Reading notes

David. Excellent. As usual. On the “Fallujah Four” and America’s history of lynching, retributive justice, and the familiar, descending spiral of violence that too often makes us, by our own collective choosing, America the Bringer of Death.

This is how the cycle of violence works, and it starts when we visit violence preemptively upon people we believe, often without real reason, threaten us. They fight back, and we visit more violence upon more of them as a way of “sending a message.” And at each step, we create more hatred, and more future acts of violence. We can nuke Fallujah, sure; but when we do so, we sow the seeds for a thousand more Fallujahs, and a hundred more 9/11s.

I’m particularly struck by commenter A Hermit:

“These acts, it should be understood, were a classic terrorist provocation, taken directly from Mao’s tactics in the Chinese civil war. The entire purpose is to get American forces to overreact and take punitive action against the general populace.” Of course that was the whole purpose of 9/11 … and Dubya took the bait, hook, line and sinker.

Yes. Humility and repentance continue to be the foundation of the answer, as anyone who’s read the Gospels ought to know, IMO, yet arrogance and self-righteousness continue to undergird our response.

I don’t think these words can ever be repeated too often:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that.
Hate multiplies hate,
violence multiplies violence,
and toughness multiplies toughness
in a descending spiral of destruction. …
The chain reaction of evil —
hate begetting hate,
wars producing more wars —
must be broken,
or we shall be plunged
into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr. at MLK Jr. Quotations,
cited from his 1963 book Strength to Love