The greatness of the United States is unique—and not a model to be exported by narrow-minded nationalists.
Orwell wrote that nationalism is partly “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects.” He said it’s not to be confused with patriotism, which Orwell defined as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.”
3 comments:
I support Orwell's view here. And as long as the Hussienites, and Islami-KKKers, and Baathists, and other tyrants only hammer their "way of life" onto people within their own country, I support not invading those countries, and permitting whichever brute has the most non-democratic power to impose retardation and suffering on whomever he pleases.
But when some of the brutes from those countries export their brutality to free societies, and attempt to impose their retarded "way of life" onto these free societies (for example, demanding that they forbid their artists from publishing cartoons of mohammad, executing artists such as Salman Rusdie or Theo Van Gough, flying planes into sky scrapers), I believe that invasion becomes an option that falls outside of Orwell's observation.
Now, you can very accurately point out that Hussein had nothing to do with 911, Rushdie's fatwa, and Van Gough's execution. And you could further rationally argue that the best response to these tyranical actions is to attack each's proximate source. That approach may indeed prove supperior to the existing approach, another one that I find rational and worth a shot: act against the larger swamp within which these brutes find safety and support, and which breeds these views. That involves imposing democracy on Arabia, just as the US did to previous retarded nations Germany and Japan, an action that transformed those societies from hostile, depressed, and retarded into peaceful, prosperous, and advanced.
Now, Approach 1, favored by Nadir and Pat Buchannon, closely approximates the approach that the US has taken for the past few decades: tolerating and working with retarded dictatorships in Arabia. Well, that approach resulted in 911. 911 was so devistating that many Americans who otherwise supported the status quo to seek a drastic change. Approach 1 would have been somewhat different, in that Nadir and Pat Buchannon would have had the US remove all its military from Arabia, including Isreal, which they would have the US stop supporting. Had Bush (or Pres. Gore) selected that choice, I would have supported it, to see if it worked. I would not have instantly opposed it, and scanned every headline for evidence of failure, and found failure with every development. (Does any reader of this forum believe that Nadir's view on the war would have changed had Bush found banned WMDs? Had no turture occured? Afterall, Nadir and the other peaceniks all predicted disasterous Iraqi elections, but when this prediction proved false, their anti-war stance was un-dented. And what about those peacenik predictions of WMDs getting used by Hussein during the invasion, killing thousands of US troops?)
Having chosen this path, Approach 2, now comes time to select the nations to invade. How about Saudi Arabia? What would the rationale be, and what would the payoff be? Surely you cannot justify invading SA due to most of the 911 strikers hailing from there. That would justify invading any country whose citizens commit crimes abroad. And which would be more likely: a democratic Saudi Arabia inspiring the people of Iraq to depose Hussein, with his army and its perception as the mightiest in Arabia, and erect a democracy? Or a democratic Iraq -- its former military certifiably defanged -- influencing the people of SA to depose the goofy royal family and erect a democracy?
And what pretext existed for invading SA? Or Jordan? Or Syria? None of their govts existed only due to a cease fire agreement... that they were demonstrably violating. None already one large chunk of land autonomously being run by democratic sophisticates as Iraq had in its Kurdish region, and none had another chunk of land socially dominated by a people who had risen up only ten years before, who felt that "the US had let them down by not previously invading," as Iran had in its southern region.
Remember, "leaving things as they were" led to 911. Merely pulling all US troops and support for Isreal would not have solved the problem of misery in Arabia stemming from totalitarianism. Would capitulating to the islama-KKKers -- who list US bases and Isreali support amoung their demands -- really have appeased them, so they would only impose their disgusting "way of life" on people within their borders? Maybe so.
But maybe doing to Iraq what FDR did to Germany and what Lincoln did to Mississipi will indeed ultimately prove the better choice. Even if not, those who selected this choice did so for rational reasons. The people who insisted that the invasion itself would be a disaster with enormous US casualties (and WMD strikes from Hussein!), and who predicted disasterous, violent, low-turnout elections, we should have 100%, 24-hour-a-day confidence in their insistance that democracy, prosperity, and peace will not result from Bush's efforts? I don't have 100% confidence that Bush's effort will work, as indicated in my writings here.
You completely ignored the argument of the essay posted, and just blathered on about nonsense that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts,” said Orwell. “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage-torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians-which does not change its moral color when committed by ‘our’ side.… The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
You just proved this point.
Back at 'cha, Nadir: blathering, missing *my* point, etc. And this is some "nightmare" we've got going on here, with millions every year from around the world struggling to live it.
But to your point: All of the actions you point to in the above re-quotation were used by the US in WWII and the US Civil War. And they are all actions that *you* condone, provided of course that those who impliment them do so against the US. I, for one, have objected to any torture by US troops, and have called for a very lenient forebarance program to end violence in Iraq. Do I still qualify as a bad "nationalist"?
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