Re: Fred speaks
- From: Scotius <wolvzbro@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:17:43 -0500
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 06:55:26 -0400, "Joe S." <no_one@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
QUOTE
The Ganglia of Four
Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Gates: How We Are Ruled
March 26, 2007
Methinks we don?t?think, I mean, about anything outside our immediate
visual horizon. Thinking is a poor way of understanding the world, which is
too complex to be thought about effectively. That leaves hormones and
unfortunate limbic wiring.
Consider the presidential wars.
You mean the one that half the senate dems voted for?
I get combative email informing me that
Moslems are savage, barbaric, crafty, and patient, biding their time through
the centuries to spit in apple pie, put Mom in a seraglio, and sodomize Boy
Scouts?that they have spread by the sword, live by the sword, and lust to
convert us all to Islam and sell us prayer rugs. The Gates of Vienna, 1453,
all that.
Perhaps. There follows a list of Christian countries I can think of that
have been conquered by Moslems since the Industrial Revolution:
On the other hand, to the best of my admittedly weak historical
understanding, the following Islamic countries have been conquered by
Christians: Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Chad, Pakistan, Bangla
Desh,
I'm glad he admitted first that his historical knowledge is
sketchy, or he might be called an idiot for not also admitting that
Bangladesh was Hindu before it was Muslim.
Libya, Indonesia,
I don't suppose he knows much about Indonesia's pre-Islamic
history then either?
Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkmenistan,
Tajikistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Kyrgyz, Kazakhstan, Somalia, Sudan, and
Uzbekistan, to name a few. On various occasions Christians have tried to
conquer Afghanistan, but with no better luck than they deserved.
Since 1500, Christians also conquered all of North, South, and Central
America,
Actually, looters conquered them, backed not by Christianity,
but by the Vatican; two vastly different and mutually exclusive
entities.
most of Southeast Asia,
I know someone who hasn't looked at an atlas lately... nyaah
nyaah...
India, Australia, Nepal, Africa,
Africa? Parts of Africa, but not Africa as a whole.
China for
practical purposes, and so on. I am not sure the record is altogether on the
side of Christians in terms of inherent pacifism.
My correspondents further inform me that Moslems hate America because of
its advanced society, or because they hate freedom (which is silly even by
the dilute standards of our sorry journals). I suspect that the reasons are
otherwise.
Good for him, but let's not go thinking he's some kind of
great political analyst because he points this out. When he puts
together the connectedness of the long-running campaign to allow
border security to become lax, the "amnesty" programs, the allowing of
entry of tens of thousands of immigrants, the border state bishops'
helping them settle, the appointment of "conservative" catholics to
the supreme court, and a couple other relevant issues, I'll be
impressed.
Now, I am inexpert in Islam and may be wrong here. Correct me. (That is,
if you are Moslem and know something about it, correct me.) They seem to
have a cast of mind more primitive than ours, or more advanced than ours
(depending on your attitude), but at least different from ours. They take
their religion seriously. We do not. Yes, I know, polls show that some
impressive proportion of Americans say they think God is more influential
than Katie Couric (who I believe to be a bubblehead I saw once on a
television network). In fact, though, religion plays little part in the
national life, or lives, of what was once called Christendom. The word has
died for want of a referent. We pride ourselves on eliminating religion from
public life, and regard those who still practice it as snake-handlers.
Thus if Rastafarians took over Lithuania, Americans would not be greatly
exercised. Perhaps one in fifty could find it on the map. That Lithuania is
Christian would mean nothing. By contrast, Moslems seem to regard themselves
as part of a family, despite rigorous and unpleasant disputes among
themselves. They see Israel as just another example of colonization by armed
force (see paragraph four above). And they know that every bomb destroying
an apartment building in Beirut was given to Israel by America, along with
the plane dropping it, for the express purpose of blowing up Moslems.
They also "know" that Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza
Strip to grab more land, when in fact it was because those are the
areas through which the Arab armies that surrounded Israel in 1967
were planning to attack.
Further, the United States looks and talks as if it were making war on
Islam. At the moment, Americans or Jewish allies are brutalizing Palestine
I'd love for the idiot who wrote this piece to tell me how a
defensive occupation consists of "brutalizing" the occupied, but I'd
settle for an explanation of how, despite Hannan Ashrawi's claims of
"genocide", the Paletinian population of the West Bank has grown
faster than the Israeli population of Israel.
and Lebanon,
I'll tell you about how the "brutalized" Lebanon; they sent an
expedition (a small one at that) to get back some kidnapped soldiers,
and Hezbollah (which had effectively taken over the country which was
not their's, and which they didn't care for the well being of one bit)
used that as an excuse to fire hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilian
areas. Then Israel responded to that with an actual full scale attack,
and now we're told that Israel bombed Lebanon because soldiers were
kidnapped - THAT is how "Israel brutalized Lebanon". Admittedly, I
don't know how bad the bombing of Lebanon was, but I know how bad
Hezbollah is.
using Pakistan as a puppet,
That's a legitimate criticism, but not coming from most of the
people it's coming from, who've never objected to the use as a puppet
of any of the Arab states by any other Arab states, or even a
terrorist group as in the case of Hezbollah and Lebanon.
wrecking Iraq and Afghanistan,
bombing Somalia, hunting Moslems in the Philippines, and threatening Syria
and Iran. Maybe that?s why Moslems don?t like us.
I just offer it as a thought.
I'll offer this as a counterthought; I don't mind an actual
"war on terror", although I do object to the Bush regime fighting wars
to artificially prop up the dollar and secure the oil cartel's
monopoly game. That said, I also don't like the kind of idiots who
pontificate about how evil the US is while saying nothing when other
countries engage in the same game of nations that Washington does, as
if they don't even notice, and then have the nerve to pretend that
their revolutionarily insightful thinkers of some sort.
The truculent among my correspondents often express contempt for the Iraqi
and Afghan insurgents, calling them dirtballs and rag heads and such.
Perhaps, but they are not helpless rag heads. (If I hear another stupid joke
about the seventy-two virgins, I?m going to kill something.)
If I may lapse into the vernacular, underestimating the enemy is a
serviceable approach to getting your ass kicked.
In a way, it's actually overestimating the "enemy" that has
hurt the US.
When you go to war against a country whose leadership actually
has something to lose, you may get quite a number of collaborators in
the enemy government. Afghan leaders were probably lucky if they had
hot and cold running water, and if they did it was probably heated by
firewood and pumped manually. Iraq probably was not much better off
after more than ten years of sanctions. The US planners thought they
could go in, bully, and establish "order". They couldn't, because as
Alexander Solzhenyitsin (I hope I'm spelling that right) said, "As
long as you have something you can take away from people, they won't
fight, but when they have nothing left to lose, they'll fight".
Machiavelli pointed out that you can only occupy a country for
a significant period of time if you AT LEAST are no worse than the
previous government, and longer if you give the people something more
than the previous government did.
In both cases, the US here has invaded countries were most of
the LEADERS (let alone the people) probably felt they had nothing to
lose, and also been worse to the people (in Iraq at least) than the
previous government was, in at least some respects. As long as idiots
are in charge, there's no hope of any good coming out of these wars,
and idiots ARE in charge. Not that the wars would have been right to
fight if there had been smart people running things in Washington.
They are cunning, but they're not wise (I feel I need to differentiate
those two qualities in relation to the crooks in charge currently).
It?s working. The US
?coalition? has something like 150,000 troops in Iraq, equipped with
artillery, tanks, fighter-bombers, armored personnel carriers, helicopters,
gun ships to include AC-130s, night-vision gear, and excellent medical care.
The Pentagon seems to know little of the insurgents, but I?ve seen guesses
that they might number from 12,000 to 30,000. Outnumbered five to one, and
having only rifles, RPGs, and explosives, the insurgents have so far fought
the US to a standstill, and have good prospects of handing it a defeat. That?s
contemptible?
Further, US losses have been light. The US military has claimed to be
killing 3,000 insurgents a month (and lots of other numbers too). Do the
arithmetic. Even allowing for lying, guessing, and honest ignorance, the
insurgents, and their families, are taking heavy casualties. They haven?t
quit. If the US had suffered proportionately?say a couple of hundred
thousand dead?the war would have been over years ago. Why did no one in
power think of this beforehand?
A drawback of getting older is that one has a sense of seeing the same bad
movie over and over. We always fight demons. Like the Moslems, the Russians
also were patient and barbaric, as were, and will be again, the Chinese when
they come online as the next enemy. The Japanese too were primordially evil,
committing such atrocities as the Rape of Nanking until nuclear terror
bombing returned them to civilization?s fold. The only good Indian was a
dead Indian. Et cetera.
The Japanese were barbaric in WW II; there's no denying that,
but it certainly was unnecessary to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, especially since it was the US government that started
the war with Japan.
Perhaps if the writer really knew his history, he'd know about
the letter sent to the imperial government of Japan by US government
representatives. The letter stated that the US government demanded
that Japan acknowledge unconditionally the sole right of US
corporations and business entities to exploration for, and
exploitation of resources in Southeast Asia.
Southeast Asia, as the writer might know (although he did say
he didn't know much about geography) is in Japan's back yard, not the
US's. You don't bark in someone else's yard and expect them to pretend
you didn't. Oh, and by the way, the word "unconditional" was in that
document, just as it was in the surrender document the Japanese
representatives signed aboard the US battleship, just in case they
forgot. Did you catch that too? That's another little fact of history
the great analyzer up there probably didn't know about.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm
END QUOTE
.
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