Choices

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Life always offers choices.  History has shown that humans almost always
make the wrong choices.
On the choice between war or peace, war always get chosen.  Having
fought wars to end all wars twice
in the last century to make the world safe for Western civilization, we
now have a new war on terrorism
which many in the West view as a clash of civilizations. It is amazing
that those who promotes economic globalization are among the loudest
advocates of a clash of civilizations.  To my view, there is a global
civilization that is molded from many strands.  The American ideal,
though yet far from reality, of a cultural melting pot of immigrants, is
a living testimony to a budding world civilization.  New York is the
heart of such an ideal.  Any city without ethnic enclaves cannot
possibly be an interesting world city.

There is a common thread running through three of the world's dominant
religions: Judaism, Christianity
and Islam.  Judaism is dominant because its religious concepts form the
root of the other two religions.
Christianity is dominant because it saved Roman imperial culture and
extended its life for two millenia.
Islam is dominant because it is the religion of over one billion
believers. That common thread is
communal communism.  The Jews led by Moses saw communal socialism as the
ideological tool and
successfully employed God-assisted terrorism as a tactic tool against
Egyptian oppression.  The early
Christians were communists until Constantine co-opted their religion to
serve the empire.
Throughout its long history, the Christian Church faced continuous
internal conflict betweem clerical
hierachy and theological equalitarianism, bewteen eccesiastical order
and grassroot piety.  Even today,
the Pope is forced into a race to keep pace with the faithful in the
Third World on condamning
globalization and the excesses of finance capitalism. Communism is not
alone in its crtique of capitalism.

Prostestaniam began as a protest against the corruptions of the imperial
Church.  Both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation agreed on
Church corruption.  But the Reformation blamed the patient for the
disease and turned to fundmentalist guidance based on individual
interpretation of the Bible, against Church dogma.  Protestanism gave
birth to capitalism against the land-based economy of the Church,
allying itself with the amibitious German princes against the Holy Roman
Empire, gaving modern nationalism a boost if not its birth.  Islam
believes that it is a religious duty of a believer to share his wealth
by practicing charity and that the purpose of wealth is to serve God,
not secular ambitions.

Capitalism in its success leaves a world with a rising disparity of
wealth both within nations and between nations.  Neo-liberals argue that
the overall standard of living has risen around the world under free
market capitalism.  That is generally true. Yet disparity of wealth and
well-being has been rising faster global growth.  A rising tide does not
raise all boats afterall.  For example, smallpox deaths a few centuries
ago were curses of nature, hitting both the rich and the poor.  The
advance of medicine has made death by smallpox among the Third World
poor a geo-political casaulty.

The Cold War was a conflict of two ideologies that in theory are not
even diametrically comptetitive opponents.  Since all people value
freedom and equality, the debate becomes one of definition.  The
capitalistic West defines freedom as political rights to be enjoyed only
by the property class, and asserts that economic equality is
economically counterproductive.  Systemically, all serious thinkers view
capitalism as a dialectic process towards socialism which is expected to
naturally evolve from an advance stage of capitalism.
The struggle between defenders of capitalism and advocates of socialism
tend to be one over the process of evolution vs revolution.  The
struggle is clouded by mutual charges, frequently justified, of inhumane
and oppressive excesses in both camps, often falling back on the
circular argument that such excesses are neccessitated by the excesses
of the opponent side.  It is increasingly obvious that capitalism,
because of its inherent nature, cannot possibly solve a host of critical
social problems, while socialism, for opposite reasons, cannot possibly
be as efficient in wealth creation.  Yet a good life requires a balance
of both material wealth and humane values.  In he larger context, the
existence of poverty anywhere is the system is a drag on the efficiency
of the system.

WWII was a war against Fascism, the enemy of both capitalism and
socialism.  Facism was nevertheless nurtured by capitalism as a antidose
for communism.  Fascism, once having taken hold of state power, turned
on both capitalistic democracies and communist states.  The Cold War for

five decades was a war to win the right to achieve freedom and equality
by revolution or evolution.  For
better or for worst, the evolutionists won.  The winners then
conviniently restrict freeedom only for the victors and proclaim
economic inequality as a natural way of life.  But the victory was
achieved with the help of Islam fundalmentalism, a sworn enemy of both
socialism and capitalism.  There is a tendency by the Western
establishment to label terrorism as the handiwork of a handful of
deranged individuals.  This enable the system to deny legitimate
collective discontent of the oppressed.  Hitler was as a mad man
relieves the Allies responsibility of the flawed Versailles Treaty.  O.
bin Laden as a deranged devil relieves the need to redress centuries of
Christian oppression on followers of other faiths and capitalistic
exploitation of the economically weak.  To add insult to injury, such
oppression and exploitation is hailed by the victor as proof of cultural
superiority in a new form of survival of the fittest.  Terrorism is an
extremist weapon, but extremism is a natural reaction to relentless and
persistent persecution.  It is the godchild of socio-political
desperation.  The Pope, as head of the Christian Church, has finally
apologized to the Jews for centuries of unjust persecution.
Civilization is still waiting for him to apologise to Islam.

The Jews are at once an example of human heroics and human tragedy.
They are a people relatively small in number whose will to survive
commands the respect and admiration of all.  They successfully resisted
cultural imperialism from their adopted societies.  They exert an
influence far disportionate to their numbers in intellectual, political
and economic arenas. The have been singled out for persecution more
regularly and more severely than any other minority group, except
perhaps the Blacks.  Unlike the Blacks who were and are oppressed
because of their inability to resist, the Jews were generally successful
members of society, but were targeted for very different socio-ploitical
reasons.  The tragedy is that after suffering from repeated and
relentless persecution, including the horrid Holocaust undr the Nazis,
and perhaps because of it, the Jews have developed a survival strategy
that at time moves them dangerously close in behavior to their
oppressors.  Also, to preserve their precarious security in their
adopted countries, to prove that Jews  are not dangerous to the greetaer
community, Jews often adopt zealous in-group persecutory pograms against
other Jews who deviate from mainstream values. McCarthyism in the US had
a large Jewish element in both the persecution camp and among the
trageted victims, merely to prove Jewish loyalty to America.
International Jewry has allowed itself to become an agent of
anti-communism in Superpower conflict in hope of two related benefits of
Western support for a Jewish state in the Mid East and disavowing heavy
Jewish involvement in the early development of socialist theory.  Judeo
fundamentalism thus forms a convenient alliance with Chritsan
fundamentalism against both Islam fundamentalism and communism.  Thi
syndrom has its historical roots.  Jews became hated in Europe because
they willingly became the tax collectors of European monarchs.  They
also became banker to Christian and Islamic capital which had been
forbdden by religous taboo to practise ursury. Thus they wre hated by
the victims of financial oppression as well as the beneficiary who can
vent their own guilt through self-righteous anti-semiticism.

Today, we have a world in which the extremism market fundamentalism,
Christain fundamentalism, Islam fundamentalism and Judeo fundamentalism
is endagering the future of human survival.

To view terrorism as deranged acts of fanatics is to turn the whole
world into an insane asylum.  The danger of the events of 9:11, 2001 is
that the destruction was beyond the wildest dream of the attackers who
never expected the level of damage to be so horrifying that no
self-respecting terrorist would dare to be associated with them.  Yet
the response by the victim government runs the danger of being such that
a new level of terror would be institutionalized.  After 9:11, terrorism
is no long minor destructions for maximum publicity, but takes on
para-military characteristic of organized warfare with the objective of
not merely drawing world attention to grievances, or appealling to the
world's innate sense of justice, but with the aim of destabllizing or
destroying the target system.  In other words, a duel to the dead on its
own terms, not a means to a political end.  In this age of widespread
technology and easy access to weapons of mass destruction, such a war
will bring destruction to human civilization.  It is not a clash of
civilization. It is a mad rush to destroy it.

Zane people of world must wake up to this danger and set the world on a
different, constructive course.
We must stop the war on terrorism, and start constructing a deterence
against terrorism.

Henry C.K. Liu



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