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February 4, 2006

Cartoon Crisis

There is a certain cartoonish quality to the beginning of most of the great and terrible wars. The reason is simple, really: great and terrible wars erupt over great and terrible chasms of belief, understanding, and need, and it takes a long time for those chasms to grow; so in retrospect, the tiny incidents that are seen as the starting point of the great wars seem so trivial as to not merit mention.

World War II was an exception, because it was a calculated gamble by Hitler and another by Tojo: each believed that they could get what they wanted by war, without being meaningfully opposed. But WWI was started by the assassination of a middling royal in a nowhere place that no one had heard of or cared about. The American Civil War started because a minor and nearly forgotten garrison refused to abandon its post, as several other garrisons had already done in other places. The English Civil War started over the arrest of five members of Parliament. The Thirty Years' War started because 3 people were thrown out of a Prague window (they all survived). Some great wars start over insults, and others over misunderstandings, and still others over minor battles in out of the way places by peripheral players.

We may be at the point, now, where a great clash of civilizations begins over literal cartoons.

Posted by jeff at February 4, 2006 9:34 AM

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Comments

I think the cartoons are insulting and at the same time I would fight for the right to publish them-----there is no free press where there is no right to publish controversial material. This notion is lost on the Muslims--just as it is lost on the fundamentalist christians--- and they are both enemies of free speech---which is a basic value of our western civilization and the culmination of 2000 years of western development.
The basic fact is that muslim societies provide models of what we in the west aspire not to be.
Women as second class citizens, chopping your hand off for petty theft, jail time for any depiction of religious figures (depiction of religious figures is the foundation of western art!), dictatorship and theocracy, the rule of religious dogma over the rule of law. The fact is that muslim societies are at a point of development similar to that of Europe 700 years ago! Any insinuation of muslim culture into Europe
--unless it is the benign sufism---is a step backward to our common western civilization and must be resisted. The Danish cartoons have drawn a line between the two cultures-- and, as you can see, the mere drawing of the line is enough to cause a paroxism in the muslim world. Similar caricatures of Jesus might be considered offensive
by many Europeans-- but few would call for censorship--most everyone recognizes that free speech is fundamental.
The real enemy is fundamentalism and the muslim variety is particularly virulent and we must protect our hard won European freedoms against it.
To do anything else is the undermining of the fundamental character of our western civilization.
We must now all stick together in order to counter the challange and threat.

Posted by: Alice Weturska at February 4, 2006 9:32 PM

I say if they want war, they should get one but it shouldnt be a conventional warfare. let's nuke'em fast and furious. It should be like spraying useless pests in your garden

Posted by: Winston at February 4, 2006 11:53 PM

Well, the problem of course is that what you are advocating is genocide. It may come to that: I can see at least three routes by which we could end up at that point. (Nuclear terrorism, Iranian nuclear weapons development provoking Israeli nuclear attack, and radicalization of the entire Muslim world leading to vastly stepped-up terrorism) But I think it's fair to say that we should try to avoid genocide, rather than embracing it. The whole point of the American strategy is to pull the social rug out from under the terrorists, so that the problem goes away from lack of motivation on the enemy's side. I would rather that our strategy work, than that someone resort to nuclear genocide to solve the problem.

Posted by: Jeff Medcalf [TypeKey Profile Page] at February 5, 2006 8:33 AM