Superb analysis of the 9/11 attacks (in German):
Richard Herzinger
Brilliant: Asymmetric wars and the current conventions (in German):
Herfried Münkler
Martyrmania
Much like most countries America has often gone in the wrong direction – maybe more often than others because it is “bigger than real”.
E. g. the way it decimated and still treats the vernacular American population, the way it treated “witches” and negroes in the 19th century; the prohibition and McCarthy, the megalomanic war on Vietnam, the smugness it indulged in after winning the Cold War, its attitude towards
Switzerland in the nineties (Switzerland = Nazi collaborator!), its contempt for language, its pathetic punctuation rules, its prudishness, its wrong laws (prostitution not allowed, abortion a big issue still, absurdly high legal age) – to pinpoint just a few things.
But now America is doing the right thing. Its current battle is comparable to freeing Nazi Germany. America is using its power to do good. Like 57 years ago.
Terror against Hitler was a legitimate means of resistance; terror against the democracies of the free world is barbaric, bestial and insane. Anybody who says it’s wrong to attack a country that obviously harbors and fosters terrorists doesn’t deserve the freedom and liberties we have.
Autonomy is far from self-evident; our ancestors fought hard and long wars to attain this privilege. If we lose the ability to fight when a fight is inevitable, we might as well give our enemies a present of everything we own. And run.
Poverty issues have nothing to do with the current conflict. It is clearly about power and dominance, a perfect “clash of civilizations”. Arabs were leaders for long periods in history, slave traders and conquerors, and they just can’t get over the fact that in today’s
world nobody seems to be interested in what they have to offer. We want their oil, their rugs, the pyramids and camel rides into the sunset; but we don’t want to be told what we should read and do and think and how we should treat our women. And our women don’t want to be told how to behave
and dress. And they certainly don’t want to be told that they can’t fuck around. (Fucking around is the biggest thrill they have today.)
So Moslems give us their suicidal mass murderers to teach us “manners”. Don’t they just know how to work their way into our hearts!
If they came to us as scientists and artists, as inventors and entrepreneurs, as scholars and philosophers – we would respect them.
But they live in the Middle Ages. Calvin, Luther, Zwingli (with an “Al” or an “Abu” in front of the name) are their heroes.
We know what merits these guys have: none whatsoever. They represent intolerance and puritanism. But these poor people don’t know this; they are convinced that spiritual leaders are needed.
I believe they are not. Coca-Cola is needed, Levi’s jeans are needed, Chuck Norris is needed, pickup trucks are needed – but untouchable high priests and scriptures and commandments beyond question are certainly not needed!
A Personal 9/11 Diary
October 25, 2001
A nest of hornets – hornets all over the place in my garden. Some of them stinging me, my pet, my girl. What do I do? I could ignore the problem. I could say: “If I destroy that nest, I might hurt innocent civilian hornets. Educated, humane hornets.
Compassionate ‘good citizen’ hornets.”
Okay, I see that; I take more wine to forget the problem.
But they keep stinging. They keep coming back.
They have no respect.
So I go to the cellar and get out the big club, the .357, the flame thrower, the gelignite, the surface to air missiles, the B2s, the nuclear warheads.
And all of a sudden I have peace. The hornets are not half as aggressive as they used to be. They don’t protest anymore. The young hornets don’t give me that sneer.
We are one big happy family now.
October 26, 2001
Soft and gentle looking bitches on FOX and CNN these days.
The war of the sexes is forgotten. The harassment suers have shut up.
For the time being.
Snuggles and cuddles are on the program, one can see that.
Why do we need a fucking war to be normal?
EU announces that suspects won’t be extradited to the US because of the death penalty. Great. Just great. Terrorists should be given a cozy cell for life. No, correction: a condo and a medal.
You EU suckers – have you forgotten who saved your sorry asses back in 1944/5? 400’000 American soldiers died for us then!
October 27, 2001
And the anti-smoking campaigns? What happened to them?
I thought smoking was so terribly unhealthy ... The sole reason for dying. The message was clear: If you don’t smoke, you live forever.
And now this. Gee.
Again: Why do we need a fucking war to be normal?
(I don’t smoke by the way. But I think the spirit of intolerance should go up in smoke and not come back.)
October 30, 2001
McCain is right: The terrorists don’t credit America with the toughness, ruthlessness and determination to win this war. They think America is a sissified nation. And over here many people think the same. Yesterday in Chur I saw a graffito that read: “USA – how many casualties are you ready to accept
after losing this war?”
Well, let’s teach them respect! It’s time. No second Vietnam!
America will be targeted again and again, if it fails to win this fight, however complex it may be. The weak are always targeted. And these guys interpret being human as being weak. They don’t know what compassion is.
I saw an Afghan father with his son on FOX recently; he said he would be proud, if his son died in battle!
This is WW I mentality; “Altar des Vaterlandes” – here we go again.
Does this fucking world have to learn everything the hard way? Do we have to bomb every single neanderthal on this planet to make him wake up? Every damn dog eater, every stupid father who thinks he owns his daughter?
Compassion is not weakness; it is an intrinsic human quality, the hallmark of civilization. Only barbarians can suppress their inner voice of compassion, their conscience.
Imagine being a hijacker, ready to do the job. And then a little girl on the plane smiles at you ...
Then being bribable is being human. And not being bribable makes you a sick bastard.
In other words: The most dangerous people are the ones who are not bribable. People who are so fanatical that they will stop at nothing.
October 31, 2001
We don’t need these guys. Life is complicated enough.
Earthquakes, floods, fires, droughts, diseases, accidents, giving birth, rearing children, interpersonal relationships, intersexual relationships, aging, death, burglars, abattoirs, avalanches, baldness ...
We don’t need these motherfuckers to give us more shit.
November 4, 2001
Bridges, tunnels, buildings, power plants – nice targets for suicidal mass murderers. Anywhere in the free world. All this makes life just great. Everywhere I go I have to be prepared for this kind of stuff now. And accept queues and delays because of road blocks and police checks.
This is just beautiful.
We are sitting here, afraid of traveling, worried about our loved ones – and they hide somewhere among us, like rats, in the sewers of our civilization, abusing our hospitality, our technology, our tolerance.
Maybe we should take the fight to their countries, their loved ones, their children. Maybe that would make them see what they are doing. They love to burn in effigy our democratically elected leaders, they love to cheer our enemies in the streets of their capitals – maybe we should pay every supporter of terror
a little visit, wherever they are. And if they are among us, we should not treat them like princes and princesses just because our birth rate is stagnant.
Guests who turn against their hosts are scum. These people would like to take what’s ours and make it theirs, just like that. Envy is their sole motive.
November 12, 2001
Quotation:
“Welche Art Islam sich durchsetzt, ist absehbar, wenn man das konzertierte Schweigen westlicher Intellektueller gegenüber islamischem Recht, wie es teilweise schon in islamischen Kreisen in Europa praktiziert wird [...], als Vorgeschmack nimmt. [...] Hat der Islam doch probate Mittel gegen den ‘Zerfall
der Familie’, zum Beispiel die Einsperrung von Frauen. Dies stört die christlichen Theologen nicht. Zwischen Verbrennung und Steinigung kann man sich durchaus einig werden. Das Mittelalter lebt!”
Gudrun Schwister-Schwan, NZZ Nr. 261/2001, p. 70
I couldn’t have said it better. And it takes guts to say such things today, in this country, in the face of our sick laws (“Rassismus-Strafnorm”).
In our country (!) animals’ rights activists have recently been sent to jail for criticizing kosher butchering – a barbaric way of slaughtering animals.
December 11, 2001
Smug professorial morons one sees these days on FOX, nice and cozy in their living rooms, with impressive bookshelves behind them, saying stupid shit like military tribunals are not needed and will violate constitutional rights – what would they say, if their daughter or their son or their wife had been on one of those planes!
One doesn’t need erudition to be a fair judge of this; one needs passion. And compassion. And imagination. And, as a result of that, anger.
Personally I think of “a” guy on that plane, making his last phone call to his wife. And I think of “a” woman who fought with her guy and let him walk out on that morning of September 11 – never to see him again.
Her sense of guilt must simply kill her now.
January 15, 2002
Peace talks? Preemptive strikes!
Dialog? Drone attacks!
Motive debate? Martial law!
We did not mess with their world; they have thrown down the gauntlet. Now they must learn to mind their own business in the future. And to beg nicely, if they want our technologies, our standard of life, our software, our development plans, our irrigation systems, our planes, our cars, our TVs and mobile phones.
Salman Rushdi: The death warrant issued by religious leaders was the first instance of islamic barbarity. For that alone a nation should be ostracized for a minimum of 100 years.
Censorship is the first step towards barbarianism; inciting hatred against authors and artists is the last and should be treated as murder #1.
February 6, 2002
The Achilles’ heel of our civilization is the fact that we are “too civilized” to deal with maniacs. A trial and a prison cell – something that would destroy most of us – do not impress these people.
Only massive strikes would bring home our message. Unequivocal superiority.
This is our tragic predicament: Civilization, at its best, is respect for life. Tolerance. Humility. Socrates (“I only know one thing: that I know nothing”) and Voltaire (“Any fool can kill a fly, but the entire French Academy can’t bring a dead fly back to life”).
I say, to wrap this up: Rabid dogs have no raison d’être. And fools are fools. Anyone who gives up his life – the most precious thing we mortals have – for whatever cause is a fool. If he does no harm, he should be left in peace to find his peace. But if he does harm, then he and especially the seducers
and proselytizers behind him must be punished in a manner that is as archaic and antediluvian as their acts are.
And if we cannot do that – because we are “too civilized” to stoop to their level of barbarity –, we will be the laughingstock of the conquerors to come.
September 9, 2002
A cockroach.
I read him his rights. I get him an attorney. I notify his mother. And Amnesty International. And the Geneva Convention guys. And the French president.
Oh, yes. I do these things.
September 14, 2002
Putting a scratch on a Jaguar door, “9/11”, the French revolution, the Russian revolution, the Nazi revolution – the motive is always identical: envy, envy and envy again.
Pitiful losers who will never be good at anything crack. Sewer rats that want to be sun kings freak out. Barbarians destroy that which they could never create.
September 16, 2002
100 protesting cockroaches.
I give them a cushion. And a glass of milk. And a color TV. And a pension scheme.
Oh, yes. I do these things.
October 9, 2002
An American with a PhD from Princeton knocks America, Israel, Great Britain, the entire Occident: “We deserve the problem ...”
Well, I can think of lots of things Dr. Finkelstein deserves. But what can one do with such pathetic intellectual primadonnas? With the Marx, Engels, Brecht, Adorno etc.? By the time they are finally proven wrong by history they are usually dead and can’t be held accountable anymore for the rubbish they preached.
History is amoral; history books are about winners and losers. And introspection and self-doubt are the first step towards decline.
I don’t think a suicide bomber who blows up women and kids spends a lot of time worrying about moral issues.
March 28, 2003
“No wars! Never again wars!” – these are the slogans I hear every day now. The fools who utter them don’t seem to realize that this is an invitation to aggressors. These folks might as well proclaim: “The door of my house is always open, and my guard dogs are gone – I have goldfish
instead.”
Burglars and thieves and killers love hearing such things ...
March 31, 2003
American hubris, American stupidity, American arrogance – these are the headlines of the gutter press these days. Bush is stupid, Bush is a cowboy, Bush can’t read ... God almighty.
The only stupidity here is in the heads of the people who write such crap.
Trying to pacify any of these Middle Eastern hellholes is a gigantic task; tackling it is nevertheless necessary and far from stupid. The Yanks are doers, and we are whiners. We talk about problems, America solves them – for us too. Here is a good analogy: Europe is like a psychiatric patient who spends the day analyzing
his defecation and wondering whether metabolism is good or bad; America flushes the toilet and goes on to the next thing.
Simplicity is wisdom. All brilliant men are brilliant simplifiers. There is no better method of dealing with complexity. Simpletons, on the other hand, are people who cannot cope with complexity.
May 13, 2003
For almost a hundred years we had to deal with Marxism-Leninism, the stupidest ideology of all times, and some incorrigible hard-core apologists have still not given up.
But are we free now? Wiser? Has the world gone beyond stupidity now?
It has not. Now we have to deal with religious fanaticism. Probably for the next hundred years.
We are no further than Voltaire. Now, today. This is so pathetic. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.
June 6, 2003
War crime charges against Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, Sharon ... in Switzerland! Our laws have obviously gone nuts. The arrogance of the legal crowd has reached pathological heights. Who the fuck do these people think they are! How dare they even think of indicting democratically elected representatives of the free world!
They ought to be disbarred. They might as well say Churchill was a war criminal because he bombed Germany ...
What about Saddam, a guy who ruthlessly decimated his own people while he was in power? Should he get the Nobel prize? And a Dr. h. c.?
Oct. 22, 2003
Motive debates on end. Is terrorism caused by poverty? Is terrorism caused by religion? Is terrorism caused by stupidity?
You know what? I don’t give a shit. I think we should regard this as an epidemiological problem. And take the steps we normally take in such cases.
In the case of the bubonic plague bacterium we don’t spend a lot of time wondering what background these little guys might have and why they want our lives.
We just fight.
August 17, 2004
Today the NZZ, my beloved newspaper, announced a change for the worse (as usual) regarding the Swiss “Rassismus-Strafnorm”.
As I wrote here two years ago this law is a typical wrong law. Now it is even more wrong. If you say things like “Islam sucks”, you can be fined, unless you are saying it in strict privacy.
Thank you, Swiss lawmakers! I have been waiting for this!
On islamist websites I can watch movies of “infidels” (= guys like me) being decapitated. If I criticize this as being barbaric, I am a racist in this country.
March 15, 2005
In today’s NZZ I read that a politician sued a journalist for saying that terrorism is an intrinsic problem of islam.
The charge was dropped. But I am speechless all the same. How is this possible! How stupid can politicians be! How stupid can our politicians be!
I am waiting for the day I am sued for saying “The sky is blue”. That day will come, no doubt. In a rogue state everything is possible.
February 14, 2013
If it’s so nice up there, why don’t the “spiritual leaders” blow up their own asses? |
