Of course the various components of virtue are higher purpose factors in human life: <do not try an sell VVV as some higher purpose.. > You and ElM have an anti-Anglo bias which is nothing less than racist. I do admit to using the r word for fun because it's considered a winning argument without having to do any reasoning. So I don't really consider you racist in the extreme sense that it originally was: "Let's exterminate that race". "No, let's just enslave and eat them".
But seriously, the fashionable denigration [which I hasten to add is not used with racist intentions] of Anglos and the British Empire is a rewriting of history along the lines of the rewritings by the USSR and others who prefer a different record of what actually happened.
The American Empire is along similar lines to the British Empire, but We the People of the American Empire don't even get to vote though we pay taxes ["No taxation without representation" was good for overthrowing the British Empire which wouldn't allow slavery and murder of the locals was chucked out some time ago] and we do not get an American passport unlike in the British Empire which made all the local yokels fully-fledged British subjects too.
With the loss of the British Empire, we were all reduced back to tribal, parochial, provincial, isolated enclaves with far more circumscribed globe-roaming abilities.
While it's true that the American Empire brought us My Lai and Lt William Calley, along with many other horror stories, blunders and self-dealing crimes, the overall effect is very good indeed; one can buy a Big Mac with a Coca Cola almost anywhere. Just kidding. There are many more positive attributes of the American Empire, which is really just the British Empire from a different centre of gravity brought about because of the heavy migration of British people to the USA [and Canada which is a semi-autonomous province of the USA like Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan are with China].
Yes, the British Empire had its share of nasty violence. Heck, even with a stable civil order, we get problems just in downtown with various people in government committing crimes of all sorts. How about the Canadian Colonel who murdered two women and committed other crimes who has now been convicted and gaoled? Insanely evil stuff. guardian.co.uk That's in the here and now. Imagine him in action in conflicts far from anywhere with no video cameras and a free hand to decide what to do to suppress the local opposition.
It's the VVV higher order minds which save us from wanton evil like that and the petty kleptocratic crimes of local rulers which are as harmful in a more corrosive way.
Mqurice |
