The following is an excerpt of the front article appeared in a Spanish Newspaper (ABC Sept 21). I beg both the author (Cándido) and the readers their pardon if I miss with the synthesis or translation:
Arabs are men that invented trigonometry, included algebra in Maths science, or built the first Astronomy Observartory. Meanwhile, europeans searched for the Philosopher's Stone and replaced spiritualism with superstition. Arab Nation's greatness was based in placing reason and work in the first place, instead of fatalism & inspiration. These last aspects destroy willingness and conscience, suppresses liberty and wipe out dignity by taking away responsibility. Muslim fatalism provides with no options and transform the struggle against it in a struggle against a machine. That's what desacralized western countries are facing. After NY blast, there is no doubt terrorism is one of the greatest dangers in today's world.
Intellectuals' approach to this problem tends to focus on the deep motivations of the problem. And there's always a moment where their desire of understanding things leads to confussion. Their consistent perception of themselves as the mirror where the average people should look into and their repugnancy about "specialist's" barbarism (politicians, technicians, military, etc.) leads them to transforming their general ideas about events into the ultimate causes of them. They ellaborate a theory fiting their moral system, and give it to the crowd as if it was the Kingdom's keys.
Unfortunately, problems are never universal, but specific, and qualitative explanations do not solve them. Discussing the moral substrate of atomic knowledge did not avoid Hiroshima. What scientists got in terms of human progress was different from what they thought they would get in intellectual/moral terms. And this example is a cornerstone in understanding current situation.
It's fundamentally wrong that ellaboration and dialog will stop terrorism. It's more true that facts ar not ellaborated, and their factual nature lies in their unellaborated character. The horror that this nameless aggression stirs up in the U.S.A. is an aggression not to certain (could be historically isolated) ideological or social structures, but an aggression on the basic structures of human society.
In this context, no further significance to be found in the terror action than the action itself. Focusing on previous events trying to find the historic, political or social reasons to the crime is only an ellaboration that falsifies the fact of the terror action. Terrorism has nothing to do with the social or historical system where it lives and breed from time to time. There is no system beyond terrorism. Terrorism is the system itself. That system has to be isolated and destroyed, previous any discussion that connects the terrorist fact with the reasons that try to explain it. With regards to U.S. tragedy, no intellectual ellaboration (usually reduced to transfer the responsibilty from the culprit to the victim) that might obscure evidences about what's happened should weight a fulminant action.
We should not, we must not, do is looking at the present of western civilization into the light of its historical and moral weaknesses, because we would be assasinated. There is no argument between reason and evidence, between war and rights. Instead, we have to understand that terrorism, as it evidenced in the U.S., places western countries in a place where they have to face the urgent need to survive under the worst of the circumstances, that is, stand in front of a tenebrous power apart from any law or right, in fact, against all laws and rights, that wants to take over all of our history. Antirrepresive moans won't do anything beyond leaving things like they are now. Abstraction must leave place to simplicity. Facing a calculated, unlimited violence, rooted in ideologic delirium and developed through no-way-back strategies, intellectuals must defend against their own coherence when that coherence is against history. What is at immediate stake is not his individual way of living and thinking, but the existence of entire countries.
Again, sorry for the long post.
Cheers,
Pepe
