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

To: bacchus_ii who wrote (122379)	12/28/2003 4:38:26 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi bacchus ii; Okay, we're vicious, but on the human scale of things, we're just not vicious enough to run an occupation. Let me put this into perspective. The Germans recently attempted to kill every Jew in the world. The Russians recently forced every Chechen in the world to move to Siberia (or something like that). We've done some nasty stuff, but as far as state policy, we just don't have the inclination to commit genocide. This country's theme is one of universality and welcome. Our statue is the Statue of Liberty: "Bring me your ..." Our motto is freedom. Yes, we misapply our cherished beliefs, but other nations begin with cherished beliefs that make ours look like Mother Theresa. All humans tend towards racism, but the United States does not have a racist creed as its central organizing tenet (like Hitler's Germany did). All humans tend towards envy, but the United States does not have a communist creed of communal rights over property rights like the Soviet Union did. Over time, all nations are slowly becoming less vicious. For example, the US did move enemy populations by force (the Indians have many examples). It's unfair to compare what the US did in the 19th century with what Russia did in the 20th century. And the many examples of stuff that went on in far distant foreign battlefields are not good examples against us either. Those were far and distant lands, and the American people knew little of what went on there, at the time. And when the people did find out, there was massive protests in this country. Sure we're vicious, but not as vicious as the countries that have successfully run occupations. If we truly had been as vicious as the Germans, we'd still be in Vietnam. And if the Russians hadn't gotten nicer over the years, they'd have genocided the Afghans into submission. That neither of these happened is due to the fact that the US and USSR were founded on internationalist theories. That is, the Nazis were nationalistic, they truly had no desire to convert the Poles to their way of thinking. There was nothing that the Jews could have done that would have pleased the Nazis except to die. With the US and USSR, the underlying beliefs were in the inevitable victory of their way of life, a victory that was inevitable due to its superiority. When the superiority of communism was disproved to too many Russians, the USSR collapsed. The US still has its dreams and it continues on. But just because our dreams are exaggerations of the truth does not mean that our foreign policy can be chosen without regard to these subtle restrictions. And one of those restrictions is that we are not a particularly vicious people. Just aren't. That's why there is so little support for occupying Iraq in this country. Already, with an occupation only a few months old, support for the occupation is only around 50% or so. This is not the polls of a nationalist country that will ever kill the millions of people. Most of the neocons still live in a fantasy land where the Iwaqi people wuv us, and only a few Saddam loyalists cause trouble for us. (See neocon's latest fantasy reading of the Iraqi polls: #reply-19633244 The people advocating preparation for a deliberate act of genocide are not neoconservatives. They're old time military thinkers. They may scare you, but they're only speaking the truth, in that to win in Iraq we would have to kill millions: unclewest, December 27, 2003 ... And still that may not be enough. We may be yet forced to totally take an entire population off the map. ... #reply-19632287 hawkmoon, August 21, 2003 ... THAT'S WHY WE MUST BE INVOLVED IN THE MIDDLE EAST!! We simply have no other choice except to quarantine the entire region and cut them off from interaction with the rest of the world until they die off to "manageable" population levels, of finally realize (as in Iran) that fundamentalists are just as corrupt and inept as their secular leaders.. ... #reply-19231020 But don't worry about these guys. They're not the center of the neocon movement or the Republican party. The swing voters will see these guys as fascist nutcases, and as the fact that only their proposals have any chance of winning in Iraq, those swing voters will swing and both parties will be forced to find some sort of "peace with honor". -- Carl

To: bacchus_ii who wrote (122379)	12/28/2003 5:01:27 PM
From: GST	Respond to of 281500

Hawkmoon will tell you that "democracies" are peace loving and never start wars or do anything evil -- you must be mistaken about Vietnam -- nothing bad could have happened there due to our actions because the US is a democracy. Once you know that a country is a democracy, you can safely assume that looking into the facts of the war is a waste of time. I am sure that the US did nothing wrong in Vietnam and merely flew hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam in self-defense. We should be proud of all the killing that was accomplished in Vietnam -- otherwise we would have had to fight the Vietnamese on the streets of America, just like we would have had to fight the Iraqis on the streets of America if we had not wisely sent half our military over there to kill people and occupy their country. Thank god for self-defense. If we shot children it was in self-defense because they might grow up to be communists. If we shot old women, they probably gave birth to communists. If we killed entire families they probably were concealing information about were we could find more communists to kill -- serves them all right for living there in the first place. Thankfully we did not kill all the commnists as it turns out that there are hundreds of millions of them living in China stocking the shelves at Walmart -- those are nice communists so we are not going to kill them at the moment -- but killing millions of people for calling themselves communists in Vietnam -- we had no choice, it was "self-defense".