If you want to have guidance during these troubled times, don't count on mainstream modern philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Here are a couple of quotes from Giovanna Borradori's book, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida:
Habermas: Only in retrospect will we be able to understand if the symbolically suffused collapse of the capitalistic citadels in lower Manhattan implies a break of that type or if this catastrophe merely confirms, in an inhuman and dramatic way, a long known vulnerability of our complex civilization.
Derrida: As for states that "harbor" terrorist networks, it is difficult to identify them as such. The United States and Europe, London and Berlin, are also sanctuaries, places of training or formation and information for all the "terrorists" of the world. No geography, no "territorial" determination, is thus pertinent any longer for locating the seat of these new technologies of transmission or aggression. (University of Chicago Press, 2003.)
Confronting Terrorism III
Read letter Virginia L.L. Hamel's letter, Never let your virtues be used against you. Here is an excerpt:
Today, our men are being killed in Iraq as we try to kill the enemy on one hand while trying to make Muslims like us on the other. This is a self-destructive contradiction. We should decide if we are fighting a war or running a popularity campaign. We should order the enemy out of the mosques or blow them up. The mosques are a value to the enemy, not to us. They only respect force. Use it to save American lives. (Brookline TAB, 09/09/04.)
[Editor's comment: Have you read Virginia Hamel's book, In Defense of Ayn Rand?]
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