Dear Organlearners,
Doc Holloway <learnshops@thresholds.com> writes:
> Regarding the reward for information leading to the arrest of people
> responsible for the bombings of the US embassies in Africa. The reward
> isn't for the deaths, or the spirits, or the lives of those innocent
> victims of these bombings. It is to induce the larcenous of spirit who
> are most likely to know the names and whereabouts of the criminals.
Greetings Doc,
Once again I experience the importance of dialogue. I get the notion
that you think that I do not consider the apprehension, conviction
and sentence of terrorists as important. I think it was because I
wrote only a sentence or two on this facet since my original
contribution was on something else -- creating a society which is not
conducive to the growth of terrorism!
I do consider jurisprudence to be very important. In fact, the
majority (and not a minority) of South Africans consider it to be
very important. But we have now enetered a stage in which we realise
that jurisprudence are not enough. Let me explain.
You all know about the immense transformations which took place in
our country since 1990. One of the terrible negative effects was that
we have not been able to apprehend, sentence and convict ordinary
criminals sufficiently. This caused us to enter a horrible phase
since 1997 -- criminals commit their crimes like terrorists! In other
words, whereas the embassy bombings concern "terrorist crimes", we
now experience "criminal terrors".
The scale of "crimanl terrors" has become so extensive that it has
overloaded our justice system to the point of disintegrating. I do
not want to discuss the disintegration of the police force, the
courts and the prisons in detail here. But I can assure you it is
sheer horror like a fire consuming everything. Whereas the Rest Of
The World (ROTW) helped extensively to push the transformation, it is
now looking elsewhere while tapping each other on the shoulder:
"Without our ACTS South Africa would never have transformed."
I am now going to use your definition of terrorism and let you judge
whether the ROTW commited and act of terrorism on South Afria. I
quote:
> Acts of terror are symbolic, indiscriminate, terrifying
> (intimidating) and brutal.
Let us assume that the meddling of the ROTW in the transformation of
South Africa is an act of terrorism. (You may judge it to be
otherwise.) How on earth are we South Africans then going to
apprehend, sentence and convict the ROTW? Can you now see how limited
is justice alone in stopping terrorism?
> I have been a target of terrorist bombings. You cannot draw parallels
> between acts of terrorism and other aspects of life that occur
> (organizational downsizing, management-labor conflicts, acts of war),
> except perhaps the parallel of government terrorism against its' own
> people.
Excuse me -- I cannot draw parallels? What about the parallel I have
drawn above with respect to the meddling of the ROTW in the
transformation of South Africa? Doc, I have tried to explain very
carefully in my one reply to Douglas Max that when I, you or anybody
else want to participate in whatever way in the affairs of anybody
else, we have to do it constructively. As soon as we participate
destructively (excusing ourselves that it is for their own good), we
instigate the culture of hurting.
I would like to draw the parallels between terrorism (using your
definition) and the things which you have mentioned (organizational
downsizing, management-labor conflicts, acts of war), but we will
have to do it at some other time. I have something more important to
do now.
Please, do not think that I hate the ROTW for the way in which they
had been fighting against Apartheid and thus engineering the
transformation of South Africa. What we have to understand, is that
South Africans (mostly Afrikaners - I am also one) have been able to
formalise some very "vile thing", the result known as Apartheid. Once
formalised / articulated / expressed, Apartheid was ready to become
the symbol for the "vile thing" which they were ready to fight
against. So they began to fought the symbol Apartheid, but not the
"file thing" which was symbolised by Apartheid.
What is this "file thing"? Please forgive the pedantic mode in the
following. Please be honest, think carefully and write down your
answer before you go any further.
* If you have no answer, then write down "I do not know what it is".
* If you have a concept in mind, but you do not know what the concept
involves, then write down "It is xyz, but I do not know what xyz
is". (xyz can even be "apartheid")
* If you have a concept in mind, know what the concept involves, but
do not know how it is related to the culture of hurting, then
write down "It is xyz where xyz means ..., but I do not know how
xyz leads to a culture of hurting".
Now, if your answer is any of the three cases above, have you been
able to formalise (articulate, express) this "vile thing"? No. Is
Apartheid not then a symbol for this "vile thing"? Yes. Are you not
capable of "symbolic, indiscriminate, terrifying and brutal" acts
when fighting this "vile thing"? Is this not terrorism according
to Doc's definition?
What is this "file thing"? I think it is an extremely complex thing.
It took Afrikaners more than 300 (since 1662) in an extremely complex
country to gain enough experience in hurting to formalise Apartheid
(1948-1992) which they believed would combat this very "vile thing".
(Do you want me to document to you this experience of hurting?) Can
you believe it? Afrikaners believed they were combating this "vile
thing" with Apartheid while the ROTW believed Apartheid was the
personification of this "vile thing" - a text book case study in
conflicting paradigms! Afrikaners could list pages of the
constructive fruits which Apartheid brought while the ROTW could list
pages of the hurts which Apartheid brought. Who is right and who is
wrong?
Despite the fact that this "vile thing" is very complex, we have to
get a grib on it. We cannot expect to get the whole complex under the
knee in one lesson. We have to make effective contact (fruitfulness)
with one characterestic of it and then work from there through all
the complexity.
One way to make effective contact, is to find the relation between
this "vile thing" and the "culture of hurting". Another way is to try
and understand what Apartheid was about.
Here is an example concerning one of its many complex facets. The
word "apartheid" is an Afrikaans word for which its literal
translation into English would be "aparthood". This word helps us to
understand one "principle" of Apartheid:- whenever people of one
race cause destructions among people of another race in a certain
matter, then engineer by law a separation (fragmentation) between the
racial groups in that matter.
This "priciple" was not discovered by the Afrikaners. It was first
used by the Dutch East Indian Company against them as early as 300
years ago up to the early 1800s. Then it was taken over and perfected
by the British colonial rule up to the most terrible of wars -- the
Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902). After that war and its immense hurting
to Afrikaners and Afrikaans speaking Banthu people, the Afrikaners
decided to use this "priciple" to put a stop to their own hurting.
Now what does this "priciple" embody? Wholeness is very important to
constructive creativity. In fact, one of our prime ministers. Jan
Smuts, wrote in 1926 the book with title "Holism and Evolution",
thus becoming the father of holism. In the 1948 elections, he finally
lost the battle against Apartheid -- it became the offical policy.
Wholeness, according to Smuts, is the force which causes evolution.
Fragment this wholeness and evolution will be impaired. Apartheid
thus used selective fragmentations to prevent destructions because of
interracial interactions. In other words, it used wholeness not for
constructive purposes, but used its impairing, namely fragmentarism
to destroy any developments which themselves could lead and often did
lead to destructive behaviours. Complex, is it not?
> The lessons I've learned about terrorism is that it must be stopped by
> arresting and imprisoning the people committing the acts. As you said,
> At, the money is not the issue--it is whether it is sufficient to bring
> forth the information leading to their arrest. We shall see.
Doc, I almost wrote: pray that the era does not arrive when
international terrorism gets out of control as "criminal terrorism"
in South Africa. But we cannot only pray, we must also do.
What shall we do? We must certainly bring them to justice. But this
is not enough. We must stop and revert our culture of hurting which
is the cause of terrorism. Please, learn a lesson from South Africa.
Transformation was forced upon us faster than we could handel it,
before we could reduce the culture of hurting. Thus terrorism
exploded in our faces.
The world is entering an era of transformation as never before.
Transformation will be forced on institutions and organisations
world wide. All what happened in South Africa are peanuts in
comparison to what will happen in the rest of the world. If all
the peoples of the world do not reduce this culture of hurting fast
and effectively, terrorism will explode in every dimension of
humaneness. If it does, then the "terrion" (the name in Greek for the
"beast from the sea" in the book Relevations) has indeed emerged.
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
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