Oh gosh, I'm getting lectured by an arrogant american about airs of superiority? *boggle*
What's next, lions and lambs sleeping together?
You seem to be equally arrogant if not more so.
What does it matter if it was or not when it happened? It and many other similar incidents over the years, including in Iraq. When you send soldiers with weapons into a place you have a responsibility. Just saying "it wasn't government policy" when scores of civilians lie dead doesn't really cut it in my book. Apparantly it does in yours, but I fail to see how that disclaimer makes us so much better than the terrorists.
The military and the government can't control the actions of every individual soldier and unlike sponsors of terrorism the U.S. didn't arm them with the intent that they would commit atrocious acts. In contrast, nations that sponsor terrorism do so intentionally or at least knowingly.
Besides, it was certainly a government policy to blindly and callously carpet-bomb the countryside, carpet-bomb a neighboring country even, and douse huge areas of the jungle with poisons whose effects linger to this day.
When you say callously and blindly, you are implying that it was done in a random manner without targeting or any sort of rhyme or reason. Could you back that up?
The bombs linger too, I might add. Unexploded munitions from decades ago still turn up from time to time, and sometimes blow up a couple people or kids.
That is just part of any armed conflict. It is regrettable and unfortunate but does not mean that the only good and proper military policy is one of complete pacifism.
Oh my god... What in your book ISN'T "perfectly justified" then?
What action can't you undertake in a war as long as it reduces enemy morale, shooting artillery shells loaded with mustard gas into crowded neighborhoods must be OK, it would cause morale to plummet that's for sure!
I think that it's wrong to intentionally target civilian areas that have no military value. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified because demonstrating the threat and the ability to use those weapons was required in order to end the war and to save American lives.
Your general attitude strikes me as monstrous, Churchill and others did in fact express regret over what they felt as a need to carry out these bombings, but you're just like, 'it's perfectly justifiable'. Whoah man, that's far out on the fringe. Human life doesn't seem to carry a whole lot of weight in your mind... Well, perhaps your own life does I suppose.
Bullshit. I never said or suggested that those actions are not regrettable and that they should be carried out impulsively and without reflection or concern for collateral damage and innocent civilians. Of course you wouldn't want to order something like that. But in a war when you are trying to protect the lives of your own citizens and win the conflict you do what you need to do. Why would you even read that into what I said at all unless you were hoping that that was attitude, which it is not.
Holy crap, you're nuts man. I totally can't see how you mesh your self-serving "we're better than them" speech with mass-murder of at least 100 million human beings including women and children.
Can't you see the distinction between mass murder and the bombing of an enemy nation's military target as an act of self defense in a war that was initiated by that enemy? If you were in charge of the military, would you order your military to stand down and let and opposing aggressor conquer your nation? Would you drop flower petals from your bombers?
So in essence, you agree with this shooter at Ft. Hood and the terrorists then. Since the U.S. initiated the war against Iraq, all Americans need to die, Allah Akbar and all of that?
The initiation of the conflict in Iraq was justified in order to remove a dangerous leader who had previously gassed his own people and had the potential to manufacture weapons of mass destruction that could be sold to or fall into the wrong hands. In retrospect, it may not have been the most wise thing to do and perhaps the action was not carried out properly (such as installing a puppet leader and then leaving or letting the Kurds have their own nation), but that doesn't make the attempt to depose Hussein a bad thing to do.
...I take it you see that I can play the devil's advocate also if I like, just like you're so fond of doing...
But you're not particularly good at it and like to blow things out of context in order to do it.
Of course you realize that your position is completely crazy, yes? You can't morally condone mass murder against your enemies, but condemn it when it's being done against you. It's hypocrisy, to an astonishing level.
Perhaps you shouldn't be so quick to sentence millions of people who had nothing to do with the conflict in question to death... I fail to see how you're any less dangerous and fanatical than the terrorists against which you rail.
My position is no different than saying, "I morally condemn Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and Nazi aggression and I condone and support the Allies' military response."
Also you may want to note that Japan during the imperial era wasn't the kind of place where you publically expressed disobedience or dissent with the official line. People tended to lose their head you know...literally.
Then they needed to rebel or at least do as little as possible to support the war effort. Why didn't the armed military turn against its commanders and the government?
It was a general statement, and as usual you're being obtuse, either on purpose or because you're simply too damn narrow-minded to get it. I'm saying, you can't claim to have the moral high-ground if you use the same kind of methods as your adversaries.
You are the one who is obtuse, failing to understand or acknowledge the difference between an aggressor nation that institutes a conflict and a party that is acting to defend itself.
This does include blowing up entire cities just to spare soldiers' lives, or magically eradicating all life in two countries just because their leaders started an armed conflict by the way.
If you don't want to risk eradication, don't initiate or provoke warfare. Don't make a threat of yourself to other nations.
If you want to have liberties and live in a free, democratic society, with moral standards and ethics and all of that, well, there's a penalty associated with that, and the penalty is that freedom sometimes costs lives. The cost can be in the form that at times armies need to march against people like Hitler, or that our liberties can be abused and Bad People bring bombs with them on a bus, or on an airplane, and murder innocents.
If you want a free society, you will always have to be ready to pay that price, there's no way around that. Liberty doesn't mix with a police state supervising everyone to make sure they don't commit terrorist acts, just as morals don't mix with mass murdering civilians of an enemy state.
What makes you think I disagree with any of that? Where did I advocate a police state? Did I ever say that a nation should drop nuclear weapons on other nations unprovoked?
You can't just SAY you have morals, you gotta SHOW it with your actions as well, and it's NOT morally justifiable to say, eradicate entire countries' worth of life to solve a military conflict. How could it possibly be?
If it is a large and very serious, desperate conflict such as the one that occurred in World War II, then it would be justified. You intentionally keep dropping that context.
You getting any of this or am I just talking to myself here?
Oh I understand what you're saying but disagree with it and think that you are a moron.
That's probably because you're American. No, it's not a badly veiled insult, haha. You may not have heard much about these simply because it didn't take place on your continent (and in the case of RAF - which does not stand for Royal Air Force by the way - you were probably a child, maybe not even born). Use your google-fu or something, it's not hard to scrounge up relevant infos.
Just provide a link to a discussion about the RAF incident please.
Israel was more or less created overnight, the western powers that were behind it didn't purchase the land or anything like that. Really, there's too much history behind all this to explain it all in one post (which is already way too big I might add) so why don't you just read some on your own. History is fascinating stuff anyway, and often VITAL to understanding exactly why things are the way they are.
Based on my research, Leon Uris's excellent novels
Exodus and
The Haj do an excellent job of capturing the essence of the history. You should read them for another point of view. The Jewish people put the primitive mystic, barbaric Arabs to shame with their productivity and they felt badly about that, seeing these people transform desert and swampland into fruitful farms and observing women in shorts enjoy freedom. Instead of abandoning their obviously backwards culture in favor of what was proving to be an objectively superior culture, they tried to eradicate those people as a matter of Arab pride.
It's easy to dismiss reality and say, "oh, the Muftis are just dumb and evil", see the Arabs simply as a sort of live-version of Star Wars stormtrooper "evil-doers" a la Shrubya Bush... In reality there's reasons behind everything, it's not just a case of "either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists".
The Mufti who later bedded down with Hitler advocated genocidal massacres and pogroms against the Jews.
Of course there's evil Arabs by the way. Tons of 'em, especially today after so many decades of bad blood between them, Israel and the west in general, but reality is (almost) never simply black and white. Conflicts have foundations too, reasons for existing. It's not always just a matter of they are wrong, they are bad, we must kill kill kill. Hell, even the rise of almost universally hated and despised men like Hitler and Stalin have rich and complicated backdrops...
Oh, I don't deny that there are reasons why these things happen. What is your point here? I'm surprised that you would acknowledge that "there's evil Arabs."
You know... If it weren't for racists like you who want to see rifts between people and strive to create them if they aren't there, this wouldn't be any issue whatsoever.
Is that the best you can do? Name calling me a racist?
Let's get this straight. I am an advocate of individualism and believe that individuals and people of all races and choose to adopt a philosophy of reason and live rationally.
Perhaps you are a racist for implying that all races are good and that an individual's philosophy is necessitated by his race and that it cannot be changed or chosen?
If there wasn't so much racial and cultural tension, Arabs in general and their descendants in particular would simply integrate into Israeli society and become one homogenous whole with it. There would be no need for any "takeover", how can you take over a society you're already part of, or even want to...?
Let's hope that the Arabs choose reason and civilization.
Oh don't worry, I'm not portraying you as some kind of anomalous monster, there's tons of people just like you in Israel as well and they'd never permit any Arab takeover. Heck, there's at least one party in the Knesset that proposes genocidal (even nuclear) warfare against not just the occupied territories but the entire Arab middle east. There's enough haters to go around to keep the embers of this conflict going for a long time.
When did I say that I am in favor of a nuclear strike against the Arabs? If another major conflict for Israel's survival occurs, then it would be understandable.
Perhaps you're not portraying me as an "anomalous monster", but your childish moronic condescending tone and your purposeful misinterpretations and taking-out-of-context of what I say seems to do just that. Grow up and grow a brain.
IQs are more or less bunk. They're an amalgamated measure of a person's level of education in abstract thinking, self-esteem and a couple other factors, not a reliable measure of actual intelligence...
IQ isn't everything and perhaps it is difficult to measure and quantify, but differences in intellectual ability between people do exist and the concept of IQ is a good way to try to measure that.
Perhaps the hillbilly shoe doesn't fit, but you got the bigot part down pat I'd say.
And you have the cultural relativist moron part down pat, I'd say. All you can do is take what I have said and then purposely blow it out of context to support your fantasy.
Or maybe it's that whitey simply has evolved to be more hostile and war-like, or that our overcrowded European continent with its limited living space (being surrounded by water on almost every side as it is) created countless armed conflicts which bred a NEED for evolution in warfare?
So what do you advocate as a solution to overcrowding? I'm an advocate of zero population growth.
Notice that I'm simply not patting ourselves on the back for being inherently more superior, like you do. Again, just because other people live a different life doesn't mean they're inferior.
When did I imply that "we" were inherently (arbitrarily) superior to other people?
My view is that all individuals can choose to be good or bad people and that some that some philosophies and cultures are objectively better than other philosophies and cultures, such as a culture where women have freedom as opposed to one where they are men's chattel.
Dr. Wallace Breen would like to have a chat with you, he has a working position open...as a Combine Stalker. ...Interested?
I have no idea what this refers to.
There's really no point in refuting this though, or the couple other things I've mentioned. They really are historical facts. All you have to do is read up on them a bit. That the U.S. wreaked havoc in south and middle america during the cold war...well, what's so secret about that?
No one can be omniscient and knowledgeable about every single fact or historical event in the world. As I said before, it's difficult if not impossible to make judgments about the U.S.'s role in supporting various regimes in South America without seeing the best arguments the both sides have to make for the justification of those actions.
There's official U.S. gov't documents and testimony regarding the coup against Alliende, and the Ollie North trial ought to be public enough for you to have heard about it for example.
Like you deciding beforehand that the U.S. either didn't take part in any unethical dealings, or if they did, that it was 'fully justified' and all for the greater good of fighting communism? That doesn't leave much wiggle-room for discussing any philosophical principles now does it...
It isn't necessary to refer to concrete historical incidents in order to discuss philosophical principles. What specifically do you want to discuss?
Did you either simply forget that before the renaissance period it was the Arab world which was the center for science, astronomy, matemathics and philosophy, or simply never learn it?
What makes you think I'm unaware of that? Where in this conversation have I suggested or hinted that I was unaware of that? What would lead you to say that in the first place?
In Europe during this time period, the church and despotic monarchs ruled supreme and anyone who defied them were typically either imprisoned, tortured until they recanted or put to death... It may be but for a random flap of a butterfly's wings so to speak, that the winds of history turned things around for us.
The Europeans rediscovered Aristotle.
Mystic indeed... And you wonder why I keep calling you a bigot.
I have pretty much concluded that you are a moron and unable to engage in a rational debate. All you can do is adopt a condescending air of superiority and pretend that you are prevailing in this debate.