Posted by parhad (158.252.223.74) on October 12, 2001 at 10:48:30:
Years ago someone told me I was a "warrior". He was speaking in terms of archetypes...roles and personalities that repeat throughout the Ages though in altered forms suitable to the times. If you're born today as an old-style warrior you land in jail or someone's army.
I suppose I am a warrior. In another day and age I could easily see myself cutting the very liver out of someone and roasting it for lunch. Today we have to fight by other means, but the impulse is the same...the organ has changed that's all, that and the method. A good warrior in that day used the latest and best techniques, even improved on them. An Iron Age warrior would look pretty silly going up against someone armed with a club from the Stone Age.
It's the same today...to resort to guns like we were still in the Wild West is primitive beyond belief...and to use bombs and missles is only good "war" if death and destruction is your goal...if gold treasure is no longer enough and you want "Trade" instead, or oil and other petro-chemicals or cheap labor, which is the Slavery of today.
Bin Laden was more effective than Che Guevarra ever dreamed of being because the dreams were different then. Then, a revolutionary was willing to run and hide and shoot at his enemies in his own land...he didn't think of fighting the ones who supported and propped up his enemy, and he certainly didn't think of killing the women and children of his enemy. Who taught that lesson? It was the Christian Spaniards who taught the Indians to scalp people.
America has been killing the wives and parents and babies of men it considers its enemies...Bin Laden learned this tactic from us, we did it over there in his part of the world first... THAT is the "code" he is sending to us, that's why he's being denied access and we are being kept in the dark so we don't get "upset".
It was our being KEPT in the dark while all sorts of horrors were done in our name, that led these people to such a desperate and murderous act...and things are being done NOW we also don't know about, that will come back to bite us in the ass...again and worse.
To be a warrior today is not to take up sword and gun and missle and go kill children...America avoids any fair fight and lives in fear of the PR disaster if ONE soldier, SOLDIER not child, getting hurt or injured. To be an effective warrior today is to know perfectly well what it takes to murder people, but to choose not to do so, to understand that war brings only more war, as it ever has.
People objected to the idea of my putting a sword on Hammurabi...they said Hammurabi was a man of peace. Someone even said the boots I put on him were "war" boots. Hammurabi wasn't a Christian, that means he did not rule out violence on principle (and which ones do?), indeed he wasn't elected King...his family took their title by force and kept it that way and built an Empire through force. He was a man most comfortable with force, good at organized violence, as I'm sure he was adept at one on one combat...he would have had to have been to keep the respect of his people and fear in his enemies.
There is no need to strip him of his amazing accomplishment at a time when the ideas he promoted stood alone, by making it "inevitable" that as a proto-Christian at heart, he merely followed the dictates of a Christian conscience...Bullshit. The man CHOSE what he did and it went against the common "law" of his day, defied the priests and scribes and Generals and "experts" of the day, and it was for that choice that he has been placed in the Pantheon.
But he was more than that. He was "modern" in the sense that he wasn't satisfied with killing to get his way, didn't think the strong, of which he was the strongest, should thereby and just for that reason, oppress and rule the weak, especially not the most vulnerable, the women and orphans. Guess who America made war on in Vietnam and who they have been killing for years since the Gulf War ended, the war in which they killed and buried alive the fathers, sons and brothers of the widows and orphans they left behind to be starved and killed off by disease?
Hammurabi will have his sword on the monument, it will be big and bold and sharp and beautiful...for having it emphasizes all the more that this King struggled to find a way to put it aside when confronted with issues of justice and fair play, mercy and forgiveness. He did not propose to cut a baby in two to determine an issue, he developed Law, precedent, and the means by which we would someday have to give evidence, to find fact, and not resort to the sword.
He was not a Christian, castrated into docility...he was a robust and passionate man who could have remained what he was, a general of great skill and daring...instead he opted to become a king in every way, a warrior for a future Time he could only imagine and hope would come. He did his part and more to bring it about...we will carry on the work.