How Many Russians Do You Hate?
If you couldn’t continue hating someone who hurt you, why would you hate any one of billions of people you’ll never know? It’s foolish, a waste of time and energy. Most people pursue their own opportunities, living and letting live...especially people they don’t know. It’s an important element of a well-adjusted personality. Wars and conflict get all the press, but the unrecognized history of the world is actually a more salutary chronicle. Through the generations, people in large measure have lived peaceably together, even people of different races, nationalities, and creeds. Peace, cooperation, and mutually beneficial exchange, not war and conflict, account for humanity’s journey from cave to skyscraper.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article, please click the above link.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article, please click the above link.
For number two:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/opi...
Hussein's Baathists were Sunni, which is the minority in Iraq. He basically kept a lid on Iraq through the bloody force, especially against the Kurds, frequent purges, and keeping his own family and clan in most of the positions of power. When he was deposed and executed, the country basically fell apart. Many Sunnis, dispossed by the Shiite majority, reconstituted themselves into the Islamic State.
1. Saudi Arabia is Sunni, and Israel aligns with the Sunnis
A lot of conspiracies around 9/11 theorize that Israel played an active role in the 9/11 attacks to help certain US gov't authorities further their plans in the Middle East. I find this interesting if I can come to the same conclusions that you make in this statement.
2. Osama bin Laden, a devout Wahhabist (Sunni sect) hated secular Hussein.
The second one asserting that Hussein was a secular having ruled over a predominately Shiite sect of people in Iraq since the 80's. Something's wrong there because I would think civil war would have been going on during Hussein entire reign in Iraq. Great information and detail by the way. I agree with your sympathy for Vietnam vets, but mainly because they were mistreated when they came back home. I still give my respect to any man willing to fight for his country's freedoms even if the government has been corrupted by certain individuals to make war with another country. You are still correct in that peace, cooperation, and mutually beneficial exchange is the way that man should strive to live his life. You chose star wars, I'll pick Dr. Strange for a nice quote of the day: We can never lose our demons, only learn to live above them.
You ask me to discuss your points and I will. As I discuss, I will make assertions that I have investigated and I believe are amply supported. However, I will not cite source material until the end of this reply, for ease of reading.
First off, I must admit that the paragraph from my article you cite would have been better if, when I talked about stoking hate, I had said hate not just against another country and its citizens, but against its leaders as well.
Sadamm Hussein had been an ally of the US in the 1980s when he made war against Iran, a US enemy since 1979 after the Iranian Revolution deposed the US-installed puppet, Shah Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi. The US provided arms, including, it has been alleged, the gas which Hussein used on his own people.
George W. Bush, his team of neoconservatives, and the US's putative allies Saudi Arabia and Israel, were bent on remaking the Middle East. Long before 9/11, the neconservatives had envisioned widespread regime change, especially in the Shiite nations of Iran, Iraq, and Syria (Saudi Arabia is Sunni, and Israel aligns with the Sunnis).
After 9/11, the US moved first against Afghanistan. This was perhaps justifiable, because that was where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were then located. The US invasion of Iraq was justified on two grounds: that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he had aided al Qaeda's 9/11 attack. The first was later discredited by both events (no such weapons were found) and subsequent revelations that the intelligence had been cooked. The intelligence community had given Bush and Dick Cheney not the truth, but what they wanted to hear.
The second argument has been discredited as well. No credible evidence has been found to link Hussein to 9/11. Other assertions have been made that Iran was involved. Both assertions are on their face implausible. Osama bin Laden, a devout Wahhabist (Sunni sect) hated secular Hussein, and it is doubtful that Shiite Iran would have aided Sunni al Qaeda. The only state actor for which the evidence indicates involvement would be that of Saudi Arabia. Most of the 9/11 coconspirators were from Saudi Arabia, and there is evidence that the they were aided by wealthy and powerful patrons within Saudi Arabia, some part of the government, some not.
Hussein was no threat to the US and the Bush administration knew it. However, a massive campaign to demonize Hussein, to make Americans hate him, (admittedly he was no angel but he had managed to hold Iraq together), was undertaken by the US government and mainstream media. The US invaded and deposed Hussein, and he was eventually executed.
Fourteen years later, the US is still in Iraq and Syria as well. Anyone who paid attention to the Iraq war recognizes that the US is using the same tactics against Syria's Bashar al-Assad that it did against Hussein: cooked intelligence, unproven accusations of atrocities, arming and otherwise supporting local guerrillas of dubious pedigrees and tactics, and other regime change machinations. In Syria, the US has actually armed and supported al Qaeda and its offshoots, ISIS and the al Nusra front. So we have been allied with the al Qaeda, the terrorist group we originally went after in 2002 in Afghanistan, and we're still in Afghanistan to boot!
Since World War II, the US has not conclusively won any of its military engagements. We've been in Afghanistan 15 years and Iraq 14. We're going on 6 in Syria. US-inspired wars have created millions of casualties and refugees, fomented chaos in the Middle East and Northern Africa, and stoked the terrorism they were ostensibly meant to stop. All without making anyone in the US one bit safer.
I have far more sympathy for Vietnam vets than I do for those who have fought in the Middle East. The Vietnam vets arguably didn't know better when they went off to war, and some of them were drafted. While kids nowadays get sucked into the military with the same slogans and jingoism kids have always got sucked into the military, the US's shameful record of interventionism is now clear and the armed forces are all volunteer. Anyone who is going to volunteer to kill or risk being killed for the US government at least owes it to themselves to investigate what that government has been doing the last 60 years.
I guess I went over the limit and got cut off. I will give you my supporting material in another post.
"Hate is stoked to overcome the natural desires for peace and prosperity and aversion to war. As a leader, you don’t sit the citizens down one-by-one and calmly explain to them why they should hate whomever you’ve chosen to fight. Rather, you make a frenzied appeal to a crowd, and let crowd psychology work its woeful wonders, with ostracism and worse for the few rejecting the appeal."
You mentioned the Iraqi war as an example of this hate to go to war, but I believe we weren't stoked by hate at all. Those that fought this war went to that war of their own volition because they felt the need (duty?) to protect our way of life here in the US. More than any other war that the US has entered into, the war in Iraq has changed people's minds about how we ought to view our soldiers returning home. There is a pride and respect for our soldiers that we never showed them prior to the war in Iraq and I think it is because we all recognized that we went to war not out of hate, but out of the need to protect our way of life. Protection is what the government is about, its what the state should only be about, and we should be coerced to pay taxes for that protection because we recognize that we can't do it on our own. We would like to think we can, but even the constitution points out the following:
"we hold these truths to be self-evident,... That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,"
I understand this to mean that the men that created the constitution realized that we need government for our own protection, because we can't do it by ourselves.
Again, I'm a big fan of your writings, and I would love for you to discuss these points with me.
Or how to love an enemy fanatically sworn to either convert, enslave and kill you, that last multiple choice bit most likely the end result regardless.
No need to waste energy hating evil fiends who simply need to be blown off the planet.
Mystic me can get into that. Fly in the warthogs! Rat-tat-tat! Boom! Hallelujah!
they benefit from wars with no risk to themselves.
Excellent, well done.
A simple saying comes to mind
"Be careful what you wish for"
the left's attack on free speech.
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