There was a time in the 1850s when the Westerners wanted to open up Japan that the radicals in Japan took to beheading westerners. The idea was that Europeans should be challenged and confronted with the utmost violence in order to send a message they ought to go away. In the context of European imperialism of the last century, it wasn't a particularly novel concept, however what should be noted is that both sides of the discourse was coloured with immense amounts of racism, vis a vis the other.
In the following century, as Japan modernised, the racism of the West was challenged by the very power of the Japanese economy, and Japan's racism received a devastating blow with the loss of the Pacific War. After which, the world has found a place for Japan and Japan has found a place in it; what is good is that the days of beheading Westerners are long gone. Mind you, It was only 60 or so years ago there were beheadings in POW camps, so maybe that's not such a great claim. However, it seems highly unlikely Westerners will get beheaded in Japan on account of being Westerners.
Ironically, Japan has now been identified with the rest of the Western Cultural influence as it has sent troops for the reconstruction of Iraq. The insurgents of Iraq have taken Japanese people hostage and decapitated one:
Associated Press Television News videotape showed the severed head with the hostage's long black hair and features.
Policeman Yassin Hashim, who examined the body, said it was dressed in jeans, a beige shirt, and black underwear. The body's hands and legs had been bound with white rope, he said, adding that he believed the death occurred recently.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry said Koda entered Iraq on Oct. 21 and was last seen two days later at a Baghdad bus terminal, where he tried to catch a bus back to Jordan.
The ordeal was excruciating for Koda's family, which pleaded for his life on Arabic TV and through international media throughout the week, saying their son — who was traveling as a tourist — had no political intentions in Iraq and was simply curious.
Well, we know curiosity kills the cat.
The question we must ask is, who knows what a beheading means to an Iraqi? Who knows what beheadings mean to the Japanese? Who knows what will come from this? It's interesting to note the Japanese are not saying the Iraqi terrorists are cruel and barbarous. They are saying that they're not going to give into Terrorism; but we expected that as a 'civilised' response.
The 'cultural' response was revealed in the disdain the general public gave to the Japanese man who went to Iraq out of curiosity more than any belief in a cause or having sympathy. The word on the street in Tokyo seems to be that the Japanese government should be spending money helping those who suffered in the recent Niigata Earthquakes; don't spend it on some idiot who went to a dangerous place on a whim.
The thing is, what happens if a radical right wing Japanese group kidnap an Iraqi and make similar threats? What would Mr. Alawi do? And what if the Iraqi should get decapitated? My goodness, the Sadean possibility of that has me salivating... But it won't happen. It would make too much cultural sense and not enough civilised sense.
The stark, bipolar choices people seem to making seem to be between the ubiquitous, pervasive, bland, general force of 'civilisation' versus the immovable, resistant, trenchant, untranslatable forces of 'culture' scattered across the globe. The nasty truth is, in an reductio ad absurdum, the choices we have in front of us are accepting McDonalds or joining the Jihad. There are no third options.
If people do not believe that Clausewitz had a point in postulating as cause of war cultural conflict, I believe we are seeing it play out in Iraq right now. Those Iraqi 'terrorists are fighting for the right not to buy into McDonalds.
- Art Neuro
7 comments:
The Weasel's view is that neither Japan of yor nor Iraq of today were responsible for the beheadings. Nor was the unctious Hussein's regime responsible for the terrorist acts committed in many names.
Language is misapplied when culture is lined up with individuals.
Individuals respond as individuals. When a vast majority, by time or proximity repeat actions we call it cultural. But it is not mere repetition that creates culture. Culture can be created by an individual completing a unique task. Hence Pythagoras is recogisably of Greek cultural origin. Idi Amin is just a run of the mill cut throat.
It is an insult to Ungandan peoples to call Idi Amin a cultural expression of Ugandan peoples. Similarly these acts in the Middle East.
FYI, these events,as cultural expressions, could be pointed to as being Western. 'The West' ruled the mideast by division annd subjugation for many years, and this is the result of many of those issues coming home to roost.
Cultural killing is like the one where the Inca cut the heart out of a victim and tossed it on a stone receptacle. Or when the king was executed in the thirteenth moon and his body spread around the crops as ferteliser.
The terrorists are making bizarre demands because they have no demand, other than to feed terror. The proponents are not too different from their Communist bretheren of old (not Gorbachev Communism, but Stalin Communism).
The good news is that the killings will stop one day. Just as they did in Japan. They won't stop if we make the mistake of not building Iraq like Japan, but surrendering it like Vietnam. In Vietnam, their are the three pillars of corruption thirty years after the last soldiers left and the fighting stopped. While I have much admiration for all things Japanese, I do not feel that their superiority to Middle Easterners is so expressed.
WTF has the Incas got to do with it?
They cut out the hearts of their sacrifices for their gods. That would make it ritual killings. Entirely different to what we're talking about here.
Unless the Incas cut out the Hearts of Cortez's men asa demonstration of their willingness to commit to extreme violence in order to send the Spaniards home (which they didn't) it has nothing to do with the point of discussion.
As for the notion of Iraqis being 'inferior' to the Japanese, I don't know how you could have inferred that from this entry. It's simply not about that kind of shite. It's about the inferiority of the bland Western pardigm of 'civilisation' to the wilful resistance of the colonised cultures. If anything, I'm putting the present day Iraqi cause on the same footing as the Japanese of the 1850s. You know, the last samurais, untainted by Hollywood Cruise. Better believe it when I say I carry their leagcy in my blood.
I don't know what kind of solution the Iraqis will eventually devise for themselves. If they don't they are going to see a whole lot more hardships than they've got now. That doesn't make them 'inferior' in my books. If one is a person burdened with a culture, then it's the good fight.
Fight McDonalds.
Fight Microsoft.
Fight Californication.
They'll lose, but make no mistake, it's the good fight.
Yes, the killings will stop one day, but how many lives ae *you* willing to invest in that project? Whatever the number, you're making that forecast from the comfort of your 'civilised' living room.
Speaking of language being misapplied are you aware that "unctuous" literally just means 'oily'. It is more often used as a synonym for delicious & never as a synonym for 'odious' which you seem to mean?
As for Clauswitz, many people do indeed not buy 'cultural struggle' as a cause for war but what else is fighting for the right not to buy into McD's but that? Fortunately though I think there absolutely IS a third choice. The Western civilization we buy into need not be the impoverished mass culture of the USA unwashed (though that may be the entry point for the ignorant). There is a far better and deeper Western tradition with a great deal more cultural significance. In general Europe embodies this better than America but it is discernible in the educated echelons of both.
I like to think there is even some of it around here...
-db
With respect to Spacefreaks, you are reputing words from journalists to be from the mouths of killers. You are claiming that non Iraqi's (the killers) are speaking for Iraqi's. You are claiming that the cause, the drive that impels these people is unified and enculturated when in all likelihood, considering education, reasons are diverse, personal and probably misapplied.
Consider, the Afghan tribesman who is so outraged by a McDonalds thousands of miles from where he was born? Western Culture a threat to Mohamedenism? Many of these people might never have spoken to any foreigner other than an aid worker after an earthquake or during a famine.
The perpetrators of these crimes, if they have a reason at all, are committing them because there is a big business operating and it is fueled by a renegade saudi billionaire who hasn't invested in McDonalds. Most of these people would not know if this 'cause' they are buying into is legit or not and they probably don't care.
Western educated peoples have dropouts. These are angry people. Some, like say a Michael Hutchence will never contribute to society if they live to be 40. They become users and abusers .. part of Western Tradition. But no crack headed journo has been anle to impute a cause to these dropouts beyond the hollywood legend of 'Rebels without a Cause.'
Similar kids, brought up in 'paid for by killers schools' where they are inducted into levels of terror, does not make a culture. The universality of the disenfranchised goes beyond such panderings to leftist society. Give all kids guns and some will use them, ala Columbine. But in Columbine, there was a search for meaning because victims wanted to know why the kids used the guns. But we know there was no meaning, only a childish whim to be 'mature' and cool. The perpetrators there were unhappy. They probably wanted change but did not know how to achieve that. I think it wrong to suggest what they did involved rage. What they did involved opportunism and, in a sick sense, was probably thought to be artistic. They probably did not have parental permission.
But now we have ostensibly sensible adults suggesting that similar crimes are committed with a reason? Why would anyone suggest that if it didn't fit their agenda? The enormity of the crimes is not limited to the execution of these crimes. It includes the permission given to committ. This is where words come in.
The truth is this has nothing to do with Japanese pre modern culture and the Samurai way of maintaining order. That was cultural.
This bloody mess will end when the permission given the miscreants is withdrawn.
That will happen when society reasserts itself.
That will happen when the voice of rebellion is demonstratd to be weaker than that of authority.
Conservatism is a gift.
I dunno Mr. Weasel. I think your comment reads like how you want it to be: A couple of bad apples ruining the barrel of good Iraqi apples. I think it's more the case that many people with beliefs who are motivated to do stuff can reinforce a position through any action they choose. There's no stoping it; but it's not like there haven't been precedents for this and it *can* be identified as a cultural war.
You're insisting that there's a failure of civilisation on the part of the terrorists; and that may indeed be true. After all their acts are barabrous and cruel. However, it is also true that they are motivated to do what they based on a cultural position and find great strength in their beliefs and so we would be best advised not to belittle them by saying they haven't got civilisation. They've got enough culture to make up for it, like it or not, agenda or not.
And that in turn is breeding the problem. The West wants to pigeon hole these terrorists as *evil* or *mindless* or *ill-educated* or *uninformed* or whatever, but underlying that characterisation is the denial of the other party's footing.
The way I see it, you can deny they have a footing all you like but if they come at you with what they've got, and manage to inflict damage to our democracy (and they do this, each time they make us lose faith in our governments) isn't it about time we assessed they've got a footing after all?
as usual, the Weasels of Spacefreaks have ignored the arguement. This time they have decided to just claim offence without adressing the issues, having ignored them.
We know they have no plan to improve the situation anywhere in the world. They tell us so. They also tell us that current policy won't work not because it hasn't, but because it philosophically cannot.
Underlying these claims is the assumption that the world is different to how the Weasel sees it. The assumption that the demarcation underlying the Western Dialectic does not exist along a conservative/leftist faultline.
No experience is drawn upon to flesh out these twitterings, except a reference to a Japanese past not in living memory of those born after wwII, and not in living memory of those who fought in wwii. But culture is as we likes to sees it, as the poet says.
What makes the debate surrounding Iraq today so inflammatory to The Weasel is crystallised by the debate in the US surrounding the presidency. The Conservatives have done some good work and are seeking to improve the world, and want the continued support of the population to do so. The leftists have opposed every step of the Conservatives out of the nature of opposition, rather than belief, and if elected will continue with current policy until they get bored and decide there are votes elsewhere.
For me there is a great gulf between the two sides, and I cannot conceive how it could be otherwise for others. But I gather from the sprayings of the offended that it will be allright to vote against the Conservatives because they don't exist and anyway, are just stupid.
Of course, religious beliefs (atheism is a religion, even if the believers feel that they are better than any other), and life decisions involving the personal use of drugs and the like have nothing to do with the sprayings of the aggrieved.
I'm sorry, sooky. Forgive me for having an opinion different to yours. I'm glad that you value opinions so highly and are so fastidious in maintaining arguement in high form.
That's so Medieval; and I'm going to leave it at that. :)
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