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1.
Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to
keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies
and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and climb the
walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines
even catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.
The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead
now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we
visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.
Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums
to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to
provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we
are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.
This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without
violence, interrogations and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of
trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you
in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but
because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for
everyone.
This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less
deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem
to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope
the moat keeps the others out.
2.
The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu,
had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast
military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay
because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and
over. Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic
version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over
and over because, until now, we could afford to. One of these has been
to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This
turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical
problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the
Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerilla
violence that grows from the failure to end it.
In other words, if you define the problem as "a struggle against
terrorism" you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will
always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent
society such as ours. There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and
that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to
undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the
complaints of the most rational. - Sam Smith
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1.
Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to
keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies
and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and climb the
walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines
even catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.
The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead
now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we
visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.
Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums
to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to
provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we
are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.
This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without
violence, interrogations and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of
trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you
in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but
because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for
everyone.
This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less
deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem
to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope
the moat keeps the others out.
2.
The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu,
had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast
military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay
because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and
over. Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic
version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over
and over because, until now, we could afford to. One of these has been
to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This
turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical
problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the
Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerilla
violence that grows from the failure to end it.
In other words, if you define the problem as "a struggle against
terrorism" you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will
always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent
society such as ours. There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and
that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to
undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the
complaints of the most rational. - Sam Smith
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