Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: ThirdEye who wrote (107869)	7/24/2003 9:50:30 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 281500

You can attribute it to the liberating effect of alternative news sources on "the truth." Not a new phenomenon. I've been wandering around in various controversial topics that are hundreds of years old, and the disinformation back and forth is almost impenetrable. Jason Blair is an innocent compared to real spin doctors - he was just lazy - and who knows who to believe anymore?

To: ThirdEye who wrote (107869)	7/24/2003 11:01:23 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<they feel they are already in the far-reaching grip of some kind of unseen political and economic forces that sap their power from them> 96% of the world is not U.S. citizens. They are, most of them, ruled by two governments: their own local national one, and the U.S. government. They may (or may not) have some influence over their local government, but they have no power over the U.S. government, or institutions like the World Bank and IMF, which serve U.S. interests. This is a new thing in history. There has never been an empire, with the Reach, and pervasiveness, of today's American Empire. The Roman Empire was tiny, huddled around the Med, in comparison. The only Empire that comes close, is the 19th Century British Empire. But the British usually ruled through proxies, and let the vast majority of people in their colonies live their lives unchanged. And, even at the height of its power, the Brits had other Powers to deal with, the French and Russians and Americans and Germans. Today, there is the U.S.......and that's it. There are no other Powers. Take a map of the world, and put a pin everywhere U.S. soldiers are operating, and compare that to the Reach of other historical Empires. And our influence is not just wider, but deeper than anything seen before in history. It's not just our military power, it's our economic, social, cultural power also. This is where the alienation comes from, the sense of powerlessness, of existing at the whim of vast distant forces. It's not some twisted pathology. It's real.

To: ThirdEye who wrote (107869)	7/25/2003 8:32:15 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 281500

I think that is a reasonable point. I do think, though, that you are not considering the historical persistence of patterns of thought that are not necessarily directly inspired by current events, but are transmitted generationally. I knew a woman who grew up in Italy during the '40s, and was sent to an elite school. Although she had married a GI and come to America, she hotly defended Mussolini (it was all Hitler's fault, you see). I would bet that at least some of her children still harbor a favorable impression of Mussolini. There are still a lot of people in several of these countries who were Nazis or Communists or Fascists, or whose fathers or grandfathers were. I know plenty of Southerners, although the number is diminishing, who consider the Civil War to have been a War of Northern Aggression, or Second War of Independence. How much of this is simply the persistence of such cultural narratives?