From: Lawrence DeBivort (debivort@umd5.umd.edu)
Date: Fri 22 Nov 2002 - 19:25:57 GMT
Greetings, Wade,
Well, you've missed some missable fireworks!
You suggest that countries just are that way, naturally. But the US has done
much better at discernible times in its history, and has IMO, genuinely
provided a beacon of hope for the peoples of the world. Wilson's Fourteen
Points, the League of Nations, the Marshall Plan, the UN are all examples of
where America has been at its best in terms of putting aside the leverages
of raw power in favor of building the kind of world in which all can
participate. And we have done this internally as well. Our Constitution and
Bill of Rights, to generous welcome of refugees, the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
and the national repudiation of McCarthyism all stand out as examples of
this. Of course, these various examples can be criticized on various grounds
(they went too far, they didn't go far enough) etc. But in the main, they
are indicators of greatness, and suggestive of even greater greatness that
we can legitimately aspire to. Is this too idealistic? Some would say yes,
but I wonder if the contrary view might not be too cynical.
With Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Reed, et al, this country's
pendulum has swung away from participation and respect for others, and
embraces the macho pretensions of power, in ways that frighten Kissinger and
Scowcroft, even. It reflects the German power-is-everything ideology of the
1910s. So while I do not share the notion that 'it was ever thus', I do
think that we can do far better. Oddly, it is fear that drives much of this
'power is all' attitude. We have the guns and, by God, we'll bomb them until
they give up. This kind of thinking also infected our Nixon policies in Viet
Nam, where we achieved the kinds of results that will probably attend our
current pursuit of that kind of policy. The irony is that the fear impels
some of our policy-makers to adopt the very actions that will lead to more
harm being done to the US. In other words, these policies and actions are
likely to prove self-defeating.
Nixon, at one now-famous moment, suggested to Kissinger that he, Nixon,
should feign being crazy, to scare the Viet Namese into compliance. We can
only hope that President Bush is feigning such, now, not that the resulting
actions will work, but because we can always hope for an eventual recovery
of his faculties and the adoption of more effective policies....
Cheers,
Lawry
-----Original Message-----
From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf Of
Wade Smith
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 12:59 PM
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Islam and Europe and Joe
On Friday, November 22, 2002, at 12:37 , Lawrence DeBivort wrote:
> international bullying in the form of
> power-based relationships.
You know, I have not been following this discussion, at all, so, this is
only a comment upon this one thought.
From what I know of history, the entire realm of human experience has
always included inter-tribal bullying in the form of power-based
relationships.
As in that piece about chimps I forwarded, it is totally obvious that we
are genetic and behavioral continuations of fierce and unforgiving and
oftimes horrifically cruel primates.
Every time someone makes the claim that usanians are somehow unique and
unprecedented in their 'bullying' I have only to remark that the Maori
were not usanians or even capitalists- but that is only the first of
over a million examples of 'bullying', even total genocide, that were
not performed by usanians.
Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's how and where you are, not who you are,
that determines how far you will wage madness. We're all mad in that way.
- Wade
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For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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