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

To: Neocon who wrote (153208)	12/3/2004 4:40:56 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The colonial records of nations like Britain is a mixed one at best. Whether the actor was Britain or Portugal or France or indeed the United States, the reasons for colonialization were always too uncouth and vulgar to be used as justification, so many myths were created along the way. In my view nothing has changed, evidenced by the latest example. How a colonizing power behaves is really quite irrelevant though, since the rational for occupying a nation is rarely that which is stated. "Excuse me, we want to rape your land and exploit your people" is in the end not any different than "shut up or be shot" -- a level of politeness and decorum does not change what is happening. Virtually all such projects and experiments do not live on, and frequently when the occupying power leaves, people start dying anew. Death in, death out, its a nasty business. Regarding the onset of liberal democracy, we are in agreement largely I suspect, but perhaps where we disagree is that I do not consider our current system all that democratic. I am a passionate democrat in the base sense, not the partisan sense, of the word. What we have now is not much further evolved than what we had in World War II or before. Only baby steps have been taken if viewing the big picture, and given the advancements in knowledge and communications since then, we should really be much farther advanced than we are. My primary issue is that we are taking steps backwards now.