If the Russians love their children too …

Christina/ November 24, 2010/ Ideas of philosophy

To tell the truth takes courage. Especially, if one does it before the public. All the more Yassin Musharbashs comment “Falsche Schablonen im Kopf” (false behaviour patterns in the head) from November 19th, 2010 on Spiegel Online made me happy.

If terror comes to Germany right now, which will hopefully not happen, it is abstract for the time being, not seizable, because nobody wants to imagine the inconceivability. Menace, however, seems to be more real if its personal.

My partner works currently abroad and has to fly a lot. On his last flight back to his workplace an incident happened. When we talked on the phone after his arrival at his destination he just mentioned that the “flight has been a little turbulent”. I understood that there might have been bad weather during the flight. In fact, the incident had nothing to do with the outer but the inner conditions of that flight: it was about a passenger running through the aisles shouting “Allah-u-Akbar”. And that happened exactly when the plane flew over Teheran.

I believe that everybody can image what kind of pictures crossed my mind: September 11th. Just this time one of my beloved ones was aboard.

Fortunately the guy could be crushed down, tied up and could be tranquilized by some courageous passengers. No comments from the aircraft captain or the flight attendants on the incident. I wonder whether the flight crew is prepared to handle such occurrences (are they incidents any longer?).

I often find myself keeping a critical eye on “suspicious” fellow travellers. And I remember how much I freaked out when a supposed passenger standing in front of me lining up to be checked in who suddenly abandoned his two suitcases and never showed up again.

Is that the feeling terrorists want to create in all of us? Insecurity, fear and perpetual distrust towards fellow travellers who seem to be a little bit too nervous? Or like in the case of Erhart Körting the anxiety towards Arabic speaking or a foreign language speaking neighbours?

The question of the whys and wherefores is still unexplained to me. This is why I chose the analogy of the song “Russians” in which Sting asked the Russians how they can possibly threaten the west with the atomic bomb if they love their children too.

I tried to approach the whys and wherefores by reading the “Zeit”-Dossier (German newspaper) “the door to hell is wide open again”. It is unimaginable what the records published on WikiLeaks reveal on the brutality of the Western forces. To leave the Arabic area for once notionally let us talk about Guatemala. The atrocities of the West did not even come to rest right after the “Third Reich” came down in Germany: From 1946 to 1948 (approximately at the time of the “Nürnberger Prozesse”) the National health service of the United States in Washington financed experiments in humans of Guatemala citizens according to the article “experiments in humans” by the “Zeit” (Nr. 44/2010).

This could be food for thought: In times of warnings against terror, suspicious fellow travellers and neighbours politicians should not only point their fingers at the possible attack itself. They should also broach the issue what causes German citizens to travel to camps abroad to be trained as a terrorist and to use oneself as a human bomb against fellow man?

Still I have hope that the responsible persons love their families as much as I love mine and that the warnings against terror remain assumptions.

Further Readings (German Language):

• Die Zeit, Nr. 44/2010: „Das Ende des liberalen Jahrhunderts“ (S. 3)
• Die Zeit, Nr. 44/2010: „Menschenversuche“ (S. 10)
• Die Zeit, Nr. 44/2010: „Brezeln für den Bosporus“ (S. 11)
• Die Zeit, Nr. 44/2010: „Ewige Immigranten“(S. 42)
• Die Zeit, Nr. 44/2010: „Das Tor zur Hölle steht wieder offen“ (Dossier)
• Qantara.de: Bloggers in the Arab World. Playing with fire.

Qantara.de: “Thomas Lehr’s novel „September. Fata Morgana”.

• Spiegel Online: “Falsche Schablonen im Kopf”