segunda-feira, setembro 06, 2004
Relativismos
Excerto do artigo de David Aaronovitch no Guardian.
Yesterday, in the wake of the Beslan school horror, the historian Corelli Barnett more or less blamed the crisis on the war against terror itself. His thesis was that, since September 11th, the actions of the West (and particularly the Americans) had made things far, far worse.
The problem with this is the simple one that the war with terror was declared by terror itself. Declared in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, declared in New York on 11 September. It wasn't until 11 September, however, that we began to appreciate the scale of what was already happening. The idea that, had we negotiated with the Taliban, left Saddam in place and put more pressure on Sharon to settle, kids would now be safe in North Ossetia, is just wishful thinking.
In Saturday's Guardian Isabel Hilton gave a more interesting explanation. This is an era, she pointed out, of asymmetric warfare in which - regrettably - outgunned insurgents eventually come after kids, journalists and Nepalese cooks. What else (she implied) are they going to do? But wasn't Gandhi's situation asymmetric? Did he take over schools and kill the kids? Did Mandela? Is it really the case that what we have here are outgunned liberation movements?
On Thursday night Channel Four showed the drama The Hamburg Cell, which attempted to get inside the minds of the young al-Qaeda operatives who carried out the 11 September hijackings. What the film showed was a classic cult in operation, with young men - pampered and envious, frustrated and egotistic - urging each other on to more and more pitiless acts of violence. The film not only explained the Twin Towers, it inadvertently explained Jonestown and the mass suicide in the Guyanese jungle.
It was also interesting to see how they provided intellectual justification for their actions. Everything was read in one direction: how Muslims were forced to suffer. So, for example, the West's inaction in Bosnia was thrown into the balance, but not its intervention on the side of the Muslims of Kosovo.
posted by Miguel Noronha 12:55 da tarde
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