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

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (135757)	6/5/2004 5:13:29 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

I made the assumption that if you try to forcefully suppress big ideas with holes in them, they'll grow stronger, while if you take the pressure off they'll die a natural death. I'm so convinced of this aspect of human and political nature that it's too often an assumption in my thinking. Nice idea, if you can just leave the bad idea alone to founder on its own. However, if the bad idea in question involves world conquest, as did Nazism and Communism, then you have a few practical problems on hand, such as how to survive until the big idea loses its glamour. We defeated Nazism militarilly, and we contained Communism with a long Cold War and a series of proxy wars (we most certainly did NOT just 'leave it alone'). Go ask the inhabitants of Eastern Europe if they liked our hands off policy. Also, in the real world, ideas tend to lose glamour when they fail to achieve good results. If you can just leave the idea alone to produce economic disaster in one country, that is simpler (though rough luck on the inhabitants), but again, if the idea involves war, as islamo-fascism certainly does, nothing deglamorizes faster than defeat. Or were we to just keep letting Al Qaeda knock down skyscrapers until they tired of the idea on their own? Nice theory, certain practical difficulties.