Does it mean anything to you?

My Thoughts on London:

I am utterly stunned by the responses to what happened in London. I shouldn't be. I'm a genocide scholar. People get up in the morning, have a cup of tea, read the paper, and head off to work. I get up in the morning, brew a pot of coffee, and begin my day by reading the three newspapers I have delivered, while I have the news on in the background, and then when I'm done with that, I pour myself another cup of coffee and start reading a wealth of online news sites. The news is my job. What does that mean exactly? It means that my job is to sift through global events, summarize them, and then contextualize them, and determine trends. I spend my days mired in unbelievable cruelty. I'm used to it.

There seems to be this need to perpetuate the mentality of "us and them", "victim and victimized". It's as if somehow by denying the very humanity of the "enemy", we're relieved of our responsiblity toward them, the responsibility of our shared humanity. The irony of the situation is that the very humanity of all parties is what makes it so fucking messy in the first place.

There is no justification for acts of terror. We can explain them, and to some extent we can understand them, but we can't justify them. Any attempt to justify such things is futile - and beyond that, it's an abomination. There is never an excuse for mistreatment (real or perceived) engendering further mistreatment. That old expression, "fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity" rings true in such instances.

We tend to toss about terms like "rights" and "civil liberties" quite a bit at such times. In a political sense, there's a distinct difference between a right and a privilege. We do have inalienable rights, but not as many as we like to think we do. Freedom from terror should be a right, but it isn't. It's a privilege. Why? Because people can take that away from us. As we've experienced today, and not for the first time.

We tend to marginalize people. European muslims are so marginalized it isn't even funny. They are often discounted within their own communities as being "too western", while the western world largely writes them off as being "too foreign/muslim/too extreme". This marginalization fosters considerable anger and resentment and creates an environment and a mentality ripe for exploitation by extremists. What's ironic about this is these marginalized people, who speak out against the west, are actually quintessential representatives of western values. How? They are taking advantage of the cival liberties (freedom of expression, etc.) granted to them as citizens of western countries. Does that excuse it? No. Justify it? No. What it does is illustrate our collective responsibility.

I once heard the analogy that "Islamic Extremism is to Islam what the KKK is to Christianity". I think that's a very good analogy. Extremists are a small, but very vocal, minority. They aren't representive of the majority, but they garner the majority of media attention. In the absence of vocal moderates, it's understandable that we start to view these extremists as representative of their countries/faith. That explains it, but it doesn't justify it.

Because we don't see moderates speaking up, speaking out against the extremists, we respond - and we're only responding to the extremists. Who suffers? The average person. The moderates. What happens? We turn moderates into extremists and we give the extremists exactly what they want. We foster such resentment that potential allies turn against us.

It's impossible to explain away an attack. Period. There isn't enough rhetoric out there for it. Political spindoctors have been attempting to do so for years, and they have yet to experience success.

Dragging colonial injustices into the situation as an excuse is asinine. If I thought it would improve matters, believe me, I'd be the first one talking up the injustices of colonization - but dragging history into it only serves to exacerbate an already volatile situation. There comes a point when people need to take responsibility for their circumstances - and not blame everything on the proverbial "past". Part of being a grown up is not blaming mommy and daddy anymore. It extends to political sovereignty. If you get caught up in a historical "tit for tat" no one is going to win. The situation isn't going to improve.

There is a time and a place for debating colonialism and imperialism, and the effects of them - but this isn't it.

Oscar Wilde said, "the worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity". The people who are responsible for this crap are fanatics. There is no reasoning with a fanatic - the very mark of a fanatic is unfailing, unreasoning devotion to their cause.

The sad fact is, bad things happen. The victims of terrorist attacks, the victims of war - they are almost always innocents. They are people who get caught up in the machinations of governments, zealots, fanatic - and they get fucked over. It's wrong, but that's how it works.
We can sit here and we can speculate about the causes. We can sit here and we can cast blame. We can sit here and ruminate on how unfortunate it is. All of those avenues are open to us, but none of them are productive.

We can sit here and bemoan the sad state of affairs. It's certainly a hell of a lot easier than being proactive, and actually doing something.

In a world where more than a billion people survive on less than a dollar a day, and several billion more survive on less than three dollars a day, where a woman can't get antibiotics for her child because a simple course of antibiotics costs more than she makes in a month, in a world where $16 dollars can clothe and send a child to school for a year, in this world it's so easy to just throw our hands in the air and give up. It's overwhelming. So rather than do something small to make a difference, we do nothing at all.

There's plenty of blame to go around. If we ever hope to improve things and prevent something like this from happening again we need to acknowledge our own culpability.