New York, 2001

F

or example, in the case of the attacks on New York in 2001, everybody’s first desire was for vengeance, not knowledge.

This is exactly the same reaction as the superstitious desire to

“attack” the demon that is causing epilepsy, rather than struggling to understand the root causes of epilepsy, and working to alleviate them.

If we refuse to understand the root causes of epilepsy

, but rather just attack the epileptics, anyone suffering from epilepsy will do anything he can to shield knowledge of his symptoms from everyone else. In the same way, the president of Iran can, with a straight face, say, “We have no homosexuals in our country.” Given that homosexuals are regularly tortured and killed in Iran, it hardly seems surprising that they would be a challenge to find.

When epileptics are attacked, and then the symptoms of epilepsy

mysteriously “vanish,” the attackers generally raise a cheer and toast their own effectiveness.

However, all these monsters have done is to make the study of epilepsy

highly dangerous. They have eliminated the “symptoms,” but their definition of epilepsy as an “evil possession” simply makes anyone who strives to understand it scientifically “evil” as well, and thus subject to attack.

In this way, not only do they merely eliminate the symptoms of epilepsy

, but they ensure that epilepsy will continue – and likely increase – by attacking anyone who displays the symptoms, as well as anyone who investigates those symptoms scientifically.

Just as refusing to investigate the aetiology of epilepsy

causes one to act in a way that does nothing to alleviate the problem of epilepsy, refusing to understand the root causes of “terrorist” attacks does nothing to alleviate the problems of violence.

If fact, it only makes those problems worse.

Empathizing with Vengeance

If we are attacked, it is generally very easy to understand why.

We are attacked for exactly the same reasons that we want to attack others.

When we want to go and bomb

Afghanistan after 9/11, we fully understand the mindset of the “terrorists” already.

To understand why people would want to fly planes into buildings, all we need to do is understand why we want to bomb

Afghanistan.

Since we want to bomb

Afghanistan because we have been attacked, we can then easily surmise that planes must have been flown into our buildings because we have attacked others.

It’s really not that complicated, and it takes an enormous amount of effort to avoid this simple and basic understanding.

The Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – serves us well here. “Others are doing to us as we have done to them.” (I use the word “we” here very loosely of course, referring rather to the foreign policy of the US government. Also, please note that I use the word “policy” here equally loosely, referring rather to its terrorist attacks on foreigners.)

To understand the

“terrorism” of foreigners, all we have to do is understand our own response to “terrorism.”

When

“terrorism” is inflicted upon us – paramilitary attacks without a declaration of war – we have a desire to lash out and murder others.

Thus since we wish to attack when we are murdered,

we must have been attacked because we have murdered

, since Muslims do not belong to another species, and human beings have similar reactions to similar stimuli.

How long does this take to figure out? Not very long at all.

A few minutes on the Internet will reveal a massive bombing campaign throughout Iraq in the 1990s, conducted by the British and American military, which resulted in the economic decimation of the middle class and the physical destruction through malnutrition and illness of upwards of half a million Iraqis.

Going further, it does not take very long to find out that the United States

has tens of thousands of troops stationed in Saudi Arabia – and it also does not take an enormous leap of imagination to understand how this must make certain Saudis feel, given that many Americans would doubtless find it highly objectionable to have Muslim nuclear weapons stationed outside Washington, pointed at the White House.

Also, the

US still occupies Japan, more than a half-century after conquering it, and has 700+ military bases throughout the world, and extracts billions of dollars from foreign governments to pay for these occupations – like any other criminal shakedown.

Going just a little bit further, it does not take very long to find out that

America subsidizes the Israeli military to the tune of several billion dollars a year. Regardless of how one views the division down the Gaza Strip and the creation of the occupied territories, it certainly is the case that America finances the oppression of Muslims through the Israeli occupation.

Given that America was founded through the violent overthrow of a foreign

“dictatorship,” it should not be hard for Americans to figure out that when you cause the deaths of those in another group by the hundreds of thousands – particularly children – and when you station “infidel” troops on the “holy land” of a highly volatile and superstitious gang of oil-rich thugs – and finally, when you subsidize a group that is viciously oppressing members of the same volatile gang – that reprisals, or “blowback,” will be inevitable.

Americans make up stories

about how the Muslims “hate us for our freedoms” – and then condemn Islamic societies for their lack of freedoms. When I ask Americans if they hate Islamic dictatorships – and they say, “yes” – when I then ask them why they are not out committing acts of terrorism against those Islamic dictatorships, they just stare at me blankly, as if I were insane.

In other words, the blatant conflict

between, “They attack us because they hate us in the abstract,” and, “I hate them in the abstract, but I would never attack them,” must be repressed, like all mythologies.

Hellish Reciprocity

If they come to kill us, and then we want to kill them, then logically

they must have come to kill us because we have already been killing them

.

If Americans stare around in bewilderment, asking

“Why do they hate us?” the first person to ask, of course, is the person who attacked them.

If I sit minding my own business in a restaurant and a man comes up and slaps me across the face, my first question would be:

“Why did you slap me?”

If the man says,

“Because

here

are the pictures of you sleeping with my wife!” then I cannot claim to be ignorant of why he has hit me. I may oppose his use of force or consider it an unjust response to my actions, but I cannot claim to be ignorant of his motives.

On the other hand, if the man says:

“I slapped you because you killed my entire family,” then any vengeance that I would take would seem wildly unjust to everyone else, since the wrong I had done this man far outstripped the wrong he had done me in return.

People always ignore, repress or bypass questions for which they already have answers that they do not like, or which do not serve their needs.

If the man in the restaurant slaps me, I can only take vengeance upon him if I claim that I have never done anything to harm him.

If he claims that his slap was a retaliation for my far more grievous attack upon his family

, then I must not respond to that accusation in any way – neither to deny nor affirm – but must continue to protest my complete ignorance as to his motives for attacking me.

Only by ignoring

his

motives can I justify

my

vengeance.

In the case of the September attacks, this

“bewilderment” reached truly ridiculous proportions. The man who claimed to be behind the attacks openly stated that his three reasons for attacking America were exactly those described above – the US occupation of Saudi Arabia, the funding of Israel, and the blockade of Iraq,

He repeated over and over that his attack was a retaliation for the far more egregious American attacks upon his fellow Muslims.

Yet still Americans claimed that they had “no idea” why they were so hated – or, that they were hated for their “virtues” – which is even more offensive and provocative.

If a man rapes a woman and then claims that she is fabricating charges against him, because he is just so

“wonderful and loving,” then he is egregiously and provocatively adding insult to injury. By claiming that she is reacting in rage and hatred to his benevolence, love and virtue, he is not only rejecting the fact that he brutalized her sexually, but he is also claiming that she is emotionally corrupt and viciously anti-virtue.

Backup Lies

Of course, after the mythology of “we have no idea why we were attacked” is invented, a secondary mythology must also be created, in order to protect the first.

As described earlier, false cause-and-effect

“relationships” such as “

sacrificing a goat = good rains

” must always be defended through the use of emotional and/or physical brutality.

After the September attacks, the backup mythology

– the “thug” story – was that any attempt to understand the root causes of the attacks could only be motivated by sympathy for the attackers, and a desire to justify their murders.

This is all pure, vicious nonsense – the direct equivalent of accusing an oncologist who studies how to prevent a recurrence of cancer

of being a big fan of the cancer you already have.

Clearly, someone who wishes to get to the root causes of an affliction cannot

“cure” those who already

have

that affliction, any more than an anti-smoking campaign can reverse lung cancer.

It is precisely

because

lung cancer is largely irreversible that prevention is far more valuable than attempting a “cure.”