In our silences, evil is rising. And we're not doing anything to stop it.

In an apparent effort to both score brownie points with the US (presumably so we won't nuke the crap out of them later on) and also toeal with their own internal irritations, other countries have started combating terrorism in new and interesting ways.

What I'm hoping - although I doubt - is that the Smiler had no idea what he was doing when he declared war on terrorism. Because what's happening is that people who aren't terrorists are dying. Robert Fisk wrote an article a week or so ago for the Guardian's Comment and Analysis section - that's Op-Ed for the Americans in the audience - commenting on this very phenomenon, which I wasn't bright enough to print out, so I'm taking a wild guess at some of the places, but the fact is that this is happening.

It turns out that a number of governments are basically shooting dissidents and calling it war on terror. Presumably, of course, that means that, say, the Palestinians are much more than a local dissident force and are in fact a well-armed, reasonable threat to the security of the rest of Israel. I'm not sure if in fact Israel has declared the Palestinians to be terrorists - thereby justifying the huge loans and aid that the US is granting to Israel, but you can bet your booties that it's coming, since to do so removes any sort of onus that Israel may hold in the eyes of the rest of the world to actually either start or participate in a peace process.

Digression on Israel:

The US is treating Israel, despite all evidence to the contrary, as its 51st state. We give them something like $5 billion a year, and in exchange for what?

Apparently, in exchange for an "ally" that has learned a trifle too well from the US. Among other lovely things they've done, bombing a US ship, one prominently flying the Stars and Stripes at the time, and spying on our government facilities in the US are merely two. At the same time, they're the biggest supplier of arms and training to the rest of the Arab world, some of which they are still in an active state of war with.

It is quite obvious that Israel is not, despite all rumors to the contrary, the US's only ally in the Middle East, although if we keep pissing off the Saudis the way we've been doing, they may be. After the Gulf War, we parked military bases all over the Middle East, presumably in recognition of the fact that the next threat wasn't going to be little yellow people storming out of the jungles of Southeast Asia since they were all too busy shooting each other and growing drugs as a result of our actions, but rather little brown people storming out of the deserts of the Middle East, since we hadn't really gotten around to destroying their way of life yet. So we've got loads of military bases, and so presumably we can deal with any threat to either the US* or our allies in the region. Because Israel is not our only ally. It is not.

Other than the fact that the Jewish lobby in the US is as powerful as - if not more so - than the gun lobby, there is no reason we should be considering Israel as such. It's more than a bit like continually granting China most-favored-nation status in the hope that this year, their markets will suddenly open up and we can flood them with consumer goods produced presumably in Mexico, since it would be silly to flood them with things made in China. In other words, we continue to ignore Israel's track record and consider them our primary or only ally in the Middle East because our duly-elected leaders have been told that if we don't safeguard Israel's security the country will cease to exist and it'll be all our fault that the Holocaust happened all over again.

So here's my start of a solution. I make no claims that this solves all the problems, but it'll most likely get the ball rolling. Quit giving Israel aid.

Sign all the peace treaties you want, guaranteeing that at the first sign of Arabs we'll be there like a shot. Station another aircraft carrier in the Med, just for Israel. However, if their US subsidy is pulled, they'll be forced to consider the actual costs of their military operations, which right now are being supported by our dollars. If that's pulled, the inflation would bankrupt them fairly quickly. If we actually want peace, which I seriously doubt, that's the start.

End of digression. More on this topic later.

Anyway, back to the war on terror. What the Smiler has done is give other countries licence to kill dissidents and then justify it. Am I the only person in the world who thinks that killing for governmental reasons is wrong? I mean, if I could get a job shooting idiots, I'd do it. But that's not the same thing as killing people just because they disagree with you. (Okay, the line's narrow and the slope's slippery. But there is a difference. I'm not a government. Yet)

In The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, the plot is that a murder has occurred. There are telepaths in the society, which is Earth and the Solar System of 2200ish, who monitor the population to make sure that murderous impulses are not allowed to progress and that the individual gets help. Nonetheless, a man manages to commit the first murder in 50-plus years. After a long and harrowing chase, led by a telepathic cop who can't get a read on the murderer's mind, the man is eventually captured.

Rather than being fried, however, as the Smiler would have it, the man is sent to a mental facility, where they regress his mind back to infancy while keeping his awareness. They then embark on a course of bringing the man to mental adulthood without the ability to murder, which was caused by a family secret that his subconscious wouldn't let him acknowledge.

The reason they do this is because he's too valuable alive. He's proven that he's smart enough to buck the odds. One of the therapists, on being told by the cop that the killer would've been killed in our time, asks if that wouldn't leave our society with only the sheep. The cop says yes, and then says that he can only think that we must've wanted sheep.

In other words, every time a dissident is killed, you are killing an opportunity to allow your society to grow. You are killing the thing that makes change possible, that allows us to strive for a more perfect, more equal world. If the problems of the world are largely ones of viewpoint, then it's time to allow others into the viewpoint. They make us strive to better ourselves.

Yes, some people are complete and total crackpots. Some people have been trained to kill a bit too well. Some people only want to see others suffer. But what is being missed is that some people are right.

There's a theory in anthropology, developed by Edwin Leach, of "muted voices". His theory is that non-dominant people - most frequently women, strangers, and children - are not allowed to express their thoughts in their own framework because the dominant framework is one that older men find comfortable. There is no room in their framework for the ways that women communicate, for example. So women are simply not heard. Their voices are muted. Presumably, one of the ways to achieve a better world is to listen to other peoples' voices.

And that includes listening to people who you don't agree with. You never know what you may learn. I've learned a lot from people who I thought I would never agree with.

You can't listen when they're dead.

Governments should not be able to join the US's bandwagon just to kill people they dislike. The US shouldn't be allowed to do it either. In these silences, something is rising, and it's up to us to stop it.

Final Thought: "The Twentieth Century gave the human race its scorecard. Kardashev and Dyson made concrete the notion of type one, type two and type three civilizations. A type one civilization has mastered its planet, inside and out, is utilizing the world's entire energy potential, and also has wiped away the internal struggles of its race. A type two society has energy needs so massive that it can only continue by physically harnessing the sun. In the type three scenario, the civilization has gone galactic, extracting energy on an interstellar basis. We can make magic with engines smaller than a virus, and yet, just today, twenty-four people in this city alone will die from having walked into the wrong district or community. We are still not even a type one civilization. This remains a zero society."

- Transmetropolitan 22, The New Scum 4: New Streets.

Striving to be higher on the food chain than you,

Channon

*Although given the way that our anti-aircraft defences didn't work when the planes that crashed into the WTC towers entered the no-fly zone, this may be optimistic.