guruilla » Sat Nov 14, 2015 10:18 pm wrote:I've been following this thread because it's current and because it's RI, & I want to feel part of the community. But I'm at a loss to comment, frankly. The more I read, the more I realize that I don't have a clue what's going on in the world and, at the risk of being contentious, that probably no one else here does. It's all fancy guesswork, or so it seems to me, tho admittedly I am
really at a disadvantage when it comes to extrapolating geopolitical agendas from a single terror-attack in Paris, having never done the necessary reading and without sufficient interest to do it, and having the perhaps jaded view that everything that happens on the world stage is a dark form of theater, one way or another.
Re: Wombat's last-but-one post, that making an argument that "if you think that Arabs can't coordinate successful terror attacks in Europe without help [or whatever] is racist" this seems to me to be really a loose argument at the best of times. Because a) aren't there other reasons why someone might believe this that may not have anything to do with racism? and b) it presupposes that an argument cannot be correct if it is racist, which seems to be an ideological supposition and not a logical one. Racism is not an ontological phenomenon, and much as we might wish it otherwise, AFAWK a person can be racist and still right (as I pointed out at the Zionism thread, one person's facts are another's racism, sexism, you name it).
The larger point Wombat makes I think I get, that it's too easy to think of every form of Moslem hostility as being the fabrication of "the West", and that this is patently absurd, even if it does seem, or at least feel, to be kind of "parapolitically correct" these days.
Those are just my ten cents, or maybe it's a plug nickel, take it or leave it. Overall, I feel as though an event like yesterday's in Paris gets us riled up and emotional,
excited even, and then naturally we want to get together and be communal about it. And since this is RI, the way to do that is to start deconstructing and analyzing and trying to figure out what's wrong with this picture. But we already know (at a knowing if not a knowledge level) what's wrong with this picture, and we know that this is just business in Babylon as usual. So then it all starts to feel a bit futile, to me personally, even a way to buffer the real distress of being reminded of our fragility and mortality by such an event, rolling up our sleeves and getting out our mind-scalpels. We feel bad for strangers across the ocean, but are we tending to our own wounded?
I certainly felt unusually depressed today; and while there was no obvious correlation with the events in Paris (I didn't watch the news footage; I don't feel bad for strangers just because the mass-media has determined that their suffering is especially important), it may be related, who knows? But what I do know for myself, and remembered again today, is that all my misery and despair comes back to the pain I carry around, in my cells, that I keep pushed down, beneath the surface of awareness, that has built up over a lifetime, over generations. It all comes back to that pain. If we want a unified field theory of terrorist action, psy-ops, geopolitics, whatever, I am not sure we really need to look any further than our own stricken souls and strangled cries, whether of love or rage, or both.
I hope that's not an unwelcome interruption or an unproductive downer. My way of participating, of finding the ground again, & of sharing some love with strangers, is all it really is.