This post was prompted as a comment to the Daily Beast article linked below
See the Documentary "Dirty Wars"
You have to wonder at the contrast between what people like General Flynn indicates here, and what you learn in the above documentary. In the latter you are exposed to just how open ended, and self perpetuating, Special Operations have become as a part of American Foreign Policy. Questionable drone surveillance, ever expanding lists of individuals linked to other individuals merely by being seen in proximity, if not also in actual conversation. A lot of people are being killed and we have no real idea of whether they deserved it or not, any more than if those that did deserve it have served the purpose their death was supposed to serve. The lists just keep growing.
We had the same kind of vehement outcry of supposed weakness to adherents to Communist ideology from the late fifties to the mid eighties, and whether you believe it alone brought down the Soviet Union or not, it certainly caused us a great deal of counter productive outcomes. So much so that you have to wonder how much more trouble we would be in today if we had simply worked around Communist governments as opposed to overt programs of subversion. After all, couldn't a major part of the "destabilization as a way of life" in Central America, Africa, Southeast Asia, as well significant parts of Eastern Europe, been avoided otherwise? Or, at the very least, our being seen as so culpable for so much of it?
I don't doubt that there is a real possibility that extreme religious groups could pose a serious threat to world peace. How we go about addressing that threat, however, needs to be seen as the very complex question it is. Just as poverty, in conjunction with corruption and the absolutely immoral distribution of resources, led may groups in a desperate search for alternative forms of social organization, so too do the bunching up of belief systems in close proximity, both physically and perceptually, cause people to react to various degrees of opposing horror; each seeing in the other blasphemy or cruel barbarity. Made all the worse because each, in its own self righteous outrage, stoops to the kinds of violence they seek to stop.
Humanity has been here before and the only thing I can see that it resolved is that there is no lasting resolution. There is only the competition to see who can out butcher the other for whatever temporary respite might be gained before the next go around. And we have certainly been quite clever in that competition. Anyone still sane can only be made ill in contemplating where we might yet go with it.
If that weren't bad enough, there is added complexity in the fact that the West, and in particular, The United States, is weighted down with a social operating system that makes being able to even prioritize problems a nightmare, much less being able to address them properly. It is a system where information is a commodity and, as such, is horded. And when it is distributed one cannot be in any way sure of what was intended in allowing its release.
Then you add the horrible consequences of what being a part of a hyper consumptive, more people requiring more consumption for more jobs, kind of economy means. The dream machine environment to induce consumption in the first place, combined with the array of so many working at so much purpose in direct opposition to the needs, or purpose of not only their neighbors, but of the very complex physical systems we all live in.
Is there any wonder at all why so many social systems are either grid locked, inconsequential, or out right destructive, now?
All of this is to say that all of our problems are interlinked and interdependent. The days when we could solve one or another independently are long over. If we don't start talking honestly about all of them, and how they interrelate, we will solve none of them satisfactorily; however much we might wish otherwise.
The sooner we all realize this the better off we will all be.
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