Re: Swedish Account of Looting in Iraq

On Wednesday 16 April 2003 20:23, Andreas Pour wrote:
> Sagie Sokolov wrote:
> > On Tuesday 15 April 2003 22:33, Andreas Pour wrote:
> > > http://www.rense.com/general37/eyewitnesscharges.htm ?  Anyone from the
> > > area know the reputation of this newspaper?
> > >
> > > The story supposedly is about Khaled Bayomi, a "PhD student at the
> > > University of Lund", who accuses the US of instigating the looting in
> > > Baghdad, and also has an interesting take on the mysterious dissolution
> > > of organized resistance in Baghdad.
> >
> > Is there any chance that the Arabs will ever be held accountable for
> > their own actions, or is it too much to ask? Unless we're talking here
> > about the "Noble Savages", who are not suitable anyway to be held to such
> > a "high" standard. Or maybe it's that introspection, self criticism and
> > personal accountability are too alien to 'Islamic Culture'. Whatever.
>
> Do you realize what a total hateful racist you sound like?  My God, I am
> stunned.
>
> Were there not Russians soldiers that have killed Russian civilians?  Were
> there not Jews that worked as guards in the concentration camps?  And who
> do you blame for those things - generalized comments about the inferiority
> of Russians and Jews, i.e., racist comments?
>
> Even though Americans are not nearly as poor as the most poverty-stricken
> individuals in Baghdad who have endured 10 years of sanctions (if in fact
> the looter core came from Baghdad as opposed to being shipped in for that
> purpose, the facts are not really very clear on this one), I would hate to
> see what would happen here if anarchy erupted and an invading army was
> encouraging people to loot, particularly along racial or religious lines
> (in the case of Iraq, the Shi-ites against the Sunnis).
>
> Logic aside, the Geneva Convention clearly indicates who the responsible
> party is for maintaining order.
>
> And finally, the point really is one of realizing what is going on.
> Encouragement of looting, massacaring civilians, and destroying a
> millenia-old cultural heritage - the history of the cradle of civilization,
> if you will - do not sound to me like "liberating".
>
It's not the Americans who did, turn it as you like, it's the local 
population. The attempt to explain away that fact is what I tried to give 
possible reasons to:
I don't hold the "Noble Savage" view - it's the classical European attitude 
towards indigenous populations, who are not even expected to be as 
"civilized" as them, so they cannot possibly be accountable for whatever they 
do. Therefore it has to be "our" fault, one way or another.
The unsuitability of some norms to the 'Islamic Culture' is what the cultural 
and moral relativists would say - because we are not supposed to judge any 
culture as outsiders, for every culture is normative in it's own right and no 
one is superior to other, then whatever is going on there is OK and we just 
should live with that. So if there's something not to our liking, then we 
should only blame ourselves for that. 
I shouldn't have really apologized, for I didn't give my personal view here, 
but tried to rebuke those who might have these as motives, conscious or 
unconscious, for avoiding putting any blame on any action in "inferior" 
cultures (in the "Noble Savage" case) or just 'different' cultures (in the 
relativism case).
I _do_ hold the relativism view in the most part, and I think that it's the 
prevailing view today, at least in the west. The problem here is that in the 
extreme cases it's hard to see how judgment can be avoided: in some cultures 
incest and cannibalism were accepted - so is it acceptable just because it's 
culturally different?
And I think you might guess that I wrote that as a reaction not only to the 
looting in Bagdad and trying, *again*, to misplace the blame somewhere else, 
but to a more general tendency to do that, especially in this region of the 
World. Though I perfectly agree that the Americans should have taken this 
scenario into account, and that should it have happend someware else in the 
world, the looting might have been just as bad, if not worse.

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