permaculture

[PacificEdge <pacedge@magna.com.au>]

On Wednesday, September 25, 2002, at 08:41  AM, Margaret L Wilson wrote:

> > Well, i am fighting this for what it's worth.  I just think I'm likely 
> > to loose.  One the dogs of war are running this thing is going to be 
> > very hard to stop, it's not just momentum then, but also the 
> > inevitable retaliations against the US mainland that will fuel the 
> > fire.  Once there it's total war no matter what we want.
> > M
>
> Yeah, I am very much afraid and have been ever since the supreme court 
> made it's decision.  Most Americans have never left their own little 
> area and really don't have any concept of how the earth ( the globe 
> itself) actually is.  They have no concept of the people that live 
> anywhere else. "They hate us for our freedom"  What a crock!  They 
> think we will just go over there, kill a few thousands, come back and 
> our little lives will go back to normal.

I'm a little surprised at the interest that this topic, which is 
probably slightly off the list's main theme, has created. It's good that 
the list's moderator has seen fit to allow the continuation of the 
discourse as it seems to be something that list participants are wanting 
to talk about.

In a number of postings from the US I have seen the word 'fear'. Maybe 
some of you in that country can confirm whether fear, or its 
fellow-traveller, anxiety, is something being experienced by any 
reasonably-sized percentage of the US population.

The outcomes of large scale conflicts are of course unknown at the time 
they occur - just look at Europe today and think back to the Marshall 
Plan... and Japan after the Second world War and today. But this 
impending conflict could be different. Sure, a best-case scenario sees a 
less-threatening Iraq without WMD or territorial ambitions beyond its 
own borders. But a worse-case scenario sees, post-Iraq (a secular 
state), a move to assert a US model on the Middle East and this 
devolving into a perception by Islamic states that it is Islam being 
attacked. Will we then see an even greater divide between the West and 
the Islamic world and the fractionalisation of the world into the 
Western, Islamic and non-aligned camps with little communication between 
them? Even the considerable forces of economic globalisation might not 
be able to stem such a development along cultural/ religious lines.

> .........................
Russ Grayson
Sydney, Australia
.........................