Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is credited with saying, after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the re-awakening of a sleeping giant.
The terrorists in the Middle East are not led by philosophy, history and the promise of universal peace and freedom. But are pious, unquestioning and often ignorant; making for a dangerous, if not lethal, combination when mixed with a religious Autocracy.
A part of me has sympathy for the plight of those people who become inducted into the terrorist’s regime. The same kind of sympathy for youth who become ensnared in gangs, or young men that become trapped in the mafia. The terrorists are zealots, but the fascist societies in which they are bred often offer little or no alternative.
When democracy is stamped out, people are left catering to the will of those in power in order to survive. In places like Afganistan, Iran, and China a human life is valued by servitude and obedience to the powerful.
September 11 reminds me that wherever democracy fails, people are enslaved. And people that are enslaved will have no access to unbiased history, freedom of speech, and freedom from opression. Slaves will submit to all manner of misfortunes opposed upon them so long as they believe they will remain alive; and will even submit themselves to death under the justification that it would have come to them sooner had they offered opposition.
9/11, and the many terrorist attacks before and since, are the flailings of backwards societies which are trying to survive in a world where information now seeps in to disrupt their monopolistic control of young minds.
Make no mistake, this is not about religion… it’s a struggle against freedom. It always has been.
if you’re not free, you’re a slave…said a slave.
There is no such thing as being “more” free. You are free, or you are not. And freedom can be stripped from you. People who are too naive to recognize this, of which there are a great many in the US, are lucky to be protected by those of us who do.
John
So if it is all about freedom, that does leave me to ask the question, are you not already free? How much more free do you need to be when your mind has evolved to believe that going to war for the wrong reasons – for lies in fact – and sacrificing so MANY of our own is in fact about freedom?