Thursday, March 20, 2003 :::
Derb writes on American and the rest of the world's failures to understand each other:
They don't understand. — How a-n-g-r-y we are. It was our proud buildings that were brought down on 9/11. It was our office workers, airplane passengers, firemen and cops who got killed.
If you lived in France, you might not put such a high value on life, either.
Even when we have blundered, it has been with good intentions. France fought in Vietnam to preserve her imperial standing and keep her planters in business; we fought in Vietnam to hold the free world's line against communist dictatorship. Every pronouncement from our leaders about possible war with Iraq comes with a rider that we shall do our utmost to avoid harming civilians. When did any other nation prepare for a military expedition with such oft-repeated declarations? When? The Chinese going into Vietnam in 1979? The Russians going into Chechnya in 1994? The French in Algeria? Iraq attacking Iran? The Libyans in Chad? When? When?
Incidentally, I know someone who doesn't believe the media at all. I mean, that's a fine first approximation, but I tend to assume that discrete facts (i.e. quantized, digital; when an exact number is reported, for example) are generally true, and that sweeping arcs of stories tend to be correlated in some way with the truth, though I know that details considered unimportant are relatively unreliable. When it's reported, though, that Elizabeth Smart's abductor had a knife, I assume at least that there was a blade of some sort, or something he presented as if it were a knife, not that it was merely made up, intentionally or not. He does not believe this. He grew up in Eastern Europe, under the subjugation of the Soviet Union. If the governments of Eastern Europe support us, but their people do not, they at least have an excuse; they have no credible access to facts.
::: posted by dWj at 2:22 PM
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