The Difference between Radical Islam and Mad Muslims. What we can do about both. Why Ron Paul is the man to do it. Explained through a pop culture perspective. by John Armstrong
(libertarian)
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Blowback and BraveheartÂ
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Have you ever seen a movie? Braveheart, Ransom, Payback, A Time to Kill, The Count of Monte Cristo, Boondock Saints, Batman Begins, perhaps? Some of you may already be smiling because you see where this is going. Some of you may wonder what the hell I'm talking about or what these movies have to do with why terrorist want to kill us or Blowback. I'll give you a hint; it isn't because these movies represent America's wealth or the spreading of our culture through film.
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The thing all of these movies have in common is that because the hero was somehow wronged (like Bruce Wayne losing his parents in Batman Begins) otherwise normal people like you and me can be "recruited" to cheer for a cause that we would otherwise never be able to stomach, much less cheer for. Think about it, if you skip the part of Braveheart where the woman William Wallace loves is killed, and you started watching at the part where he's going around killing government officials, you would think the hero was some type of terrorist. If you skip the part of the John Grisham's book or Movie A Time to Kill where a black man's daughter is raped and dragged simply for being black, and you go straight to the part where he is killing the people who did it, you would think that he is a horrible murderer and you would be appalled by the thought of him even possibly getting away with it. As it is, you cheer for him when he kills the rapists and you cheer for him to be set free. You are cheering for people who kill people Why? Because the people who are being killed are getting what they deserved since the hero was wronged.
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Does that mean that the only killers in the world are people who have been wronged? Nope. Remember Scott Peterson? How many of you were cheering for him to get off? You may have been fascinated by characters like Hannibal Lecter, or Mass Murderers like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, but in the end you would have never cheered for them to get away. People like these guys are going to kill because they are killers. The reason they fascinate us so much is because things that are really rare are really fascinating. People go to a museum to see dinosaur bones. People really like to see eclipses. People who are bird watchers or deer hunters will sit in the woods forever waiting for a glimpse of that endangered Red Bellied Cockatoo or that 15 point buck. I digress. Rare things are interesting. But they are rare. There just aren't that many of them.Â
If you already see the point, you can stop wasting your time. If analogies and connections aren't your thing, I'll put these things together for you so you can see what this has to do with why terrorists want to kill us.
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While Ron Paul is right when he says that terrorists don't want to kill us because we are rich and free, "blowback" doesn't explain entirely why all terrorists want to kill us (although it does explain why 99% of terrorists want to kill us and why there are enough terrorists to actually be able to pull off something the magnitude of 9/11 to begin with). Just as some people read the Bible and believe that somehow it makes it okay for them, or not just okay but that they are somehow "told by God" to blow up abortion clinics; some fertilizer salesmen will have a brief affair with a woman with nasty blonde hair and think it's okay to kill his beautiful, pregnant, brunette wife on Christmas Eve; and some people will read the Koran and believe that all "infidels should die, and America has a lot of ‘infidels' so that would be a great place to start." The extremists who believe these things can and do harm people, but they aren't typically capable of doing massive harm because so few will join their cause. Because these extremely off-base people are relatively small in numbers it isn't that hard (compared to say, overthrowing the government of an entire country and installing a new one while rebuilding a country you just destroyed) to catch them and end their potential to do more harm.Â
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These people become very dangerous when they can convince others that their fringe ideas are justified. They have more support. The increased number of converts reinforces their own beliefs making them even more radical and dangerous. They have more financing. They have more manpower. They are harder to catch after the fact because they have more places to run and hide. And worst of all, people are cheering for them because they believe the bad guy got what he deserved. And the people cheering would never have been cheering if they hadn't seen the beginning of the movie. Just like you would never cheer for a man to kill two men in cold blood and get away with it if you didn't know those two men he killed had raped his daughter and drug her behind a truck. By continuing to run all over the world doing things that seem justified to us because of our current foreign policy (putting economic sanctions on countries that starve children, shooting missiles into pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities, posturing and preparing for war and even intimating that we would nuke them before they even fire a shot and before they've even actually been proven to have done anything wrong), we are unintentionally showing normal people the beginning of a movie that allows them to get called into a cause they otherwise would have found deplorable. The crazy ones don't need to see the beginning of a movie to support the idea of running around and killing people for fun, but the normal ones do.Â
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The same metaphor also explains why we are having such a hard time understanding why these people could possibly hate us so much that they would be willing to die themselves to kill us. It's because we missed the beginning of the movie. Most of us Americans are woefully ignorant of most things that go on in the rest of the world. I have no statistics to back this up, but I'd bet everything I have that the average American spends more time watching football than watching/reading/listening to the political-world news in any given year (even taking into consideration that football only lasts about ¼ of the year and most women don't watch football). When you come in during the middle of the movie and you ask a friend that you have no reason to doubt why in the hell the black dude is killing those two white guys and he says, "Completely unprovoked, before you came in, he was talking about how much he hated white people because of how rich they are." Of course you would trust your friend. Why wouldn't you?  But when you watch the movie again on DVD and see what really happened, it would change your perspective. You might not believe it at first. Your friend might not have lied to you. Maybe he just came to the movie a few minutes before you did and you assumed he'd been there for the whole thing. You might even think it's funny because it's just a movie. But if your life and the future of your country depended on the accurate description of the movie, you would damned sure ask questions to make sure you saw what you thought you saw. You may be a little angry with your friend, but even if he lied to you it wouldn't change your personal responsibility to make sure you got it right. In this case, our actions over the last half century is the beginning of the movie very few people watched, and our friend is propaganda of our current elected officials.
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But even after you figure out what the real issue is, you are confronted with questions like, "Does that make it right for them to come over and kill us? Does that mean we invited it? The answer is "No." Just like it doesn't make it right that the dad killed those two guys in A Time to Kill. Does it mean that most of the world (especially the part of the world where the hijackers were from) believe that it is justified? Yes. Just like you believed the dad was justified in killing those racist bastards that killed his baby girl. But most importantly, it means that once you have an accurate depiction of the movie you make sure other people see it from the beginning and that you don't write any more movies that people could potentially come in late to see. If we keep attacking and attacking we create more and more people who will cheer for our destruction. We can handle the few nutjobs, but we can't continue to have otherwise normal people have a reason to believe what these few radicals are selling.
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