Re: "Dog-whistle Catholicism"

On Jul 8, 9:04 am, jdnic...@xxxxxxxxx (James Nicoll) wrote:

Actually, do people want to have a whip-around to get
funds for Savard to either emigrate to the US or serve with the
Canadian forces in Afghanistan? I'm sure there's a civilian
contractor position we can find for him.

Ah, yes, you are correct that I am leaving out an important
constraint.

The world has a lot of problems. Whether it is the threats to the
safety of the American people themselves, as highlighted by the events
of September 11, 2001, or the threats to other people in peaceful
civilized democracies - Spain, Britain, Australia, Israel, and Taiwan,
for example - or whether it is the suffering of the poor people who
live in the less safe and secure parts of the world, whether religious
minorities in Iraq, the people of Zimbabwe, or the people of Darfur,
there are bad things happening in the world that it would be nice to
change, and which are being caused by human agency.

Since these bad things are being caused by bad people, the _obvious_
remedy is for someone to take these bad people by the scruff of the
neck and put them away.

This is, however, predicated on the *assumption* that doing so
involves no significant costs of its own. So, for example, the U.S. is
assumed to be able to have the ability to free Tibet by just walking
in to China, overthrowing the government, establishing its own rule
and then carving the country up to taste - one of the results we will
want is for it to be possible for all the Mandarin-speakers in Taiwan
to be able to come home, so that the Taiwanese people will have their
country back, and be able to speak Southern Min (Amoy dialect) there
in all areas of daily life including education and employment -
without shedding the blood of a single U.S. soldier.

The trouble with that, of course, is that while the U.S. might be the
"world's only superpower", it isn't quite _that_ strong.

If one wants a nice, pleasant, comfortable world in which one doesn't
even read upsetting *headlines* about far-distant foreign lands...
one's love of pleasantness and comfort _will_ also lead one to not
being fond of the notion of getting shot at in the jungles or deserts
of far-distant foreign lands to an even greater extent. And if one is
compassionate towards the oppressed people of foreign lands, the neat
and tidy solution of reforming their politics through just launching
over a few nukes and expecting the survivors to organize a government
more to our liking is not likely to be appealing either.

The American people having done so much already, in World War II, in
Korea, in Vietnam, to protect peace and freedom, they're entitled to a
rest. If nukes are too unselective, and so ground troops are needed...
why not let the countries that contributed to the world's problems
send them in? So, for now, to make our conquest of China humane, we
would draw ground troops from Germany, Japan, Italy... and Argentina,
countries which recently threatened world peace. Later, then, we would
also have Russian and Chinese troops with which to handle the
occupation of the homelands of the world's one billion Muslims.

Of course, that's preposterous too. For two reasons:

- relying on foreign mercenaries didn't end well for the Romans, and

- world conquest is not usually the goal of kind and humane democrats.

And this is just the _easy_ part.

Because, when we condemn the unnecessary suffering caused by certain
evil people - tyrants, fanatics, warmongers, demagogues - it is easy
to lose sight of the fact that they are sometimes symptoms of
underlying problems. The poor countries of the world are sometimes
poorer because they are misgoverned - but they are almost always
misgoverned because they are poor.

My first order picture of an "ideal world" is:

- Everybody lives peacefully, living by reaping the fruits of their
own labor, not trying to steal the fruits of the labor of others.

- National boundaries are coextensive and coterminous with ethnic/
linguistic boundaries, so that old wounds, and the effort of learning
a second language, don't complicate the efforts of people to live
under democratic rule which provides, as an end result, a system of
laws which matches their own desires, including their cultural
preferences.

Why we aren't living in an ideal world _already_ isn't entirely due to
Bad People. People can't live decently on the fruits of their own
labor... if they don't have enough land on which to plant enough
trees. All over the world, wildlife habitat is under pressure because
of overcrowding, of poor peasant farmers desperately seeking more
land.

If the people of China had the same amount of per capita arable land
and mineral resources as the people of the United States do, this
would mean that China comprised more than one planet like Earth.

So, rather than having the United States go on a save-the-world
rampage - which I simply note as an illustration of the severity of
the situation, and the profoundly paradoxical nature of our options in
dealing with it - instead, as the military and industrial leader of
world freedom, it should do those constructive things which are more
easily accessible. It will, however, have to also act militarily to a
sufficient extent to ensure its own survival in the interim.

An example of something constructive would be to address global
warming *not* through throttling the economy, but through expanding
the use of nuclear power. Through putting more emphasis on the space
program, with the explicit objective of beginning the colonization of
space, so that eventually methane and ammonia from comets will feed
the world's hungry (after suitable processing, of course; I would not
wish to be accused of channeling Marie Antoinette).

John Savard
.

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