Saturday, October 27, 2012

Why Do They Hate Us? (asked in whiniest voice possible)

It doesn't matter why--their reasons are their reasons, not ours, and when their reasons don't make any sense at all, it makes no sense to try to respond to them. What some will call dismissive, I call common sense:
Like gawky teenagers, Americans are far too obsessed with what people thousands of miles away think of them. The first reaction of the ordinary man in the street on December 7, 1941, was not to wonder why the Japanese hated him. It was not even his tenth reaction because at that point he was much too busy hating the Japanese to care why they hated him.

That attitude might not be pretty, but it was a practical response to the exigencies of wartime, and that war, like most wars, was not fueled by emotion, but by territorial aggression. FDR was unconcerned with Japanese emotions, let alone their hearts, minds and livers; because he knew that the conflict did not come down to emotions but to a power struggle between a Japanese empire in the Pacific and the only Western country with a view of the Pacific capable of standing up to the land of the rising sun.

The study of Muslim rage, its wellsprings and tides, is as worthless as the study of Japanese rage in the dying days of the 1930s. Despite the showy displays of violence in the last week by inflamed Chinese mobs attacking Japanese properties and Muslim mobs attacking American properties, the conflicts do not revolve around the axis of emotion, but of power and territory.
The following was sent to an email list of which I am a member and I received permission from the author to post it here.  Its logic and truth are, to me, self-evident:
There's a certain world view that assumes all conflict is based on misunderstandings. And that if someone is attacking me it is just as much my fault because I didn't fully understand their grievances or their attack was a reasonable response to something I did.

The end-result of this world view is to first look at our own culpability in any conflict and when there is conflict not do anything that may escalate the violence.

(snip comments specifically related to the Benghazi fiasco)

The problem here isn't the inconsistencies or the existence of a supposed "cover-up". The problem is the misguided notion that there wouldn't be conflict if we just tried harder or were nicer or weren't as belligerent or understood our enemies better. It's a world view shared by most everyone in the administration and a cornerstone of liberal Foreign Policy.

But it tends to get people killed.
I'm not saying that it is impossible for a people or a nation to have a grievance against the United States. I am saying that trying to understand why people will fly airplanes into buildings, or massacre civilians, is a fool's errand. Back to the link posted above:
The appeaser consensus obstinately refuses to understand that Muslim violence is not blowback or the uncontrollable reflex of a knee being jerked in response to our foreign policy. It is not a reaction that can be soothed by applying aloe and appeasement, but an aggressive action intended to expand their power and influence. That refusal to see Muslims as actors rather than reactors is rooted in a colonialist view of Third World peoples as the balls in our pinball foreign policy machine, rather than civilizations looking to step into a power vacuum that we have left open for them...

If Muslims only hated us, then we could live with that. But like Japan on December 1941, they do not just hate us in the abstract fashion that countries and peoples hate one another. We are not just hated. We are in their way.
That is all we need to remember and all we need to focus on, and it should form the basis for how we respond.

24 comments:

  1. Certainly, there is no way to remove by logic an idea not founded in logic. However, the quest of understanding and peaceful co-existence is not a fool's errand. If we simply keep complaining about immigration from Mexico, for example, rather than understand that they will not stop coming until their home economy gives them reason to stay, we will make no progress. As a teacher, I would expect you would believe that education and asking why and seeking answers and understanding is a good thing. Once someone makes a decision to hate or wage war or blow himself up, it's too late. But it's not a bad idea to wonder and ask if we can prevent people from going to the dark side in the first place.

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  2. Said in whiniest voice possible :-)

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  3. Again, *you* want to take responsibility for what *they* are doing!

    And this has nothing to do with illegal immigration. They're breaking the law but they don't "hate" us. I don't know that I want to spend any extra time, though, figuring out why you threw in that red herring, because none of the answers I came up with make you look very good.

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  4. allen (in Michigan)5:33 AM

    They don't hate us. Their leaders/overlords hate us.

    All nations governed by representative forms of government are an inherent threat to all authoritarian governments because they put ideas in the heads of the people whose heads, as far as the leadership is concerned, ought only to be filled with the ideas put their by the leadership.

    That's why when the same people who supposedly hate us emigrate to the U.S. they are so disappointing to those leaders. Beyond the grasp of that leadership, which has to inflame the population to help maintain its control, Arabs by and large go about their daily business giving not much thought to their supposed hatred of the U.S.

    The question of real value is "why do lefties have to portray the United States as culpable in the creation of hatred?"

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  5. Sad, D.

    Asking why - and why not - is not wrong. Don't give up on humanity - and certainly don't promote such pessimism to young people.

    And it was an "analogy" - a comparison of situations to simplify and promote understanding. It's the sort of critical thinking we do in English class.

    Pop in to an AP Language class at your school from time to time, and you might learn what an analogy is versus a "red herring" or other logical fallacies.

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  6. Your "analogy" was completely unrelated to what I wrote. Despite all your high-sounding words, you're trying to change the subject. Perhaps instead of "analogy" or "red herring" we should add "straw man" to the list.

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  7. Throwing words around doesn't make you educated, D. It was a comparison - not a red herring.

    Words of advice: a thesaurus is a place to meet old friends, not pick up new ones.

    The same might be said for a book of literary terminology.

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  8. pseudotsuga4:44 PM

    There is an "easy" answer--evil exists. But to admit this defies all manner of relativism and post-modernism. No manner of hand-wringing and self-deprecation will change the fact that some people are beyond understanding, and sincerely wish to do harm to others to serve their own ideologies.

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  9. "Throwing words around doesn't make you educated, D. It was a comparison - not a red herring."
    I agree it doesn't make you educated, and you should heed your own admonitions.

    And your comparison was, and I'll be *generous* here, tenuous at best. Were I not so generous I'd day it was throwing ca-ca on the wall and seeing what sticks, but I'm in a generous mood today :)

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  10. I guess it's the teacher in me that gives some silly hope that by occasionally checking in, you learn some things and just a smidgen of knowledge and moderation sinks in.

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  11. Why would you think that? It hasn't worked for you in all your years of visiting here :-)

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  12. Anonymous10:45 PM

    mmazenko is correct here!

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  13. Mazenko's analogy is fair . . . but, just like I don't care why illegals cross our border, I also don't care why people blow themselves up. Punishing the groups/countries responsible should be first priority; reducing their desire to do so, a close second . . .

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  14. It's not fair at all. Illegal immigrants don't come here because they *hate* us. That's the point of this post.

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  15. mazenko's comparison is fair in that both groups commit crimes against the us . . .and that we would do well to deter either. Obviously one is lethal and fomented by hate, and one isn't. But why not punish the crime AND attempt to reduce the motivation?

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  16. Non sequitur. This post is about ignoring the phony reasons, remembering what they're really after (power/territory), and reacting accordingly.

    I don't think illegal immigrants are trying to destroy us or hate us (it would kinda defeat their reasons for coming here). That's why his straw man argument is ignorant.

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  17. No, D. The point was you not caring or asking why people act or feel as they do and you thinking that understanding a person's motivations for action doesn't matter. But it does. Which is why you're naive and narrow-minded and wrong. Educators should know better.

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  18. You clearly didn't read what I wrote. Your words could not be further from the truth or from the thesis of this post.

    I believe now that you're intentionally mischaracterizing my words to make some silly point that *you* want to make. I encourage you to do that on your *own* blog. When you can calmly and rationally read what *I* wrote, and not what you want me to have written, then I invite you to return and offer some intelligent commentary.

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  19. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  20. I say again:
    I believe now that you're intentionally mischaracterizing my words to make some silly point that *you* want to make. I encourage you to do that on your *own* blog. When you can calmly and rationally read what *I* wrote, and not what you want me to have written, then I invite you to return and offer some intelligent commentary.

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  21. Comment removed? Mine?

    Nothing like censorship. Though, you shouldn't fear others' opinions.

    But, then again, your blog, your call.

    :-)

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  22. Don't act all butthurt. I grant plenty of latitude, but I will not allow you to intentionally misrepresent what I say and get away with it. What could I have said to have made that any clearer to you?

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  23. This is a crap argument between two people who usually respect eac other. Mazenko, I think you're failing to appreciate the hatred that D has for people who kill us for completely idiotic reasons. as hatred he should have. Mazenko, while I think you make a valid point . . . people streaming across the border to work is NOT really equivalent to trying to indiscrimanately kill us. Both situations might benefit from us trying to understand motives, and try to deincentive -ize it ... but the major difference is . . . the mexicans, for the most part, don't kill us. the muslims, on the other hand, don't appear to follow logic, at all . . . so trying to understasnd might be nice lip service, but likely won't help . . .

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  24. allen (in Michigan)7:27 AM

    Oooh! A lefty engaging in some mischaracterization? Say it's not so!

    How could anyone who's deeply and sincerely dedicated to "the quest of understanding and peaceful co-existence" engage in mischaracterization? That's simply got to be the sort of thing someone who isn't, by definition, interested in the quest of understanding and peaceful co-existence, would do.

    Mike's engaging in sophistry and the very first agenda item for sophists is to set the assumptions upon which the discussion is built. Ignore or attack those assumptions and all subsequent exercises of sophistry fall apart.

    For instance, it doesn't really matter if Muslims hate us or not in the response to unprovoked violence. If a home invader kicks in your door you're under no obligation to understand his motivations - first things first. So the phony assumption is that there's a worthwhile comparison between terrorists and illegal immigrants due to illegality of border-crossing being comparable to an act of murderous terrorism.

    If you deny Mike that false comparison his tedious moral and intellectual posturing falls apart as does what little there is in his comment.

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