The time was when "war" consisted of a bunch of guys showing up outside their territory, in your neck of the woods, and challenging the men of the village to "step outside" the village boundaries and engage in some rough-and-tumble in which some people likely would end up severely injured, if not dead. The winners got to grab some of the losers' possessions, and everyone went on their way.
I'll not recount the rest of history, which is depressing and mostly directed downhill, with just a few moments where hope sparked for a generation or two and then faded away. In terms of international affairs, the nation-state threatens to
de facto be made obsolete in some parts of the world, to be replaced by fanatics without a country that answer only to their own, crazed drummer.
In recent times, it has become fashionable to cast the United States as morally on the same plane as its enemies. What is interesting in this debate is that the enemies of the United States have never, ever, considered themselves to be on the same plane as the US. No. Indeed, they can never even conceive themselves as being
one iota in the wrong, and thus, feel they occupy a vastly superior moral high ground as compared to the US.
All because some Inquisitor, brownshirt, blackshirt, commisar or mullah told them so.
I became aware of this as far back as when I worked in the USSR, a long time ago. The head of the Intourist office in Kiev took great pains, whenever I was in town escorting a tour group, to arrange a private meeting, during which he deftly probed my political views. Who knows? Maybe he was trying to recruit me.
At one point, the subject of discussion turned to the issue of general officers, and my host remarked that the generals in the US were most certainly warmongers.
When I observed that it was the job of generals everywhere - including those in the USSR and in the US - to be on guard against the enemies of their country, he looked at me strangely and remarked that Soviet generals
were on guard against the enemies of the USSR, as well they should, as opposed to US generals, who were merely warmongers.
(These same Soviet generals soon found themselves guarding against Soviet enemies, located in Afghanistan, apparently, but I digress...)
In the end, people who commit such acts will always find some reason to justify them, but they all basically boil down to rationalization or an expression of True Belief.
When I look at the space program, I see people from all over the world working together to overcome technical and cultural differences and reach out to the stars. When I learn of such calculated acts as happened today, I see us all subject to the whims of small-time, ignorant, lust-crazed warlords who wish nothing but to gather tribute for themselves or some Ideal and who will gladly immolate the rest of the world for fun, or for God.
In any struggle between the two, it is easy to see that the destroyers have the upper hand, for their job is so much easier and their obstacles more amenable to high-explosives or a bullet in the neck. Nobody dares question the motives or means of barbarians, unless they want to end up with their head on the end of a pole.
I better stop before I get
really depressed.
* * *I don't report for Execute Package duty until 9 am, and I hadn't been listening to the radio on the way in to work (not with a CD player in the rental!), so I was absolutely shocked when I arrived at work to find everyone attentively following the unfolding events on any one of several screens around the room. After absorbing the news, I was dumbfounded. But work must go on, and slowly we all put our attention back on the computer screens in front of us, while images of horror continued to move on the televisions on top of our consoles.
I even managed to snap out of my state long enough to translate the Form 24 for tomorrow, though I don't know if it did anyone any good. (It didn't begin to dawn on me until later that I was sitting inside a not-so-shabby target, by which point NASA management had issued an evacuation order that extends until tomorrow morning. ISS operations were transferred to Moscow for the interim.)
One item that we caught on the downlink was an image of New York taken from the ISS, which turned out to be going overhead soon after the attack.
In this picture, the camera angle for the image on the TV screen is looking toward the west from somewhere over eastern Connecticut or the L.I. Sound. New Jersey is in the background. The white splotch in the lower right center of the screen is the smoke plume resulting from the explosion.
Getting out of JSC was a slow trick today. At 11 am, the roads out were as jammed as I had ever seen them. I went back to my client's office, thinking maybe they had some work I could do (having my day cut short means not getting paid). They did, but nobody was much in the mood to work, and it took me a couple of hours to do about an hour's worth of billable work.
There were several radios turned on at the office, and I grew tired of the incessant nattering of the media voices, yammering on and on, repeating what few facts there were over and over again, cautiously adding rumors when they were too good to sit on, apparently, and then starting the whole presentation from the top.
So I checked my materials back in and left, wandering over to the Christus St. John hospital across the street. I felt like doing something, and the only thing I could do was donate blood, because heaven knows it's going to be needed in the days to come.
* * *There was much mention of Pearl Harbor in among the verbal diarrhea offered to us as news commentary today. I am afraid, however, that the casualty list when this is finally laid to rest is going to make what happened at Pearl Harbor look pale by comparison. There will be other, more salient differences, too.
At Pearl, the enemy was identifiable. Moreover, they had planned for a formal declaration of war to have been delivered by the time the attack started (it didn't work out that way). Too, for the most part, those attacked were members of the military, who had consciously set forth - when they embarked on military service - to place their precious bodies "between their loved homes and the war's desolation" (not my words, but those of one F. S. Key, in stanza four of something called
The Star Spangled Banner).
In the events that transpired today, the enemy is not clearly known and is likely a collection of stateless freebooters, as opposed to a country's government. Their victims were largely civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That was then... this is now. I hope, though, that there will be one similarity between today's attack and that on Pearl Harbor: I do earnestly hope the US will pursue the bastards who were behind today's attack, find them, and utterly and dispassionately destroy them.
Cheers...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
