From: Chris Taylor (Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed 30 Apr 2003 - 09:51:48 GMT
> Hey Guys
> Don't blame me for starting this. I wanted to talk about memetic ice-cream
> flavours.
Lol ;)
> There are indeed many places, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Iran, Syria, Libya,
> the Sudan and North Korea prominent among them, where people are
> denied basic human rights and political representation. We should
> indeed be in favor of doing what we can to help them achieve these. Of
> course, different situations with different countries are amenable to
> differing means, but there are many worse and less altruistic ambitions
> one can have than the ambition of working to liberate the oppressed
> and enslaved of the world, to be free to choose the course of their own
> lives and the selection of their own preferred memes from a free
> personal and informational market of alternatives.
> Oh, yes: Haiti had no oil, but now Duvalier is gone. Serbia and Bosnia
> had no oil but now Milosevic is gone and Karadzic and Mladic are out of
> power and in hiding. And if you had a gun to the head of Hitler in 1935
> and knew what the next ten years would bring if you didn't pull the
> trigger, how would you explain your principled nonaction to the families
> of all the Holocaust dead? There are always exceptions to rules: these
> exceptions do not PROVE rules (that is a misquote of Aristotle), but
> PROBE the scope and parameters of rules by means of their status as
> exceptions.
Yeah I think the difference is that the realpolitik of all this is
obscured when the claim is made that freedom (a late comer it has to be
said, in the I-word war warm up) is the cause (not China, not N Korea,
not Saudi, not large parts of Africa etc.). The US is decidedly not
doing a world audit and building a list of places that need sorting out.
There _is_ anyway a valid threshold for intervention where there is no
threat to other nation states; such as was (rather late in the day) seen
to have been surpassed in Rwanda/Burundi. Bosnia was a hand-wringing
mess for 10 years, where we stood and watched ethnic slaughter on a huge
scale because we (esp. Europe) wouldn't commit significant force. We
only bothered with it at all because it was _in Europe_ (roughly
equivalent to Mexico having a huge war - I think the people might start
getting twitchy between Texas and California). Kosovo (the media
friendly bomb fest that didn't actually remove Milosevic anyway) was
partly about Clinton too. We should have intervened in Bosnia anyway
(hard, and early) because several of the fragments of yugoslavia had
been recognised as states by then (through yet more realpolitik -
Germany recognises Croatia, Britain gets a euro opt out, others
recognise other bits in response etc.), so making it a conflict between
countries (fair game).
As for Hitler; he should have been squashed the moment he put troops
into the Rhineland. Territorial breach -> war. Simple. Something else to
blame the French for (une plaisanterie, mes amis).
The Duvaliers were allowed to operate for so long they formed a mini
dynasty, then were eventually kicked again partly because of Clinton's
own political situation and partly because it was so grim for so long so
close to the US.
There aren't a whole helluva lot of examples of virtuous intervention
beyond those two are there? Maybe Somalia, a couple of others (I'm
struggling). There sure are a lot of the vested interest kind left to
list though. Allende is a name that springs to mind. The way Italy was
run from 1945 up to the last few years (CIA/mob carve up basically) is
another great one. Then there's all the stuff Britain and the other Euro
powers did of which Suez was kind of the last hurrah - often much more
brutal than anything the US has managed, just long enough ago that all
the participants are dead...
To close can I just add that my objection is solely to a bag of policies
and those that promote them, not to any creed, people or state per se.
Cheers, Chris.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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