You cannot kill an idea

[Az]

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. My laser emits a beam of pure antimatter.

[Az]

3. That image is so familiar

But I can't quite place it.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

4. That's Hamilton, New Zealad.

Oh, you mean the character? Riff Raff, from Rocky Horror Picture Show.

[Az]

7. Doh!

I knew I knew it. Damn... all those years of attending the movie all a blur now.

[Rude Horner]

2. Just like you can't defeat a tactic

ie - the "War on Terror". You can't defeat terror. It would be like a war on grumpiness.

[Az]

Exactly the point

And in the case of terrorism the idea of using military might to squash it is just mind numbingly insane. Each person you kill in your pursuit of eradicating terror generates an entire family of people angry at you and left feeling helpless in the face of our might. Their only recourse becomes using terrorism to strike back at you.

[bryant69]

5. Sure you can

Everything dies. Entropy always increases.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Az]

6. Pffff

Curse you and your demon science! :hide:

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. But you can strip it of its effectivity to the point of non-existence

Ideas are something like viruses. Smallpox is technically "still around," but its capacity to affect people is greatly diminished, almost to the point of its non-existence. This does, in fact, happen to ideas all the time. Whether an idea is "alive" or "dead" is therefore inconsequential - a nice little conceit on the part of the writers, but ultimately meaningless in practice. Ideas require the capacity to "infect a host," to keep the metaphor running, and that capacity CAN be attenuated. An idea without its corresponding wetware is "dead" for all practical purposes.

(Just as a note, this is what Nietzsche meant when he said "God if dead." He was not, obviously, referring to an actually existing God who had somehow "died." Rather, he was referring to the "idea" or concept of God as it circulated and affected society and thought in "pre-Enlightenment" Europe. So, the "idea" of God as foundation for, say, ontological and ethical claims had "died" - it had lost its capacity to affect society and thought in the same way it had in the past)

[Az]

9. Agreed

But in the case of our so called war on terror the idea we are supposedly fighting is reinforced by the actual act of violently fighting it with superior force.

Terrorism is the resort of people that are unable to counter force aimed at them through similar means. It is typically the actions of those over matched by the military force of a larger group. Might does not make right. Just because we can crush their military does not mean the people being defended by that military lay down their ideals and give up. They will struggle to survive. By any means necessary.

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. These "ideas" are actually quite young, and extremely mutable

People forget that as recently as 35 years ago, leftists and labor factions across Europe routinely assumed that coalition or some connection with armed factions was a necessary feature of resistance to State power, and that terrorism and other violent confrontations with what they called the "State Apparatus" was also a viable political strategy, and even a necessary one. Every labor union and movement group had a militant arm, and these were embraced and encouraged, if privately. Today, even masked anarchists resisting obvious state violence or merely acting as vandals are decried and condemned across the "respectable" Left, and assumed to be "agent provocateurs," or some other nonsense. In the big scheme of things, there has been a rather rapid transformation in "tactics" (which is to say, ideas), or rather, a fairly rapid collapse of direct physical resistance to the State Apparatus (together with a corresponding collapse of various state forms).

Similarly, if we set aside the usual nonsense about Islamic extremism being "thousands of years old" and examine the specific form of extremism and tactics employed by al Qaeda and its various surrogates, we find that the "ideas" - both in terms of the specific ways radical Islamic teaching are allied with political goals and processes, and in terms of actual tactics to achieve those goals - are very recent indeed. Radical Islamic practice of the kind seen in Iran is no more than 40 years old historically, and the version of Sunnism that grounds the al Qaeda project is even younger than that. These are specific graftings of Islamic teaching with political postures arising from decolonization (or post-colonial power structures). The tactics employed by al Qaeda, moreover, are even younger than that: with some minor exceptions, "Islamic" terrorism of the 1970's and 1980's has a much closer connection to leftist terrorism in Europe during that time period than it does to the al Qaeda attacks of the 90's-00's. The Munich Olympic attack, for example, or, say, the various hijackings of the 1980's, look like they could as easily have been orchestrated by the Beider Meinhof Gang or the Brigada Rosa as by the PLO. THAT variant was largely political without the corresponding religious flavor, so it generally didn't include, say, suicide bombings etc. These only emerge in the late 1980's (mainly after the the defeat of the first Intifada, with a few exceptions), and correspond to the extremely dangerous configuration of Wahabi teachings with the pan-Arab political project. The point here is simple: these ideas are NEW. Many commentators have noted that they seem to be a direct response to capitalist globalization of the sort only really operative since the early 1970's (after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, for instance). It is at our peril that we imagine them to be "as old as the hills," as some have tried to paint it, or that we face a thousand years war, or other such nonsense.

Before you can "kill" an idea, you have to understand its life cycle. That's where we're stuck right now.