They shoot children, don't they?

[Rick Nebiolo]

I'm posting yesterday's Dennis Prager column titled: They shoot children, don't they (http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20040907.shtml) without comment, mostly just to see what you guys think /images/graemlins/wink.gif

~ Rick

[Zeno]

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind. – Voltaire

Fanaticism is a camouflage for cruelty. Fanatics are seldom humane, and those who sincerely dread cruelty will be slow to adapt to a fanatical creed. – Bertrand Russell

Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hated. –Bertrand Russell

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. - Thomas Jefferson



.

[NotReady]

Voltaire
[ QUOTE ]
Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances


[/ QUOTE ]

Neither Hitler, Stalin nor Mao, the three all time greatest butchers of history, not to mention Alexander,Napoleon,Ceasar(many of them),Saddam and Pol Pot, were genuinely religious, and none of their atrocities were done in the name of God or any religion.

Religious people are human. Humans are sinful. Some sinful religious people use religion as a cover. The atheists you cite were dishonest in trying to place the blame on religion. The blame falls on their humanity, not the fact they were religious.

What else could you expect from Voltaire and Russell? Russell's second quote is almost as moronic as his Why I Am Not a Christian.

There's no doubt militant Islam is the enemy. My understanding is that it is their goal to convert the world, and to kill those who will not convert. All the more reason to take them on in Iraq. The fact they're Islamic is incidental. Nazis wanted to do the same thing. Stalinists wanted to do the same thing.

[The once and future king]

Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hated. –Bertrand Russell

Its true that after 300 years of the rise of reason and rationality that this does not apply so much as it once did to Christianity. But in Christianitys hayday this comment would have been spot on.

P.S. Only a moron could call Russel a moron.

[NotReady]

[ QUOTE ]

Its true that after 300 years of the rise of reason and rationality that this does not apply so much as it once did to Christianity.

[/ QUOTE ]

It never applied to Christianity or any other religion or philosophy - read my post, it applies to humans.

I never called Russell a moron - he was clearly a genius in math, and not totally all wet in philosophy. I called his idiot book moronic, which it is. A freshman in high school could expain why.

[The once and future king]

Neither Hitler, Stalin nor Mao, the three all time greatest butchers of history, not to mention Alexander,Napoleon,Ceasar(many of them),Saddam and Pol Pot, were genuinely religious, and none of their atrocities were done in the name of God or any religion.

So dogma had nothing to do with :

9/11
Crusades
Inquisition
Witches being burnt
Gulags (Stalin)
Concentration Camps (Hitler)
Killing Fields (Pol Pot)

We can explain in your opinion all of those phenomenon with the observation that some humans are "bad".

Russel was taliking about DOGMA. Both religous and political systems can be dogmatic.

When they are dogmatic, Russels quote seems to sum up their qualities quite accurately.

Dont you think?

[NotReady]

From his quote it's clear Russell was refering to religious dogma.

If dogma is defined as that which is taken on authority, or a concept which cannot be justified through the reasoning process (discursive thought), then all humans must submit to dogma at some point - even Russell.

[ QUOTE ]

We can explain in your opinion all of those phenomenon with the observation that some humans are "bad".

[/ QUOTE ]

It's a good thing to expose false dogma such as anti-semitism or the statism of Stalin and Saddam, the unChristian beliefs and practices of the Inquisition AND where applicable, the Reformation. But doing so will not cure the fundamental human problem. The difficulty is not a lack of education.

[The once and future king]

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

"dogma

noun: an inflexible principle or set of principles laid down by an authority"

Next time I want to know what Russel was realy saying ill get back to you.

[Boris]

Rick, I had the same reaction at first. However, an Op-Ed piece in the WSJ lays the blame sqarely at the feet of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. I posted the Op-Ed yesterday in a post titled "Beslan Commentary". Scroll down and read please. The article was written by a member of the Hoover Institution, a right leaning think tank. There is more to this issue than simple Muslim fanaticism.

[Boris]

There is another excellent Op-Ed piece by Garry Kasparov in today's Wall Street Journal. He also blames Putin and advocates giving in to terrorist demands on Chechnya.

[andyfox]

Prager reduces everything to simple Muslim fanaticism. He harps on retail terrorism while ignoring wholesale terrorism that takes many more lives. The article you posted gives much greater perspective. Prager is not interested in perspective, only polemicism.

[B-Man]

[ QUOTE ]
There is another excellent Op-Ed piece by Garry Kasparov in today's Wall Street Journal. He also blames Putin and advocates giving in to terrorist demands on Chechnya.

[/ QUOTE ]

Do you think we should give in to Osama Bin Laden's demands?

Putin didn't kill those children, the terrorists killed them, and to place blame on anyone besides the terrorists is wrong.

[nicky g]

"Putin didn't kill those children"

No, he killed thousands of other children. But they don't matter because they weren't killed by "terrorists".

[Boris]

My impression is that Kasparov does not see a close parallel between bin-Laden and the Chechnya terrorists.

I do not advocate giving in to Osama bin-Laden's demands (whatever they are).

Did you read Kasparov's editorial? If what he says is true then to absolve Putin of blame is immoral as his current policies will lead to more innocent deaths with 100% certainty.

[Cyrus]

The atricle's writer is doing a poor service for his readership's education and illumination.

The issue of Chechen terrorism cannot be explained away as just another exporession of "Muslim terrorism" or "fanaticism". People do not understand that the Chechens are (how can I put it?) like "concentrated Gurkhas". They are the most tough warriors of the Caucasus, and that's saying a lot. The Russians have bungled one try after another to have a peaceful, confederate republic (or whatever regime they choose) in Chechnya - as they bungled things re Georgia, Armenia, and elsewhere. The result of Russian blundering has always been bloodshed.

Now, another circle of violence has began and we will witness tremendous atrocities in the area, you just wait. And no one will be the wiser. (Not Putin in the Kremlin, and certainly not the nincompoomps in Washington.)

[Abednego]

I wonder what it is about the Jews that these guys don't like.

[Rick Nebiolo]

[ QUOTE ]
There is another excellent Op-Ed piece by Garry Kasparov in today's Wall Street Journal. He also blames Putin and advocates giving in to terrorist demands on Chechnya.

[/ QUOTE ]

I was hoping you would post a link. Then I went looking for it to post it myself. It seems the Wall Street Journal online requires a fee, where the blog http://www.opinionjournal.com/ (the Wall Street Journal opinion blog) is free (I may have had to give my alternate email address at one point - I forget). Anyway, if someone can post a link I'd appreciate it.

Regards,

Rick

[Boris]

I'm a bad boy for doing this but oh well....

Putin Must Go

By GARRY KASPAROV
September 8, 2004; Page A18

When two Russian aircraft exploded in the air simultaneously two weeks ago there was no word about terrorism from President Vladimir Putin. When a suicide bomber blew up near a subway station in the center of Moscow a few days later, the Russian people again waited in vain to hear something from their president.

When the most horrifying terrorist act imaginable took the lives of hundreds of children in Beslan, in southern Russia, Mr. Putin had no choice: He had to speak, and speak he did. But what did he say? Mr. Putin's words, and the tone of his brief statement, were uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has lived under Soviet rule.

We can sum up his address as follows: 1) The U.S.S.R. was wonderful and we need to return to its methods. 2) Russian society is not ready for democracy and everyone must follow the lead of a central authority. 3) My personal image as a strong leader is more important than Russian lives.

In a democratic country, Mr. Putin's statement would have made an apt resignation speech. But there are no voluntary resignations in the Soviet vocabulary. During a crisis, Mr. Putin's true colors are revealed.

The language was all "we" and "they." No naming of names, no mention of accountability. "We were weak . . . . We need to improve defense," all this from a president who came to power on the issue of security and who has been in complete control of the country for five years.

During Mr. Putin's stay in office, spending on the military and security has increased steadily. In 2005 it will be the most in Russia's history, leaving only scraps for social security and schools. He also mentioned eliminating corruption, but he has only his own appointees and followers to accuse. It was Mr. Putin who resurrected the KGB monster to its "old glory," putting the agency's departments back under one command after Boris Yeltsin had wisely dismembered it. The five name changes the KGB has undergone in its history have not changed its nature.

Mr. Putin has harshly, if unintentionally, lambasted his own administration with his comments. The still-unsolved Moscow bombings in 1999 marked the beginning of his rule. Two years ago we suffered the Nord-Ost theater siege and parliament blocked an investigation. Now Mr. Putin says that any inquiry into Beslan would be turned into a political show and so he will conduct an internal investigation.

This lack of transparency and accountability means rewarding incompetence and repeating mistakes. Compare the American 9/11 Commission to what happened in Russia after the theater crisis. No one believes that the U.S. is now immune from terror, but it cannot be a coincidence that there have been no further attacks on U.S. soil after the relatively swift response of the Bush administration. The KGB policy of total secrecy is quite effective for harassing dissidents and jailing businessmen. It is tragically, fatally, ineffective when it comes to fighting terror.

After years of pretending that there was no crisis in Chechnya, it is now very hard for the government to admit that the inflamed North Caucasian province isn't becoming a utopia. What will it take for Mr. Putin to admit that Chechnya won't abide Kremlin-appointed leaders, especially while its villages are blown apart daily by the Russian military and Kremlin-backed bandits who are no different from the terrorists?

Mr. Putin got one thing half-right in his address when he said that other nations are demonstrating that effective counterterror measures can occur only when civil society supports the state. This should mean an open society in which faults are examined and the media can criticize the government. But Mr. Putin means quite the opposite, a Stalinistic society that backs the state unquestioningly. It is obvious that the state is already suffering from an increasingly severe case of "Soviet sickness."

There has been one high-level Moscow resignation in the early aftermath of the Beslan horror -- but just don't look inside the Kremlin's walls. The editor in chief of the prestigious newspaper Izvestia, Raf Shakirov, stepped down Monday. There was no comment from the paper's owner, an oligarch on good terms with the Kremlin, but there is little doubt that Izvestia's emotional coverage of the Beslan crisis angered the Putin regime and that Mr. Shakirov suffered the consequences. For a similar example, we need only look back two years to Nord-Ost, when NTV television's director lost his job after the Kremlin criticized their coverage of the crisis. That expulsion took several weeks; this time the chilling cycle required just 36 hours.

But the Kremlin wasn't too busy persecuting journalists to remember its most essential agenda: looting the dying oil giant Yukos. With the nation's attention focused on Beslan, the government raided the offices of the company's lawyer. I doubt a security service can chase terrorists while its arms are full of plunder. Mikhail Khodorkovsky of Yukos is in jail while the most famous Chechen warlord, Shamil Basayev, is on the loose.

It's possible Mr. Putin is simply confused on the entire issue of terrorism. His continuation of the longstanding Soviet backing of Yasser Arafat strips him of any credibility on the subject. The same could be said for any number of European leaders. Jacques Chirac has been quick to condemn American actions in Iraq and Israeli action on its borders. Yet he and Gerhard Schroeder are happy to stroll with Mr. Putin, ignoring Russian atrocities in Chechnya. On the same day the U.N. condemned Israel for military crimes in Jenin, it declined to do the same for Russia's crimes in Chechnya.

The prison abuses in Iraq must be punished, but the endless horrors of the Chechen prison camp of Chernokosovo make Abu Ghraib look like a one-star Soviet-era hotel. There is a fullscale genocide taking place and it is being endorsed by every member of the G-7 when they fail to condemn it. The West has written the Putin regime a blank moral check for the sake of stability. The cashing of that check at the expense of Russia's citizenry has left the leaders of the free world morally bankrupt. Russia is allowed into the G-7, an organization supposedly for the largest industrial democracies, when Russia is neither.

Another aspect of the Chechen conflict that merits attention is the relative lack of interest paid by the Muslim world. You would think an undeclared war by Christians against Muslims would merit the notice of Al-Jazeera. Despite Mr. Putin's attempts to lay blame on al Qaeda -- and so pretend he is fighting the same battle as the West -- the war in Chechnya is of his own making.

Mr. Kasparov, the world's leading chess player and chairman of the Free Choice 2008 Committee in Russia, is a contributing editor at the Journal.

[B-Man]

[ QUOTE ]
"Putin didn't kill those children"

No, he killed thousands of other children. But they don't matter because they weren't killed by "terrorists".

[/ QUOTE ]

If you disagree with Putin's policies, there are many ways of protesting without murdering hundreds of children, you smug bastard. This act was sickening and there is no possible justification for it. Introducing the bad acts of others is completely irrelevant. If you don't agree, you have no morals.

[andyfox]

While I don't agree with the chessplayer's assessment of what Mr. Putin said, I too was shocked by the unfocused illogic of Putin's statement. It was a rambling, confusing hotchpotch of nothings. Now I understand he has since said that Russia reserves the right to preemption anywhere in the world. The thought of these incompetents jumping off in whatever part of the world they see trouble is pretty scary.

[andyfox]

"his act was sickening and there is no possible justification for it. Introducing the bad acts of others is completely irrelevant."

I agree with the first sentence above. But not with the second. These people didn't just decide to do this because they had nothing else to do. While understanding that a special place in hell should be reserved for these people, it would be nice to try to understand why this happened so as to see what can be done to avoid another one happening again. Mr. Kasparov thinks Mr. Putin is the problem.

[nicky g]

"If you disagree with Putin's policies, there are many ways of protesting without murdering hundreds of children, you smug bastard. This act was sickening and there is no possible justification for it. "

I agree with this (apart from the smug bastard bit) and I didn;t suggest otherwise, althought the wording is disingenuous; one side are child killers, while Putin simply has "policies: - no mention of the tens of thousands of innocent victims of those policies.

"Introducing the bad acts of others is completely irrelevant. If you don't agree, you have no morals. "

Absurd. Of course one side's acts in a cycle of violence are relevant to the other side's, especially if that side has been brutalising and terrorising the other for years. Let's say people from village A go round to Village B and beat the villagers up once a week. After a while the villages from village B go round and cripple some innocents from village B. Were they justified? No. Did what they did have nothing to do with what was done to them? Of course it does.

[Chris Alger]

The better argument: if enough Americans take this kind of hypocritical, lying, racist drivel seriously, perhaps their children ought to be killed. Sort of the "self-defense, collateral damage" theory that right-wingers casually invoke when they get caught burning kids.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
This act [murdering hundreds of children] was sickening and there is no possible justification for it. Introducing the bad acts of others is completely irrelevant. If you don't agree, you have no morals.

[/ QUOTE ]
Unless, according to you, the child-killers are Israelis. After, Israel's sacred right to self-determine the Palestinians is being attacked, so surely a few hundred dead kids is worth it. Nothing like what's happening in Chechnya.

[dsm]

[ QUOTE ]
"Prager reduces everything to simple Muslim fanaticism."

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm sure most people (including Prager) would agree there are more considerations involved, but why entirely dismiss what he has to say just because he chooses to spotlight what he believes to be central to the cause? My god, it's only a six or seven-hundred word opinion-piece.

[ QUOTE ]
"He harps on retail terrorism while ignoring wholesale terrorism that takes many more lives."

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't entirely agree with this statement. You are right that he harps on retaliatory acts of violence to a great extent, but he often refers to large-scale acts of violence as well, though it's primarily during discussions with those who take issue with him on-air (example: the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland when Israel was established, or the massacre of thousands of Lebanese civilians at Sabra and Shatila. Of course he may phrase his reference to them differently than some, but none the less...). But for the most part I think you are right on this one.


[ QUOTE ]
"Prager is 'not' interested in perspective, only polemicism."

[/ QUOTE ]

"Not" is a little extreme, but definitely "less" than someone like Chomsky for sure.

As for his only being interested in controversy; IMO if his show were any less controversial, he'd probably end up with ratings as low as Ira Fistell's late night/once-a-week-only show (I'm sure I'm alone on this one, but I've been an Ira fan since I was a teen /images/graemlins/grin.gif ).