Posted by zeugma on June 15, 2006, at 19:29:25
In reply to Re: fearful asymmetry (TRIGGERS violence SUI) » zeugma, posted by zazenduck on June 15, 2006, at 18:20:54
> The IRA in the early eighties used suicide by starvation as a weapon in the English jails. Thatcher chose to allow them to starve to death rather than use force feeding which was the American strategy a few months before the hangings. (The hunger strike ended in the face of forced feeding.) Was it successful? I don't know. It certainly kept the issue in the public eye and an asymmetric war is political. The monks who burned themselves to death in Vietnam were I
think instrumental in the end of that war. So I think that it can be a weapon.>>Weapons are not the only instruments that end wars. Unless we are talking metaphorically. When George Bush denounced the Axis of Evil as a prelude to his invasion of iraq, the weapons of asymmetric war he alleged were in Hussein's possession were assuredly not the unconventional 'weapons' of a Vietnamese monk or IRA hunger striker.
the act of killing oneself to make a political point, so long as all parties inflict it solely on themselves, and of course intend that to be so, is not analogous to the act of doing so with the intention of committing simultaneous homicide.
The Pentagon has closed off all access to Gitmo, I hear. Does that bode well for the justice of our system?
-z
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> > It is interesting to see the latest application of 'asymmetry' by a military professional. The camp commander of Guantanomo bay, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, is on record as saying, of three detainees' recent suicides there:
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> > "I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us," Harris said.
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poster:zeugma
thread:656104
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20060610/msgs/657375.html