evocates | (no subject)

Hmm.

Imagine a hypothetical situation.

You have a thousand people on an island. All of these people are immensely important - politicians, businessmen. All of them are, in one way or another, responsible for the wars that are happening around the world.

Warmongers, basically. Despicable people responsible for the deaths of hundreds, thousands, millions, even. People like bin Laden. No one will miss them. No one will mourn for them. They are 'evil'.

Or so you tell yourself.

In front of you, there's a button. Press the button, and the island will explode, and all those thousand people will be killed. No more wars.

Will you press the button?

If yes, will you do it if there are heavy consequences on you and you alone? You will be the scapegoat, the mastermind, the murderer. You will be hated and persecuted. Perhaps you'll live the rest of your life out in jail. Or perhaps you will be executed.

Will you still do it?

(Does the ends justify the means?

Will the wars even stop in the end, if one does this?)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Some years ago there was a similar email all around the net, it was another hypothetical situation. You're walking down the street and suddenly you see the previous spanish prime minister, Jose María Aznar (the one that allied with Bush and sent toops to Iraq) trapped in his expensive car in the middle of a flood. You could save him risking yourself or you could take a picture of this decisive moment that would surely win the fucking Pulitzer. If you take the photo no one would blame you, it's too dangerous to save him after all. Now, think about it. What are you gonna do? This dilemma is serious and could change your life and even the world.

...

Now, you take the photograph in black and white or in color?

As for your question, I'm against any kind of death sentence, so I wouldn't press the button. The end doesn't justify the means and probably wars are embedded in the human nature :/

~~I hope this post wasn't a rhetorical question, darling! :0~~

~~It's half of one and half not. Answers are totally welcome! =D~~

Mmhmm. I think if someone actually presses the button, it will cause more problems. Terror will only breed more terror and hatred. Those politicians and warmongers - they are like hydras, really. Cut off the head of one, and two grows. Replaceable. Killing one man doesn't, unlike what anime and fiction tries to tell us, stop a war.

But it's so terribly tempting isn't it, the solution? So very, very tempting. If you can kill them all and stop the wars, even for just a day, two, three, a week... it's so tempting to just slam down the button and say good riddance. But that doesn't work, does it?

I wonder why there are people who think that war and terrorism can be used as tools to stop war.

Well, terrorism is useful if you want to extort and scare the population, but you can't sustain a negotiation in that terms. The problem is that the governments get too involved in that power play and in the end they act like if they were still Homo habilis fighting for the control of a cave. So much for evolution...

No, because the capacity for war is part of the human condition.

I'd rather keep them alive on the island and see what happens when they meet one another, no?

>>;

Well. They will kill each other, they will work together, or they will all die of thirst/starvation.

Either way.

At the risk of pointing out how much of a fangirl I am (and this is something that I've known for a long time)...

"History is nothing more than an endless waltz, with the three beats of war, peace, and revolution continuing into enternity." Or something like that. One of my best history papers was entitled, "War and Human Memory," because even if we kill all of these evil people off, humanity will still find something to cause conflict over.

There's a war for whatever reason - religious, political, economic, whatever - and people fight, and people die, until finally one side or the other (or both) manages to win, leaving losses on both sides that sicken the populace to the point where they will refuse to fight, however long this takes. And then, in the peace that follows the war and death, people lick their wounds and begin the recovery process, and then they grow older, and have children who become adults, and who have never experienced the hells that their parents have. They too will find a cause that they find sufficiently motivation to support - is there something with the government of their country, with the government of another country, with the people of another country? And then they bring about a revolution or start a war, and the fighting and dying begins all over again. The cycle will not end, because time passes and humanity forgets all about what it was that we were trying to stop in the first place.

Aborting one step of the dance simply means that it'll take a little while longer to come about. It won't stop everything in its tracks.

Also, if nothing else, with the sudden power gap at the top of political structures now that the "evil" people are dead, there will be fighting and scrabbling for power and conflict as others race to fill the places that were once held, and those people will most likely be just as bad as those they're replacing.

I wouldn't push the button.

I wouldn't. Because (and this sounds new-agey, but I swear it's not) violence does sort of beget violence.

I don't mean that in a live-and-let-live sort of way or anything like that. I mean, you kill someone powerful who a lot of people agree with, they're not going to shrug their shoulders and say, "Peace be with you." They're going to retaliate.

Which is just the immediate response.

In the end, you're just killing men. Men are powerless as physical entities in cases like this. What IS powerful? Their ideas and the LARGE MASSES OF PEOPLE to whom those ideas are passed on. You can kill the man with a bomb; you can't kill an idea like that.

UM. FEVERISH RAMBLING ENDS NAO.

I would leave them alone to degenerate into Lord of the Fliesesque savages.

Far more amusing. And they have the natural capacity for utter savagery without me having to lift a finger.

No, I wouldn't push the button -- war wouldn't be eradicated just because people like bin Laden were killed. Someday, someone else will find a cause that motivates them enough to use violent means.
Besides, there would be massive turmoil by removing so many people in high positions all at once.

-totally takes this question at face value- No, I won't. Not unless there's a guarentee that there would be no war whatsoever if these people were dead. But realistically, the deaths of these people wouldn't all of a sudden change the world for the better. A lot of the wars now, I think, have deep roots from history( civil wars and such) and the idea of battle and prejudice is already heavily ingrained in the people.

Moreover, if these people were dead, sure, it's great and all, but that doesn't stop others from following in their footsteps.

but idk, this is a really interesting question.

I wouldn't. I'd take away all the technology on the island and let them battle it out >:)