Un Articulo En Ingles

September 8, 2011, 1:39 pm
The Cycle of Revenge
By SIMON CRITCHLEY

I’ve never understood the proverbial wisdom that revenge is a dish best served cold. Some seem to like it hot. Better is the Chinese proverb, attributed to Confucius, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Osama bin Laden’s grave was watery, but the other still appears empty. Is it intended for us?Revenge is the desire to repay an injury or a wrong by inflicting harm, often the violent sort. If you hit me, I will hit you back. Furthermore, by the logic of revenge, I am right to hit you back. The initial wrong justifies the act of revenge. But does that wrong really make it right for me to hit back? Once we act out of revenge, don’t we become mired in a cycle of violence and counterviolence withno apparent end? Such is arguably our current predicament.
Of course, moving from ends to beginnings, the other peculiarity of revenge is that it is often unclear who committed the first wrong or threw the first stone. If someone, George W. Bush say, asserts that the United States is justified in revenging itself on Al Qaeda, by invading Afghanistan, then Iraq and the rest of the brutal saga ofthe last 10 years, what would Bin Laden have said? Well, the opposite of course.

In a scarily fascinating 2004 video, called “The Towers of Lebanon,” in which Bin Laden claimed direct responsibility for 9/11 for the first time, he says that the Sept. 11 attacks were justified as an act of revenge. If the United States violates the security of the Muslim world — especially by using his homelandof Saudi Arabia as a base during the first Gulf War — then Al Qaeda is justified in violating American security. If there had been no initial violation, he claims, there would be no need for revenge. Bin Laden contrasts the United States with Sweden: as the Swedes have never been aggressors in the Muslim world, he says, they have nothing to fear from Al Qaeda.
Bin Laden then reveals theextraordinary fact that the idea for 9/11 originated in his visual memory of the 1982 Israeli bombardments of West Beirut’s high-rise apartment blocks. He recalls his intense reaction to seeing images of the destroyed towers there and  formed the following notion: “It occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America.” (“Missile into towers,” he might have whispered; the ideastuck.) The Sept. 11 attacks, which most of us remember as a series of visual images, repeatedly televised and published, originate with an earlier series of images. For Bin Laden, there was a strange kind of visual justice in 9/11, the retributive paying back of an image for an image, an eye for an eye.
Opposites attract — the awful violence of 9/11 is justified by Al Qaeda as an act of revengethat in turn justifies the violence of America’s and Bush’s revenge. My point is that revenge is an inevitably destructive motive for action. When we act out of revenge, revenge is what we will receive in return. The wheel of violence and counterviolence spins without end and leads inevitably to destruction.
This is exactly what Bin Laden hoped to bring about. He admits that Al Qaeda spent$500,000 on the 9/11 attacks, while estimating that the United States lost, at the lowest estimate, $500 billion in the event and the aftermath. He even does the math, “That makes a million American dollars for every Al Qaeda dollar, by the grace of God Almighty.” He concludes, ominously, “This shows the success of our plan to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy, with God’s will.”
Like it or not (Idon’t like it at all), Bin Laden had a point. The last 10 years of unending war on terror has also led, at least partly, to the utter financial precariousness that we see at every level of life in the United States: federal, state, city and individuals laden with debt. We are bankrupt.
But why grant Bin Laden some sick posthumous victory? Consider an alternative scenario.
In a 1999 Republican...