“Re: RE: Bush, Iraq, al Qaeda, WMD, Terrorism, etc., etc., etc.”

"Brian Carnell" <brian@carnell.com> wrote in message news:Conversant-74082@truerwords.net... > The comparison with China is important, but there is a major difference > that also occurred with the Soviet Union. China and the USSR had an > ideology that was secular but non-capitalist and which they followed -- > they claimed -- because it would bring the greatest good to the greatest > number of people. It took them decades to do so, but eventually people > in leadership positions in both countries recognized that Communism had > been a failure at delivering on that and that if the only way to avoid > civil war without going completely totalitarian was to open up the > country's economic systems. Once that happened, the political changes > follow (more slowly in China than in the USSR, but clearly China is not > the threat to the U.S. that it was in the 1960s, and the threat level > keeps diminishing -- the major contention between the U.S. and China > today is Taiwan, not whether China is supporting Third World revolutions).

Excellent summary.

> But in Muslim countries we have an extremist ideology that has > established spiritual purity, not economic success, as the standard.

It's just boggling how disconnected these countries have kept themselves from western culture. One thing that concerns me lately is how poorly the western countries are at articulating larger social issues. Things we take for granted (rule of law, voting rights, etc) have significance that's lost on our own citizens, not to mention utterly foreign to those never having benefitted from them for themselves. It's almost as if there was a time (here in the US anyway) that it was possible to articulate these messages such that they empowered the people to live up to them. Now the public has gotten itself so utterly divorced from those ideals that it's become "unmarketable" to pitch them. Thus the failure to pitch them, Thomas Paine-style, to the masses in the middle east. It's almost as if the need to educate these populations is equally matched in the west, if for different reasons. One to project hope and the other to appreciate it's bounty.

I'm not claiming economic success as a superior to spiritual purity. But the style of 'purity' being practiced hardly seems so. In this measure it seems they're matched in hypocrisy. False piety and rampant greed seem to be running a neck-and-neck race.

Or something like that.

-Bill Kearney