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Dear Khalid (or
do I call you Sohail?)
Yes, there is a chance
I may come to Toronto
for a visit later this year or next year, but it depends on many things.
I was interested to
read your response to my comments. The fact that the US armed the mujaheddin in the 1980s has little bearing on
my claim that neither the US
nor any other nation has a “war economy”. I am really not sure who paid for
the mujaheddin’s weapons, but I suspect that it
was the US
taxpayer. As for the idea that the world is threatened by the combination
of Islamic fundamentalism and western weapons, I find it rather bizarre.
The fundamentalists cynically use whatever western technology they can get
their hands on. Oddly, the Taleban proscribes
kites because they are not mentioned in the Koran, but are quite happy to
use Toyota
pickups with grenade launchers mounted on the back. I have no idea which sura mentions such vehicles, but perhaps someone more
familiar with the Koran can enlighten me.
The 9/11 outrage, as
we all know, did not use military technology at all, but rather harnessed
civilian technology for destructive purposes. The terrorists have developed
explosives from commonly available fluids. I’m sure they would also love to
adapt existing nuclear technology to make a “dirty bomb”. Do we then say
that the world is threatened by a combination of Islamic fundamentalism and
western civilian technology? This makes no sense to me. The evil lies not
in the technology, but in the intention.
Humanity cannot be held responsible for the uses to which terrorists
put its technology.
Who armed the mujaheddin says nothing about the issue I raised. In
the unlikely event that the US
made some financial gain from such transactions, it would surely be a
miniscule proportion of its total economy. My challenge – to you and anyone
who reads these postings – is to provide evidence that the US, or any other nation outside North Korea,
has more to gain economically from war than from peace. Without such
evidence, this claim, common though it may be, appears untenable to me. It
is also an important distinction; anyone who accepts without question that
war stimulates the US
economy will always attach the nastiest motives to any US
intervention in trouble spots. Such an outlook is like a conspiracy theory
in the way that it develops its own internal logic, which no amount of
common sense or evidence can refute.
It is not the only
such concept that I read on this site. There seems to be a small but vital
set of ideas that all contributors accept as unstated maxims. Even those
who offer themselves as progressive and secular seem to accept them, yet I
do not. My next posting will address another of these.
Peter Joyce
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