I think we agree on plenty of things, we just have different perspectives on the events.
>> Your assertion that our foreign policy has always preferred control over benevolence is wrong.
WWII was a different situation, so I'd like to exclude that from the discussion. Let's just stick to the last 50 years or so.
>> We limited our confrontation with the Soviet Union in order to avoid a major war. Do you think that was a prudent policy?
Yes. That was good policy for us and for most of the world. What I am saying is that we deliberately chose to fight one evil with another, even though we did not have to. We could have chosen to fight evil with good. But the good would not be as obedient to Washington's whims. Furthermore, the "lesser evil" is in the eye of the beholder. You may have thought that preventing Communism in Vietnam was the lesser evil, but I doubt the Vietnamese who wanted their independence would agree, and certainly they would not have approved of the destruction of their country as a sacrifice to the war against Communism. A fundamental rule of ethics is to put yourself in the other person's shoe and see how'd you feel about it. Do you think the Vietnamese think, "Oh those Americans, such wonderful people, they came here and fought so hard so a greater evil would not befall us"? Anyway, a detailed discussion of US adventures around the world would just take too long to study.
>> Without the concept of the "lesser evil", one cannot justify any sort of war.
You raise a good point, but I don't quite agree. I am a proponent of natural law (in its original meaning and not its perverted neo-Nazi sense). It roughly means believing in the innate goodness and believing that which comes naturally is the best course of action. The problem is that you need an ethical system to balance out the conflicting emotions, wants, etc (Taoism and Zen both discuss this in good details). But I think we call agree that most living things have an instinct to survive and when left with no choice will fight back. You'd never find me opposing such inevitable wars. WWII was one such occasion.
>> As for Washington, I think that people are pretty decent, and do the job they are hired to do, by and large.
Yes, I agree. But I think we perceive the "job" they are there to do differently. I think Napoleon who said "in the arms of empire builders, men are nothing but means to an end". They care about the people like a soldier cares about his gun or a general cares about his soldiers; good keep them in good shape, but ultimately means to an end.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
-- Johann W. von Goethe
The character of America has changed greatly since WWII. This has not been sudden change, rather a great extension of the existing trends. And by the way, this is not just America who does this. If you have fallowed the economic crisis in Japan, you know that the government has been protecting big Japanese companies at the expense of the people. Perhaps this has always been the case in the world. When the Titanic sank, the government hid the truth from the public and did not allow the people to sue the company as that was deemed destructive to the shipping industry. In each case, the laws are bent backwards and the people are forced to make sacrifices so that some "greater good" in someone's mind is served. Funny enough, those people almost never need to make the sacrifices themselves; it is not their family members who'd get experimented upon or silenced or sent to the front lines or die in accidents...and in any event, I believe if a sacrifice is to be made for some greater good, then the choice should belong to those who have to make the sacrifice. There is something very immoral for I to decide what sacrifices you must make. I am going to cite you some quotes, and tell me if anyone who utters them today will not pay a dear price.
Sun (how many of these quotes would survive in US today) Tzu
"We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both."
-- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice from 1916-1939
"The United States is not nearly so concerned that its acts be kept secret from its intended victims as it is that the American people not know of them."
-–U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark
Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse. -
--Mark Twain.
"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government."
-- Thomas Paine
"They don’t ... deserve the same guarantees and safeguards that would be used for an American citizen going through the normal judicial process."
— VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY
"The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission - founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller - and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."
-- Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, Ph.D., former German defense ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner
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"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
--Jean Paul Marat, 18th Century French Visionary (and revolutionary), murdered in his bathtub by Royalist Charlotte Corday
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"If the truth is that ugly -- which it is -- then we do have to be careful about the way that we tell the truth. But to somehow say that telling the truth should be avoided because people may respond badly to the truth seems bizarre to me."
--Chuck Skoro, Deacon, St. Paul's Catholic Church
"It is not the case as the naive might think that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, rather . . . it's the essence of democracy. The point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what we would now call a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter because you've got a bludgeon over their heads and you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard you have this problem—it may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule, and therefore you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda, manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusion. Various ways of either marginalizing the public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion."
—Dr. Noam Chomsky, from Manufacturing Consent , censored ex parte from WUTK radio's Alternative Nation, Summer 2001.
In another example of the ever-growing censorship in the United States, readers are reporting that Noam Chomsky's new book, "9/11" is being pulled from book store shelves. |
