Cultural narratives are always complex. Each contain enough truth and history to establish legitimacy among their subscribers. Mutual ignorance abounds between cultures but it is their interpretations of shared historical and contemporary events that determines a culture's durability in conflict. That's really what the war on terror is about isn't it? It's about ending a culture of death, at home and abroad. But we don't know how to do that do we...? Instead we rightly fear that we are fostering it. IMO, propagating a culture of death is best done by dismissing its cult members as ignorant or incompetent, particularly when they are just that. As a result of being spurned by the culture of life - they will assert our irrelevance with more zeal than they assert their own irrelevance. Validation of their culture is equally damaging. In my opinion, there are only two cures for the culture of death:
- Empowerment to live life to the fullest
- Massacre them all
In Iraq and Afghanistan we are finding the first prescription more difficult than we imagined. That's because we've not played favorites, empowering our enemies and allies alike. Empowering an enemy simply validates their culture - validates their perception of history - validates the culture of death. Empowering your enemies destroys your allies perception of events. Doing so sets your allies adrift on an intellectual road to conspiracy. But then again, what could we expect our allies to make of us when we harbor our own culture of death - made popular by lucrative media deals? Our own political inconsistencies are making the second prescription more likely.
In terms of our own hypocrisies... what could be worse than the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation.
Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in the The Bronx in New York City.[4] He was named after Túpac Amaru II, an Incan revolutionary who led a Peruvian uprising against Spain and was subsequently sentenced to death. "Shakur" comes from the Arabic word thankful (to God). His mother, Afeni Shakur, was an active member of the Black Panther Party in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s; Shakur was born just one month after her acquittal on more than 100 charges of "Conspiracy against the United States government and New York landmarks" in the New York Panther 21 court case.[5] Although officially unconfirmed by the Shakur family,[6] several sources list his birth name as either Parish Lesane Crooks[7][8] or Lesane Parish Crooks. Afeni supposedly feared her enemies would attack her son, and disguised their relation using a different last name, only to change it three months[7] or a year[9] later, following her marriage to Mutulu Shakur.
On September 7, 1996 at approximately 11:15 p.m., while stopped at the intersection of East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, Shakur was shot several times in a drive-by shooting. Shakur was struck by four bullets out of the twelve shots that were fired at him; he was hit twice in the chest, and once each in his left arm and thigh. Shakur was later placed on life support until his death six days later, on September 13, 1996, at 4:03 p.m. PDT at the age of twenty-five.