Good ol’ Major Rucker – trying is best to get people to stop killing each other. We could use people like him here in the Real World.
Naturally, I’m referring to the atrocities committed in Paris this week, and all the follow-on from that. I think it’s basically global news, now, of course, with a lot of soul-searching and navel-gazing and censorship and pro- and anti-religious propaganda on all sides because of the overtones of fundamentalism to the whole thing. And naturally, I find it personally upsetting, given that it was a strike at cartoonists, and, you know, I’m a cartoonist, myself. And also, the French are, to use an expression culled from English, “les Nôtres.” They’re “our guys,” our sister republic, a nation born in the same spirit of revolutionary democratic fervor that has since swept the civilized world. And although it’s a sort of cliché that Americans like to take pot shots at the French and their way of doing things, it’s no exaggeration to say that there would be no America without France. Their soldiers supported us, their fleet protected us, their ideas inspired us, and their diplomats laid the groundwork for our peace, trade, and eventual alliance with the British and Canadians, which allowed us all to overcome the fascists in the last War. So when someone attacks France, it feels very personal. At least, it does to me. And I mention the fascists for a reason, by the way, because when you lay aside all the religious nonsense, the perpetrators of the attacks on France were really just a bunch of fascists. Actually, if you take note of the real heroes of the mess in France, many of them were moslems themselves. So the whole thing about Islam is utterly irrelevant – we’re dealing with fascists, here, plain and simple.
Americans, being a hot-headed and reactionary kind of people, as new-world provincials like us are wont to be, have an instinct to strike back with maximum force when someone screws with our friends. A lot of people are going to be making sweeping statements about moslems and drawing pictures of Mohammed just to spite these guys, but that, it seems to me, is just part of the trap. The whole point is to provoke the civilized world into further reactionary acts of violence or repression or so-called “provocation,” so that our enemies can point to it and claim that it’s our own intolerance that forces them to do what they do. The truth is that you can’t stop this kind of thing from happening in a free society like we have in the West, any more than you can stop a bomb from falling once it’s left an airplane. That’s because these attacks aren’t really crimes, they’re more like bombs dropping in the Blitz, and the perpetrators are really just weapons themselves, tools of their own ruling class filled up with empty rhetoric and worked up into a kind of insanity, and who didn’t realize until it was too late that they were just being used.
But for all the bombs that fell in the War, liberty still prevailed. And for all the attacks we have seen and will see, that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back in other ways. Some people have proposed that everyone do something offensive to moslems just to “get back” at the enemy, but that just seems childish and pointless to me. I have no interest in insulting people just because I have the right to do it. And I’m not going to buy or display a copy of Charlie Hebdo, because I don’t really have any interest in it. Nor am I naive or pretentious enough to believe that anything I’m doing with my art is having any kind of broad social effect, or that I’m making any kind of major cultural impact, because that’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m just here to entertain people who happen to like what I have to offer, and in the end, that’s the role I have to play in all of this. My method of retaliation is not to be baited or intimidated into doing anything other than what I was going to do anyway. If I’m to be a soldier in all of this, then my art is my weapon, and my enemy is fear. We may lose the battle, but I remain confident that we’re going to win the war.
Solidarité, mes camarades.
Major Thomas Rucker is my favorite kind of soldier: skilled, flawed, and sympathetic while trying to do the right thing.
Also, good points all around on the war.
Thanks! I like Maj. Rucker, too. He’s the kind of guy you want as a soldier.
I wholeheartedly agree.
In Romania, we are also very close to the French, because they’re fellow Latins and because a lot of our intelligentsia has been educated in France.
Even during the Communist period, we had strong cultural and economic ties with them, which continues to this day – this is why, for example, the workhorse helicopter of the Romanian Air Force is the French “Puma” and why, last year, my comrades and I presented arms to the French President, in Paris, on Bastille Day.
Also, I grew up on French comics, I have a number of French cartoonist friends, so this is especially upsetting for me, on a very personal level.
I also agree that the religion of the perpetrators is pretty irrelevant in this case. The ones responsible did it because they were extremists, not because they were Muslims. In the end, all extremis are alike, be they Christian, Muslim, Jews, Buddhists – the latter, is, I believe, the religion that most strongly advocates peace, and yet, in Burma, hundreds of Muslims have been massacred in the last three years at the hand of Buddhist mobs for no other reason than the fact they were Muslim.
There is really no way to prevent this thing from happening again, not in a free country, as you very well point out, but ultimately, I think that terrorism is doomed to fail when it comes to achieving any sort of meaningful strategic goals and I hope, that, sooner or later, the ones responsible are going to realise it as well.
After all, what is the purpose of terrorism? To demoralise your opponent, right?
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the demoralising part works if you’re a guerilla dealing blows against an occupying army, because they know they aren’t wanted here and most of that army would like to go home to their loved ones, but it’s monumentally stupid to think you could ever demoralise a population by striking at them in the middle of their homeland.
After all, any operations you mount are limited in both scope and number by your logistics, so that means your attacks will be few and far between.
Ideal not for sowing panic, but for strengthening their resolve against you and for turning away potential allies from your cause, sowing dissent into your own camp as well as angering any remaining neutral parties.
Besides, when it comes to “sapping their resolve”, the Germans have tried that during the Blitz and the Allies have tried it on Germany and on Japan during the latter stages of the war, and, in both cases, the effects were of strengthening resistance, not of demoralising – and we’re talking here of hundreds of airplanes raining down tons of high explosives, day in and day out, with thousands upon thousands of casualties.
If that level of horror doesn’t work for sapping morale, why do they thing killing a few people every few months will do it? It’s mind-boggling.
Sure, you might say it’s not about sapping the enemy’s morale, but about raising your own, but that doesn’t work if the people you’re striking against aren’t also actively doing something against you in your own lands – there are a lot more people, even on your side, who are going to perceive you as exactly what you are, a lowlife terrorist, rather than the intrepid freedom fighter you’re trying to pose as, and that works against you as well.
Doubly if you’re also engaged in repression against your own in those particular lands, because, if your people already hate you, pissing off everybody else just because you can is tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot.
I think it’s at the point where violence is trying to be its own justification. The religious nonsense is just words. I’m not smart enough to know what the outcome of all if this will be, I’m sure, but I doubt there can be a resolution to this based on sensible or humane means. I don’t think its possible to come to an understanding with people who deny that you are a person who has a right to exist. My best hope, to paraphrase Einstein, is that at the end of this whole disaster, with God’s benevolent help, they will largely kill each other off. In the meantime, it’s on all of us to continue to behave like we live in a free world, so that something of our traditions in the West makes it to the next generation.
So I wasn’t the only one to see the parallels between recent events and the raise of fascism in Europe 80-some years ago! I was just telling an acquaintance about a certain Romanian movie (based on real events) that’s painfully relevant again, all of a sudden. And it occurred to me that all those people who died in WW2 would be really angry with the world right now.
I guess all we can do is keep creating. But that doesn’t feel like much these days.
The religious stuff is just nonsense. It happens to be expedient for this particular crop of fascists to cloak themselves in it, in order to gain followers from a particular population with an unaddressed sense of grievance latent in their society. But it fits like a glove: the pattern of violence, opportunism, self-contradiction and internal inconsistency, institutionalized terror, slavery and master-race politics, pervasive government-and-leader worship, a basement of the individual I’m the face of mass movements.
In these high-profile cases it’s less about demoralizing the enemy and more about showing your supporters that you’re doing something. It’s a PR move. The more they do this, the more funding they get.
I’m not even sure it has as much sense as that. to a fascist (or anyone committed to a mass movement, frankly) the goal is only a vague idea, and the bigger thing is to get swept up in the euphoria of momentary power and personal attention. The PR value is just hay the ruling class is trying to make out of it after the fact.
I’d agree for the most part, but this is Daesh we’re talking about. They’re the most media- and business-savvy of these outfits so far by a few orders of magnitude.
They do it, because in their mind, it is right. They are encouraged to think this, and its heavily reinforced.
Then there are others. The ones who are forced into the fight, by the threat of violence, torture, or murder of family/relatives until they comply.
You must forgive me for being out of touch with the news these days. I am just now reading about this incident. I am saddened this has happened and frankly wish it would stop.
I doubt that. Even killing in exigency circumstances feels wrong and damaging to a psychologically adjusted person. These people behaved like sociopaths. I think they knew it was wrong but whipped up a kind of frenzy in their minds to cover it up. I don’t for a second believe that they thought it was right. I think they were gripped by a kind of self-imposed insanity.
There are all kinds I’m afraid.
Yeah stop shooting in a fire fight sounds like a real good idea Rucker!
I hope he has something up his sleeve.
white flag = death
We have nothing to fear but fear itself, eh?
It may be a conceit, but it’s a healthy on, I think.
“We Germans fear God, but nothing else in the world; and it is the fear of God, which lets us love and foster peace.” OvB.