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

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (113305)	8/29/2003 6:48:01 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

<In the 14th century, the Black Plague killed 1/3 of the world's population. That was the dark ages. (your emphasis)> American's ignorance of their own history, is only exceeded by their ignorance of everyone else's history. You toss around historical comparisons, while placing events in the wrong millenium. The Dark Ages were from the fall of the Western Roman Empire (409 AD, Alaric the Visogoth sacks Rome, or 476 AD, the last western emperor is deposed by a German king ) to about 1066 (Norman invasion of England). No historian calls the 14th Century part of the Dark Ages. ahs.cqu.edu.au The Dark Ages were confined to one tiny part of the world, the peninsulas hanging off the western end of Asia (Europe), where the Christian barbarians lived. No other part of the world was dark: The Chinese Tang empire (618-907 AD) was united, prosperous, and scientifically advanced. The Muslim areas, from Spain to Central Asia, were also enjoying prosperity and growing populations (they traded regularly with China and India), and peaceful coexistence between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. If the Muslims hadn't preserved the texts from ancient Rome and Greece, during Europe's Dark Ages, they would have been lost. Nothing particularly "dark" about the history of India, Africa, or the Americas, from 500-1000 AD. Europe was, then, what sub-Saharan Africa is today. The rest of the world was doing fine.

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (113305)	8/29/2003 7:27:17 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

<...the sour misanthropic rap you have never tired of feeding us...> I champion the Enlightenment, Life, Kant, Ghandi, Jefferson, Asherah. I am a treeist, not a DeathWorshipper. I hold up a mirror, showing my own nation's true history and foreign policy (backed up with endless numbers, dates, details, all with links) and you shoot the messenger. I don't believe in the endless sacrificing of our wealth and our children to the Gods of Power and Violence. There are plenty on this thread, championing the ideas of Death (to fix all problems), assassination, AllWarAllTheTime, TotalControl, tribalism, demonization of the Other. "My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober." G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (113305)	8/29/2003 7:55:29 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<...smearing another load of excrement on the US and Israel...> Once America washes off all the excrement heaped on her, by the Imperialists and DeathWorshippers and Realists-Not, perhaps then we can have a foreign policy guided by the principles in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. I am the true patriot, as I want the words "democracy" and "freedom" and "sovereignty" to be more than empty slogans. I want us to win this war against violent religious fundamentalism (and I don't mean just the Islamic variety), and that means winning a global battle of hearts and minds, and that (in turn) means words have to start matching actions. The current hypocrisy in the conduct of our foreign policy will lead to our defeat, unless it is radically changed. I posted: <First faith, then facts. This is the motto. Some facts must be ignored, some facts must be stretched and stretched, to cover everything we need them to cover. If the existing organizational machinery of fact-production and fact-stretching prove inadequate for the task at hand, then people with greater Faith must be recruited (i.e., the Cabal). It's like growing a garden: you pick the weeds, prune and shape, fertilize with funding and legitimacy, and harvest all the facts you need, of whatever variety and flavor your Faith requires. First Faith, then facts.> and <But we already know that Faith is far more powerful than facts. With enough Faith, you can create facts, while the opposite is not true. With enough faith, we can create entire industries for the purpose of creating and propagating our elaborate National Myths. With enough Faith, we can create FactsOnTheGround, as the Pilgrims did, as Cortez did in the blood-stained Halls of Montezuma, as Sharon is doing on the hilltops of Samaria. No facts are pre-existing in the world around us, we don't discover facts, we manufacture them. They are ephemeral, malleable, plastic; servants for us to create, use, and discard at will. First Faith, then Facts. Or Ignorance is Strength.> and then <"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)> The bolded part above, is to make my irony even more obvious. See it now? youcanleadahorsetowater...