As I’ve noted before, at one point during the eleventh day of September, in the year of our Lord two thousand and one, the following words rang through my head:
They deserve no mercy. Strike them down, follow them to their base and . . . and kill them, all of them, all of them! NO MERCY!
Given my tastes in TV shows, and the fact that I’m not terribly articulate on the best of days, it is therefore not surprising that my brain would seize upon these particular words of another to express my feelings at that moment.
In the storyline of “Babylon 5,” whence the above line comes, those last two (all-caps) words became the rallying cry in a long, bloody war . . . that ultimately turned out to be one big mistake.[1] For this reason, I also found in these words not only a rallying cry, but a reminder of the need for calm, sober deliberation when considering proper responses.
I sometimes wonder which side of this dichotomy – the rallying cry or the cautionary tale – has been more prevalent during the last eleven years.
[1] Sort of. It’s complicated.
The only cautionary tale is that cerebral sci-fi is hard, and good luck getting your full story arc in.
We have always been a bit too eager to run off to war. I think we now have a stronger element of nationalism in our politics. I voote rallying cry.
Steve
Circa 1980, I read an article in National Geographic on Afghanistan. (I worked in a family crisis center/runaway shelter. Someone had donated dozens of old National Geographics for clients to read. Not telling what year the actual NG was published.) As usual, the article included lots of beautiful photos.
One thing was obvious from the article and the photos. (Many of the photos showed tall towers where families would hide and protect family members who had killed someone outside the family.) That one thing was that Afghanistan held a culture of violence and conistant warring that we could barely understand. The culture goes back thousands of years. Anyone entering into this culture of fighting and killing does so at their own peril.
I felt, if anything, we should have limited ourselves to lobbing cruise missiles at terrorist camps. Otherwise, we needed to focus on protecting ourselves at home and our borders. Of course, we can’t protect our borders because it’s imperative that we allow in illegal immigrants, so we had to go to the Middle East and put on a bloody show.
Our problem with the Middle East is that we can’t crack down too seriously on Islamic extremists, when some of them control a lot of oil.