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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (90125)	4/5/2003 5:03:53 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

>>Just as no one is forcing an American to eat Thai, or buy Japanese cars<< Seems like everything I buy these days comes from someplace else. Made in China. Grown in Chile. I think the biggest problem in the Middle East that they need to address is that they don't really make things. Almost all the income in Saudi Arabia is from oil.

To: D. Long who wrote (90125)	4/5/2003 11:24:39 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Derek, Please see the long article I posted to CB. It does a good job of discussing some of the issues. There is no such thing as exporting goods without culture. There is an interesting book (well interesting to us engineers <g>) called Soul of the Machine. It may be worth your reading. The short version is that any manufactured good is the product of the culture that produces it. It was made to answer the needs of that culture. And when you use that product, you are forced to make cultural concessions. I assume when you say others are free to buy our goods or not you mean we do not send soldiers to force them to buy our goods. This is actually not true (see the example of Japan and the massive cultural changes it brought to their society). It is an interesting case study both in the 1860s and the of course the post WW2. But more often than not we do not have to send soldiers to bring this radical shift. We simply support political opposition in doing so (various coup d'eta and revolutions) or the threat of supporting such opposition. And sometimes we just buy out the politicians. A look at the Enron saga in India may be illustrative (any of our Indian friends want to elaborate?). We work very hard to bring about a system which can only lead to our way. There is nothing free about it, though it is often subtle. Sun Tzu