----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Kaplan" <view@xxxxxxxx>
> brians asks
>
> > why is (terrorism) able to defeat designed systems so well?
>
> 'terrorism' is embedded in 'designed systems'.
>
> when i lived in israel, there was an unspoken though implicit
> satisfaction every time a 'terrorist' bomb went off in a bus station.
> each 'terrorist' event was further validation of official terrorism.
>
old revolutionaries would be called terrorist, now, as would french revolutionaires or bostonian tea drinkers...
and actually Arafat, or Ben Gourion, before beeing considered heroes by their peers, began as terrorists. Against athletes in Munich or colonisators in the 1948's pre-israelian palestine.
Tchechens , once, were quite considered anti communist russia "heroes", but as Russian totalitarism was replaced by a pseudo putsieniesky democracy more acceptable to western democrats, they became considered terrorists...
Talibans were , once, "anti communist russia heroes" ,helped by the father of Dubya... and became terrorist later on,
Verdi's Aida, do you remember ?
O tempora, o morae... the point for terrorist or revolutionaries is to win their war... after that, they could became heroes.
Many revolutionnaries, like the mexico's Emiliano Zapata, or Pancho Villa, are considered heroes, when actually they really and frecuently acted as salvages and terrorists...
Was Rosa Luxembourg, in Berlin after WW 1, an heroe or a terrorist ?.
Daniel Cohn Bendit , after the 68 in Paris, was exiled and now is a kind of nostalgic heroe there...
The German invasors during WW1 in Belgium left a very bad impression, so for my great mother to prefer the ww2 ...
and btw are our social systems so perfectly well designed , if i must suppose design is supposedly considered as " positive " ? then are they including a designed terror - ism of any kind ? and always ? certainly not.
but a perfectly well designed terror is possible, considering the PolPot regime as a brutal example.
Pol pot was a politic leader, head of a nation.
Usama Bin Ladden is the pseudomoral (for westerners...) leader of an idea some of his followers use as the motivation or basic concept of their fight against another way of life. He has no country he really represents except an idea, ( just like Bolivar centuries ago,,, ).
If he was the head of a country, like Saddam was for decades, western world would have made business with him like he does with other tyrans or terrorist regimes, like argentine or chile in the 70s, or Franco's Spain , (neutral?) during ww2..., Khadafi more recently, or Tian an men's China... a.s.o.
A report on POV on Pbs a few weeks ago showed a kind of smart or sweet (?) terror used by some elite troopers raiding irakian homes by night... but of course some homes are the nests of terrorist bombing Abrams tanks by surprise...
uniformed and organized military don't like bad surprises, un-uniformed (?) civilian clothed terrorists use those are their sole and most effective weapon.
And some Us special troops in Afghanistan act also "un-uniformed" to become more efficient, therefore civilian "Médecins sans frontières" went out, for beeing confused and targeted as " apparent terrorists" or un-uniformed .Us special troops by the local "terrorists"...
Try to understand that...
Patrick
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