominionism and what it stands for…

The left position assumes that terrorism is related to bad conditions, and it is a simplification. Islam is unique in that its religious beliefs are tied to direct politics, Islam is all about social justice and as part of that, there are laws that deal with economics and other issues, and you can’t separate them out easily. It is not a surprise that when you saw revolutions for ‘freedom’ in the middle east the past couple of years, you saw the creation of Islamic states, in Egypt and Tunisia and the like, and it also leaves out that in moderate Islamic countries, the kind of cartoons that got those poor SOB’s in the newspaper killed would have gotten them 10 years in a crappy jail in a lot of those ‘moderate’ countries. And while Muslims of good faith all over generally reject violence, that doesn’t mean that the government of those countries or most of the people don’t condemn why the terrorists committed the violence against the newpaper and such. After all, putting someone in jail for publishing something offensive to the faith is no different than gunning them down, only the level of the punishment changes. In the Islamic world even in moderate states it can be very difficult to be of a religious minority, whether it is Christian or Jew or another type of Muslim.

And in those states, while they a reviled by the violence, they also tend to look the other way at those preaching what they claim is a false version of Islam. If in fact the kind of violence the radicals promote is macking a mockery of Islam (as it does), why do they allow preachers and clerics to promote it? If in their societies, it is illegal to defame the prophet or preach false teachings and the like, if they are willing to put someone in jail for a book or cartoon that demeans the faith, why not these clowns?

And there is an interesting parallel to this to something mentioned by someone in another post. They brought up the typical response of 'well, how about the KKK in the US?" THe KKK at one time had real power in this country, and even those opposed to what they stood for refused to stand up to them. At a time when open KKK members were in public life, and when they would proudly march in their sheets in rural areas in the farm belt and down south, no one wanted to take them on. The rural and farm belt was a major constituent of the Democratic party at the time (Mencken used to call them the KKK branch of the democrats, whose descendents now are a major part of the GOP base), and even though the Democrats in the 1930’s had incredible power, both houses of congress, and a president not exactly sympathetic to the ideas of the KKK, they were so afraid of the Klan’s political power and their block that they refused to act on anti lynching legislation. More importantly, while many in this country would decry the activities of the Klan, their beliefs, they also quite frankly would not think it important enough to do anything about it. The majority of the country did not exist in KKK country, yet they didn’t care enough about those who were victims of the KKK, especially blacks, to do much about it, and there is a direct parallel to that with the Islamic world right now, many people are against the violence, but they either don’t feel strongly enough about what the crazies are doing, or in some ways sympathize enough with their beliefs, to not do anything.

The KKK died because after WWII, people found it odious enough having seen the Nazis to not stomach them. In NJ, there was a pretty strong KKK presence in the 1920’s and 1930’s in the farm areas in south Jersey or in Northwest NJ, after the war they were about as popular as smoking in an elevator, and this ended up spreading, plus the government had a sea change when the civil rights movement kind of forced them to act, the KKK was infiltrated by the FBI (Hoover had refused to do it earlier, probably because he was a racist pig first class), and it was broken…and it was backed by a population that not only was sickened by their acts, became sickened by what they stood for. The problem in the Islamic world is that this kind of understanding hasnt come about, notice that the voices you hear say they decry violence, but what about the beliefs underlying the radicals? What about the treatment of women? What about the anti education stupidity that has a direct parallel to the Christian fundamentalists in this country? That will isn’t totally there, and it is why these kinds of things happen. If the Saudis (who legrnmom is dead spot on about , more than that in a bit). When Muslims will riot in the millions over a bad cartoon or writing over the desecration of the faith but when someone is brutally killed in a terrorist act there are some words, but where is the rioting or protests over someone committing acts not of the faith? If a KKK member today marched down a street without police protection, even down south he likely would have rocks thrown at him or worst, where is the outrage vented at the radicals in the Islamic countries, when they aren’t tolerated, then the right wing will lose a valid point; but to argue that in the Islamic world there isn’t toleration of the radicals is a simplification big time on the part of the left, or leaving out that Islam is involved in the terrorism, that it holds particular beliefs that help justify the radicals and you cannot easily separate it out. (more)

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And yes, the left is right, powerless people, people living with economic injustice, will see the message of social justice in Islam and see the radicals, who tell them that if they take over, all ills will go away, there is no doubt that poverty and powerless can temp those to go over to the radicals. In one of Studs Terkels books he interviewed an ex Dragon of the KKK, who ended up a labor and civil rights organizer, and he said that the reason the KKK was tempting was because when you have nothing, when you have a crap job, lousy living conditions, you ask yourself why; and rather than blame the system, ie that the capitalism doesn’t always provide a great living to those who work hard, they have to find something else, so they blamed in particular blacks, and it wasn’t until he realized that blacks had suffered much the same thing, that he realized it was the system. Radical Islam tells the poor and powerless that all the problems they faced are caused by the western Godless powers and their lackeys, and while there is truth to that, it also leaves out that the systems they live under, no matter who runs them, is part of the problem. And in a sense, Islam being part of the government is part of this, because it also leads to the kind of sectarian strife that tears apart countries in the Islamic world. The majority of people in the Islamic world see nothing wrong with faith being tied with the government, and that is partially are the root of the problems there, for any number of reasons (for one thing, an official state religion makes oppressing people you don’t like very, very easy). One of the reasons the US has not had the kind of religious strife you see elsewhere is because of the separation of church and state, which ironically the right in this country rails against, yet it also has meant that minority religious populations, like the Muslims, are not radicalized.

Neither is the right correct in blaming muslims as a whole or saying they want “Islam” to take over, that is just complete BS. Muslims should not have to justify their faith, but like Christians and Jews they also quite honestly have to realize that there comes a time when the faith is threatened by those promoting false beliefs, endangering us. It is kind of ironic that I have been reading that the GOP is starting to realize that if they are going to win nationally, and promote the idea of freedom they claim to be promoting, that they can no longer cater to the religious right and their extreme social positions, nor try to support them using the law to enforce their positions, in large part because finally Christians and non believers alike have come to see the religious right for what they are, and what their agenda is, trying to make their religious beliefs law, and it has hurt the GOP (something like 80% of young people 35 and under see the GOP aligned with the religious right as ‘oppression’). Muslims the world over are going to need to realize that the roots of the radicalism are in their hands to solve, when they practice what they personally feel, when they don’t just denounce the violence but also the oppression of fundamentalist Islam, that they will continue to take the brunt of criticism. If as they are saying Islam is about peace, not hate, then their actions will need to be there, not to please the rest of the world, but it is the only way the extremists are going to lose their base, much the same way that the KKK died when they became as popular as athlete’s foot. They also have to learn that their faith is not everyone’s, and tying government to a religion is a disaster area, as I believe Jefferson wrote, when you mix church and state you end up with a corrupted church and an oppressive state.

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@Hunt-
You make a valid point, and those who make statements or put things out there that are outrageous also have to know that they are putting a target on themselves, that is as it always has been. But yes, people deserve to be protected for what they say, otherwise you don’t have free speech. A government that allows free speech, doesn’t use law to suppress it, but does not protect citizens who use that right, are de facto suppressing speech in that they are supporting those who would shut down the right of those making the offensive speech. We cannot decide which speech is to be protected or not, and as much as I find Westboro Baptist or the religious right and their rhetoric repugnant, if there were threats of violence against them, I would want the government to find those responsible. I think it is stupid when someone is hired to speak at a university who is controversial and the students demand the person not be allowed to speak and it happens, as repugnant as speech is a person should be allowed to say it, and then it is the duty of others to speak out louder, to say the first person was a jerk. Years ago William Schockley was a lightening rod for his theories on race and IQ (and rightfully so, he was way out of his field), and I believe he was supposed to speak at an Ivy league school (Yale? Don’t recall) and the outrage meant it was canceled. The answer to that would have been kids being outside the facility protesting, letting their voices be heard, and likewise, they should have booked those, people like Kenneth Clark if he was still alive at the time would put Schockley out of it fast. The answer to bad speech is burying it with good speech; and the answer if someone steps over the line of free speech, when they advocate violence and terrorism, is to act against those who do it. Banning ‘bad’ speech doesn’t work, burying it with good speech sends the message no one believes him, and they pull up their tent and disappears.

Likewise, governments might disavow the actions of terrorists or those who preach violence, but unless they shut them down, they are tacitly approving it. When you have people making bad speech , radical islam in this case, and people of good faith aren’t out there yelling and screaming and protesting to counter it, they are tacitly endorsing it.

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My take is this: Reckless, irresponsible, and evil would have to be defined by someone, and I am not for giving any one entity, e.g., government, or person the power to define what they think is reckless, irrespondible, or evil speech. Because who knows, one day that entity or person may see normal dissenting speech, as reckless, irresponsible, or evil.

The mountain climber is not really analogous to free speech for one fundamental reason: no one has the right to climb any mountain they want, as a third party owns it and can make climbing it illegal. If such a law is passed, then yes, it is the climber’s responsibility. There is nothing arbitrary about this.

In contrast, no third party owns the words of a language; no third party owns the sentences a person speaks; and no third party owns the meanings of said words and sentences. Therefore, anything deemed reckless, irresponsible, or evil is purely aribitrary, just the opposite of the mountain climber scenario.

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Given that mountain climbing’s inherently dangerous due to inalterable things like the law of gravity and human physiology, it seems a poor analogy for insulting zealots. That one can choose to do either doesn’t make them equivalent.

The sudden desire to find a way to blame the cartoonists for being dead seems a little uncharitable. I mean,we routinely pay intensive care/trauma service cost for people that end up shot for reasons as trivial as joining the wrong gang.

274

So should the French, US, and other Western nations emulate the British and French who held all of Germany responsible for starting WWI? The comments above sound like yes by analogy. Especially considering back then, Germany was considered the “RIGHT NOW” threat of the period.

In enacting harsh terms in the Versailles Treaty including economically devastating indemnities even after Wilhelm II and the presiding silent military dictatorship was overthrown and were out of the picture, they unwittingly played a great part in completely discrediting the moderate democratic German politicians/political activists and giving much ammunition to German right-wing nationalist groups to make much propaganda hay over this which paved the way to the rise of Fascism in Germany in the '30s and implementing their revanchist actions against France and large parts of Europe.

In contrast, the US and Allies learned from that mistake at the end of WWII and were much more focused in punishing the actual extremists groups responsible for the war, genocide, and atrocities rather than indiscriminately retaliating against everyone in the entire nation and thus, repeating what happened at the end of WWI. They also made the point of befriending and strengthening the position of their respective society’s moderate majorities.

With the exception of the lunatic fringe in both countries, there’s no calls from Germany or Japan to get revenge on the US or the Allies for their respective WWII defeats today.

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deleted. I’m going nuts with these wall of text posts.

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Cobrat, NO ONE is buying your argument that one cannot associate Islam with terrorism. Nor has anyone advocated that all Muslims be blamed for terrorism or anything of the sort. Terrorism is being perpetrated IN THE NAME OF ISLAM and no wishful thinking on your part is going to get the world to dissociate the two terms.

Now on to guilty pleasures: College National Championship. Small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but some of us with inferior intellects need our earthly distractions. :wink:

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@‌ cobra-
Your analogy is somewhat true, in that if we were to punish Muslims as a whole for the crimes of the extremists, it would generate the kind of resentment that the reparations did after WWI (though there is also another side to the story, the French in particular remembered what the Germans did to them after the Franco Prussian war when the Germans put crushing sanctions on them, the Germans were a bit of a bunch of crybabies, but whatever).

There are some intriguing parallels to this discussion. The Nazi Era was also defined by the idea of German superiority, but that did not start with the Nazis, that whole feeling of German superiority came about after the surprise victory over France in 1870 and German reunification, after being the weak sister in Europe. In parallel to that, in the Islamic world there was a common strain in the culture that Islam was superior, that it was above the other religions and cultures , it was a common strain of Islamic belief.

The biggest mistake the allies made was not occupying Germany, and it was done in part not to make the Germans feel like losers, that they wanted to stop the German people from feeling like this was the Allies trying to destroy Germany or take it over, in some ways it is like those who want to suppress speech that they see as inflaming Islamic sensibilities. More interestingly, by not occupying Germany after WWI, the German military was able to promote the myth that they hadn’t lost the war, they were betrayed, that the German military hadn’t lost and of course, with German superiority, how could they have lost? Had the allies occupied Germany, they couldn’t have promoted that myth of being betrayed, and it is likely that the Nazis wouldn’t have taken root. But allowing that myth let Hitler and the Nazis take the ball and run with it, and add that to the economic chaos from reparations, the rest is as they say history. In the Islamic world, the radicals are doing much the same thing, they promote the myth that Islamic society was once this superior thing, that before the west came it there was a golden age, and that through Islam there will be a return to a miraculous reborn Islamic society…their scapegoat is the west, but the reality is that the Islamic world has suffered through poor leadership for many centuries, the Ottoman Empires long decline, and the resulting chaos, left the middle east not all that much different than today, with strong arm rulers, warlords and so forth. The German resentment over the reparations was real, as is the resentment over western meddling, but the larger basis, that Islam had created some sort of golden age of a superior Islamic society, was a myth like Germany being betrayed. And in a sense, the allies messed up trying to be sensitive to the Germans, and much like that, we have to be careful about that, too. While we cannot hold Muslims as a group responsible for the actions of extremists, we do have the right to demand that their societies be accountable for trying to stop the extremists, that they have to recognize, as we should have done with the germans, their own duty and complicity in what happened and also to recognize that their problems are not entirely the fault of everyone else, but themselves as well. One of the reasons the extremists are not seen as enough of a threat I think is that a lot of people share their claim that the problems they face are entirely the work of outside agents, and the illusions need to be shattered, much as we needed to let the Germans know in WWI they had lost the war, that the German military had sold them on a bill of goods and ended up battered and destroyed.

278

^^^^ Who do you occupy in this case? Yemen? Saudi Arabia? France?

279

Xiggi,

You do realize that was the very same question asked by many Americans about another ethnic group not too long after December 7, 1941 in Hawaii and West Coast.

It fanned regional and national hysteria to the point an entire group of Americans of that very ethnic group…Japanese-Americans from those regions were indiscriminately singled out and placed into internment camps with barbed wire and armed guard towers during the war.

While there were also internments of German and Italian nationals, it was much more limited only to citizens of those nations and a tiny minority of Americans of those ethnicities who were recent immigrants or were suspected/found to have been involved with spying/sabotage against the US.

What’s more ironic is contrary to the then widespread hysteria and a few ignorant post-war apologists, subsequent investigation and delving into Imperial Japanese military/intelligence archives found Japanese intelligence agents in Hawaii and West Coast were frustrated by the lack of cooperation and help they were getting from the Japanese-American communities there.

280

I fail to see how this matters in the case of, say, the home-grown terror France has just experienced. Because we are now seeing a war that’s led by fanatics hidden in a remote part of the world who are finding cooperation from citizens that attack at home. It’s not hysteria; it’s fact.