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Iraq Is Not The Issue
(Elevated from a comment)
by Antifa
Iraq is not the issue.
Iraq is a symptom.
The root cause of this Iraqi resource war is our national consensus that we intend to keep living like Americans, come what may.
That’s why Democrats and Republicans alike voted overwhelmingly for this oil war, and routinely vote to fund it anew, at obscene prices, with pure overdrafts from our Treasury. Because we all intend to keep living like we do.
In practice then, we the point three billion people, we Americans, aren’t really at odds with Dick Cheney’s dictum, "The American way of life is not negotiable."
It is only when that does become negotiable that we will stop burning down other nations to get our provisions.
Iraq is a symptom.
Iraq is only one nation. Oil is only one provision. There are other nations, and other provisions. To survive, America needs those provisions from those nations, and we can’t take no for an answer.
Fact: there aren’t enough provisions in the whole world for every nation, every human, to live like Americans. It would take nine planet earths to do that. That means eight out of nine people alive today will never live like Americans do.
It means every American has eight other humans to share with. Now, if you don’t share with those other eight humans, you’ll have to kill a couple of them to get enough provisions to live like an American. And you’ll probably have to kill a couple others to keep the rest off your provisions. On an overcrowded ship, it’s the pirate way — share the booty or fight to the death over it.
And that’s our choice, we Americans.
Iraq is a symptom of that choice.
Actually, most of the resource wars to come in this century will be over potable water. And, we’ll need to kill for uranium at some point, too, to keep our electrical grid up. And kill for a few other precious ores as well, or someone else will dig them up and then we won’t live as well as we do. And that was never our intent. That’s not negotiable.
The point being, getting out of Iraq doesn’t address the root cause of our being there. We’ll just go to war somewhere else for provisions.
The country we need to get out of is the mad America that won’t even attempt anymore to live within its means or by civilized rules. Pirate America.
We need to climb down from where we find ourselves these days, folks. This is just nuts, what we, the people, are doing.
John- apparently there are different versions of the mishna, which is the oral tradition or teachings that go along with the written (talmudic) teachings. The mishna has commentary by various rabbis whose work, and their passing down of the oral tradition of those of an older era. This work began in the third and fourth centuries for both the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmud.
Neither of these contain the entire mishna. Unlike the literalism of fundamentalist Christianity, it is my understanding that points of the teachings are open for discussion to understand what this or that might mean.
I am not familiar with all these teachings, nor do I know why there are two versions. but the Babylonian Talmud is the “default” talmud (when one version or another is not indicated.)
Wikipedia notes your question about the Babylonian Talmud as a racist text and says this is an accusation that began during the Inquistion in order to justify the forced conversion of Jews (or, the other option was escape to the Ottoman Empire when the Muslims treated them better.)
As far as any religion promoting discrimination, I think that would be true for most of them. The Native America people have traditionally referred to themselves as “the human beings,” while other groups are….well, not. The Great Spirit has chosen them to guard the earth.
Christianity includes a passage in the Bible that tells Christians to go to the ends of the earth, or something like that, to tell everyone about the good news that Jesus died for everyone’s sins…the evangelicals call this “the Great Commission,” and it’s why they try to convert you…because they do not believe your beliefs are sufficient…and you will burn in a lake of fire if you do not except their three-in-one (to avoid that problem with monotheism) God.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that I think all religions are based, in part, on the belief that they have the truth, that they are chosen, that the rest of the world needs them, whether they realize it or not.
As far as the idea that Judaism in the cause of the class system in GB…well, I suppose, if Jews hadn’t been ghettoized throughout much of European history, maybe you could blame them, but since they weren’t given rights as citizens, wouldn’t it be kinda hard to follow that line of “logic?”
However, the conversion of various kings to Christianity, along with a church hierarchy that claimed a hotline to god, was useful as a way to perserve power among a select few. As the inquisition surely reveals, the Christians in Europe did not identify their religion with Jews.
Long before Christianity made its entrance into western Europe, Greek society had a class system with slaves, and women were considered as literal dirt in which a man must plant his seed, while true love was between two men, who were equally intelligent (while women, who were dirt, were a necessity to keep the lineage going.)
The Jews were not a huge force to reckon with throughout ancient history, unlike their history would have people believe. Even so, Egypt had slaves, didn’t they, and had siblings marry one another to have a pure, royal bloodline…
so I really cannot find a way to twist the idea of class into a situation that exists because of a Babylonian version of the Talmud.
Engels, fwiw, formulated a view of class that began with women:
The theory put forward in The Origin [of the Family] is based largely upon the pioneering research of the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan’s research, published in 1877 in a 560-page volume called Ancient Society, was the first materialist attempt to understand the evolution of human social organization. He discovered, through extensive contact with the Iroquois Indians in upstate New York, a kinship system which took a completely different form than the modern nuclear family. Within it, the Iroquois lived in relative equality and women exercised a great deal of authority. This discovery inspired Morgan to study other societies, and, in so doing, he learned that other Native American societies located thousands of miles from the Iroquois used remarkably similar kinship structures. This led him to argue that human society had evolved through successive stages, based upon the development of the “successive arts of subsistence.”3 While some of Morgan’s anthropological data is now outdated, a wealth of more recent anthropology has provided ample evidence to support his basic evolutionary framework.4
Engels built upon Morgan’s theory in The Origin to develop, as the title implies, a theory of how the rise of class society led to both the rise of the state, which represents the interests of the ruling class in the day-to-day class struggle, and the rise of the family, as the means by which the first ruling classes possessed and passed on private wealth. In order to appreciate fully the pathbreaking contribution of Engels’ (not to mention Morgan’s) work, it is only necessary to realize that Darwin laid out his theory of human evolution just a few years earlier, first with the publication of Origin of Species in 1859, followed by Descent of Man in 1871.
You can read more about it here
…some argue that male anxiety about paternity was the first example of a class system, in that, as a class, females were treated as property because they carried the children that would inherit the wealth that was owned by the male to whom she was married. Therefore, it was important that females be viewed as less human (unable to learn, unable to make rational decisions, unable to function because of her reproductive capacity) than males in order to justify the subjugation of women to men…for the purpose of keeping property within a genetic group. (although they didn’t KNOW their reasoning could also be traced to affliative behavior based upon shared DNA.
however, this same behavior is traceable in hamadryas baboons, who kill the babies of other males in order to bring the female into estrus so that this genetic “property” is passed on.
oh, and interesting to note, recently I read that humans seem to have DNA strands that are more like bonobo, at the level of sexual reproduction, than they do with common chimpanzees. The example of the Iroquois culture, in the link above, might provide a human correlation to such differences.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jun 13 2005 0:18 utc | 147
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