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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (7005)	12/16/2005 12:23:13 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 540800

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin Boy is this an overquoted Ben Franklin remark. Of course we should value our liberty but there are times that the President must act. Hell there are times that a CIA agent must act. If you believe we are at war (WOT) what bush did was certainly appropriate. Should measures be taken to prevent abuse--hell yeah but to ignore the fact we are at war makes on sense. Also your implicit comparison of what bush did with how nazis came to power also does not go unnoticed. If we are truly in the center over here we should not make such comparison. And German folks didnt vote for hitler out of fear. They bought into what he was saying because he was pushing their scapegoat button. Bush has never gone nativist, anti Muslim in this war. A better comparison would be the concentration camps for Japanese Americans during WW2 set up by FDR. Mike

To: Dale Baker who wrote (7005)	12/16/2005 12:28:02 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540800

Because it was "necessary" for "safety", the time-worn excuse. I was thinking of the German issue as I typed but decided it would be a bit too much to invoke it here. I came to it through some recent reading I've been doing of Paul Berman's arguments. He wants to argue, in the two books I've been reading, A Tale of Two Utopias and Power and Idealists, that the worldwide student movement of the 60s had two beneficial legacies. The first is the obvious one of a huge boost to the civil rights movement, also the movement for gender equality, and finally the gay movement. But, and this is what interested me the most, he pointed to Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors without Borders, Vaclav Havel, who we all know, Joshua Fisher, the German foreign minister in the Schroder government, and others, as rethinking what troubled them. They began to focus on the worldwide struggle for human rights. A kind of sliding from a focus on class struggle to liberalism's classic "rights" arguments. This led them to a focus on the struggle against totalitarianism. From this argument Berman gets to an argument for the Iraq invasion. He's clearly more than alarmed by the way the invasion was pursued but, before it took place, he argued for something like that to get rid of Hussein. George Packer tells this story well in his Assassins at the Gate. It's an interesting cut into the Iraq arguments. And, of course, Berman argues that much of the ideological underpinnings in the jihadists arguments for what are essentially totalitarian governments derives from European sources not from the Koran. You can find a list of Berman's books here: amazon.com And, of course, I've now pulled my old copy of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism from the shelves. Some of you may recall tekboy from postings on the early incarnations of Ken's (Faultline) FADG thread. Tek's wife, last time I talked with him, had moved her intellectual focus from early twentieth century democratic socialism to the intellectual relations between twentieth century fascism and jihadist conceptions of the state. That was atleast two years ago.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (7005)	12/16/2005 12:32:12 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540800

I should have put this in the thread header. At a minium I see a frequent need to repeat it. One more thought on this point, Dale. I vote to put it in the thread header. It might reduce the number of certain kinds of posts.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (7005)	12/16/2005 1:21:54 PM
From: neolib	Respond to of 540800

Because it was "necessary" for "safety", the time-worn excuse. It is interesting to see the same attitude in relationship to environmental issues. I was rather shocked this last year to hear that some farmer in my area sprayed some nasty contact pesticide over his entire pasture because they had seen one rattlesnake. Flood control structures on many rivers in this area have also enabled safer living in floodplains, while significantly degrading important ecosystems. A certain mindset does not accept personal risk when others can bare the brunt of safety measures.