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Export Of Democracy
Pat Lang posted a writing by Richard Sale, a former intelligence correspondent for UPI. It is about some neocon sentiment accusing Bush for leaving the "export of democracy" path.
I am shameless stealing some of the more general bits, of which I think that a lot of U.S. folks as well as others with imperialist tendencies, should glue them on their refrigerator doors.
Wilson believed that unless America actively spread its idea of democracy around the world, U.S. power might atrophy at home.
[…]
To me this is extremely dubious. There is little evidence that democracy is the most natural or foremost form of political association among human beings.
[…]
[D]emocracy is hardly a universal phenomenon.
For a great many of the world’s peoples, personal freedom has proved far less of a concern than economic security or material prosperity. Often, to secure these, people looked to authoritarian governments.
[…]
I do believe that the Bush administration’s automatic advocacy of democracy around the world does not fully take into consideration the vast array of cultural and political traditions of other countries and appears to be yet another species of the delusion that makes us believe that what we as Americans want is what other people want, a self-conceit that avoids examining our own beliefs, values and habits to determine if they are relevant to people so very different from ourselves.
DeGaulle once said of Franklin Roosevelt, “…he cloaks his will to power in idealism.”
I believe that this is what drives Pletka and the Bush war hawks. America is, at bottom, only a country, not a glorious cause lying outside the stream of history. [..] There certainly have been times when we have been noble, morally generous and clear thinking.
But there have been others when we have been greedy, brutal and squalid.
No two societies are completely alike, and it is a mistake to think that the institutions, traditions, and cultures of other countries are not revered and prized by their inhabitants as much as we revere and prize our own.
The belief that each and every foreigner secretly hungers to be an American is to me one of the most ludicrous of ideas because it flatters our conceit, and, if widely believed, will prove to be a block to our moral growth as a nation.
Yes moaites responding to infantile ad hominem attacks is equally infantile.
Firstly Slippery Truths; whoever posted thank god I’m not an american had absolutely no connection with the person who at one time posted over the nick, Debs is dead.
Secondly if you for one moment believe that garbage posted above your name further up I suggest you get some treatment. Claiming some sort of moral superiority/responsibility for whatever state of the world is in that the place we live in has contributed to is as lame as the armchair football fan who feels proud as if he has achieved something when his teams wins a game.
Stupid and meaningless. If only it worked the other way though eh?
In other words, if only when our nation commits some foul deed it was ethically possible to sit at home and say, “nothing to do with me”. Then just send off a couple of missives decrying the foul deed and in that way claim absolution and be absolved.
Unfortunately responsibility doesn’t work out that way.
Not long after USuk first went into Iraq I remember posting in here that it didn’t matter what noble cause the troops imagined they were fighting for, once the war got ‘down and dirty’ there would be shocking abuses.
That war crimes would be committed.
In order to make it clear that was a reflection of the nature of war rather than a reflection of the people fighting that war the post referred to:
That during WW1 all of my mother’s elder brothers went off to fight because they thought they were protecting Belgian babies from German bayonets.
Despite noble intent, the NZ expeditionary force committed a shocking atrocity in Palestine where they wiped out a whole village.
What were they doing in the mid east? They didn’t know.
It was a long way from Belgium that’s for sure. That’s where they were told they were going and where they had voluntered to go.
As a child I can remember bourgeois NZers barely discussing that war crime.
If they did, then passing some remark about the Maoris was de rigeur. I mean it was bad enough that the Maori people of NZ got sucked into that war. It was between their oppresors and Samoa’s oppressors. It was on the other side of the planet.
Yet when they did, NZ history forgets to mention them in the victories, but they made damned handy scapegoats in the disasters.
None of the countries Slippery mentions are beneficiaries of US largesse, funding or otherwise. NZ pays heavily in terms of trade for it’s stance against US nuclear warships. As all US allies are, NZ is forced to buy N number of ‘weapons platforms a year off the US, but since NZ said no more nuclear warships to all of the rest of the world, not just the US.
The heavily bribed legislators in Washington leapt to defent the improbable affront to general dynamics cashflow and abused the bit where amerika has the right to approve who each country on-sells amerikan flawless technology. (ask Oz how many F-18’s and before that F-111’s just fell out of the sky slippery). Nz has been trying to get rid of a couple of squadrons of sky-hawks complete with all parts, maintenence gear etc for a decade or so now but every time they find a country (not easy considering the age of the technology) The US refuses to approve the transaction. We just want to get rid of the damned things cause our airforce is about transporting men and materials to disaster zones, not about shooting people. So in the end the NZ govt offered to practically give them away for little more than the transportation cost, back to a US corporation. The US govt couldn’t refuse them going to the US could they? Yep they did. N.B. this link is to a Tory opposition site seeking to blame the NZ govt for the deliberate fucking over by the Tory opposition’s mates in Washington.
The next bit. Slippery corner says if it wasn’t us (meaning USuk I presume) it would be someone else screwing the unfortunates in other parts of the world.
This is a comment I can’t disagree with strongly enough. I don’t know how much time Slippery has spent in different ‘new world’ countries and if he/she/it has watched the evolution of a whitefella outpost into a branch of civilisation head office, but I have, and it is a mistake to imagine that all the whitefella outposts were either settled by people with the same mindset, are all moving toward the same set of values, or are in the same stage of social evolution.
When my forebears moved to and settled in NZ, it was a deliberate choice for most of them. It was certainly further, a lot more arduous and far more expensive to travel halfway round the other side of the world, under sail, in 1854, than it was to trek to any one of several port cities on the west coast of britain or Ireland and get on a ship for the US. People who lived next door to them went to the US. On my father’s side the whole family split up, some went to the US to make their fortune, some went to Australia for an adventure, one who nobody talks about went to South Africa to ‘bear the white man’s burden’ or whatever, and two brother’s one of whom was a great-grandfather of mine, sailed to NZ. Crowded outside on the deck. My brother has a diary of that voyage and although the boys had paid for accomodation inside, there were a great many women and children who couldn’t, so all of the men on that trip elected to sail topside for the two months or so it took. They ate whatever food they had brought with them or purchased during the trip’s many stops in ports. There was no Suez or Panama canal so as well as the heat of the equator, they were on deck for the ice bergs as they sailed around the cape.
When they got there as expected, there were no fortunes to be made, all the adventures revolved around keeping food on the table, but they knew there would be no bugger standing over them forcing some stupid superstition down their necks, no thug wanting a share of their pay packet or harvest, just because he had a gun, no need to kill off any previous owners because as imperfect as the treaty was, an agreement had been reached with the indigenous people.
A treaty that is still in force today. It wasn’t changed whenever something of worth was found on the land that the indigenous people held. No one got a mob of blankets covered them in smallpox infested fleas, and ‘gave them to the natives’.
That said; of course NZ had it’s share of assholes and crims and greedheads and mainchancers.
It was a group of humans and all groups of people contain a cross section of character types which includes good and bad.
On the other hand because the mindset of most the settlers wasn’t ,’this is the promised land let’s grab the goodies and the devil take the hindmost’, there were few if any really wealthy types, or what some would consider to be ‘big time winners’, but there were also few if any ‘big time losers’.
In my mind there is no doubt that a society will have a fair number of assholes no matter what it does, but societies which allow people to be reduced to nothing and humiliated so that others can be lifted up high, rewarded and lauded, have many more dissatisfied, resentful and sometimes sociopathic assholes.
Naturally other forces come into play too. For example just because the settlers had a particular mindset it doesn’t mean that all their offspring will share that mindset. Obviously they could be more like the uncle that went to south Africa or the risk-taker who went to Australia, so the society will evolve into the same multi-faceted conglomeration as others, although it foundations are diferent and for as long as the heritage dominates, it will have an individual indentifiable culture. One of the streams of NZ culture is schmaltzily typified in a movie called The World’s Fastest Indian Some of my whanau still live in and around the town the protagonist Bert Munro hails from. No none of them are anything like Burt but Burt does signify a character type still very much alive. He used US technology a 1920’s Indian, forty years later, to go over to the US to break the land speed record at Bonneville.
I watched whitefella settlement evolve up close in Northern Australia, in a town (now a capital city) called Darwin, which was only really settled in the 20th century.
Even when I first went there some people there hadn’t had anything to do with whitefellas or their culture before. They came into town, did what they had to and left asap.
As the culture of Australia developed, it developed very differently in some ways, than it’s neighbour new zealand.
As visitors never cease to remind them, many of Australia’s first whitefella settlers were convicts, transported there as prisoners in the late 18th through the 19th centuries.
Many 4th, 5th and 6th generation Australians are rightly proud of their convict heritage. Most were Irish who had the shits with the english stealing their nation. Others were regional english uprooted and displaced by the industrial revolution, who had committed the crime of trying to stay alive. Still others were captured and transported long after the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion.
But not all there were convicts.
Along with convicts were also the prison warders, still known as ‘traps’ ‘jacks’ or ‘screws’.
Naturally the english aristos who had come over to take control of great swathes of resource rich land ruled the roost for a while.
So a lot of australians have an us versus them mentality. The two tasmanian miners that were stuck underground for a couple of weeks last month are in the US this weekend I can’t suggest strongly enough that amerikans catch their act on dianne sawyer or somesuch if they can. They can demonstrate the mateship part of the Australian ethos far better than I could ever describe it.
Two ordinary blokes that barely knew each other before they got stuck about a mile underground in a wire cage about the size of one and a half coffins. There was no light, no food, no water for the first week.
They both had what one of them laconically described as ‘rock bites’. That is when the boulders came pounding down on them, big chunks of flesh and maybe even bone were torn and pulverised.
The first thing these guys did was bond. They knew hey had to if they were to live. They reckon it wasn’t easy.
One liked country music, the other was a rock fan.
One went fishing on his days off while the other got seasick drinking a glass of water. He went hunting, something which appalled his new mate who loved all animals (except fish LOL).
These guys didn’t allow their differences to divide them, they looked for similarities to unite, because there was one thing they were certain of and that was that their fellow workers wouldn’t stop looking for them until they found them, dead or alive.
Sure the mine was owned by the same sort of soul-less corporation as that which let the West Virginia miners die, then lied about it a few months ago. They were trapped because the mine owners were gambling with their workers lives. BUT! . . . Once the accident happened they knew that the decisions of the owners in melbourne, sydney, london, new york or wherever would have jack shit bearing on their future.
Interestingly the rescue mission may well prove to be the last mining operation on that site. There is still tonnes of gold down there but it is unlikely that anyone will be allowed to risk others lives by trying to mine it again.
Of course the resources in Australia have encouraged assholes to migrate there as well.
Mobs of them turned up in Oz during the second half of the 20th century from everywhere in the world, but at the moment the same ethos of mateship is still the predominant ethos.
Yes that will change; but how far is difficult to tell. There hasn’t been a concerted mob of greedheads moving the rules of the game in favour of greedheads for a couple of hundred years, as there appears to have been elsewhere.
Which brings me to the point about whether if it wasn’t the US it would be somewhere else.
If that were the case why have the greedheads driving the US culture of the quick and the dead had to spend so much time and money forcing the outcome they desire in all of these other countries?
In the 70’s when the baby-boomers had their youthful idealism, the US supported Nixon, Carter for an instant, then back to Reagan. From what I can discern, the voting then was reasonably pristine what ever vote-rigging there was chiefly in the hands of the ersatz left, the dems.
Yet that mob had to push for a bloody coup in Chile, a bloodless coup in Australia, and the secret assassination of NZ’s ‘pinko’ political leader. Then follow those shit acts up with the expenditure of millions and millions of US dollars pushing quislings sympathetic to greedheads into power in those nations.
Of course all of that wasn’t all the fault of US greedheads, but it is interesting that they knew they were unlikely to get what they wanted without skewing the playing field.
All of this cropped up again in the NZ media in early May, when the story of US repug involvement in NZ’s general election in 2005 resurfaced.
So no politicians appear to be throwing this ball of wax back and forth in parliament.
The head Tory (leader of the opposition, they still couldn’t win despite alla the tricks)tried to deny it and failed miserably.
Next thing you know he’s copping a public tongue-lashing from one of Dubya’s fellow Texas freckle punchers, the new US ambassador.
The head Tory had committed the sin of bringing the US into disrepute. the whole episode was tres amusant in that he intimated that all kiwis would be in trouble for this one we wouldn’t get our freetrade agreement with the US.
However most NZers apart from torys don’t want a ‘better relationship’ ie a free trade agreement with the US two reasons. They don’t want to be told when to attack some other poor buggers. Vietnam was the last occurrence of that for many many tears. And having how the Oz/US free trade agreement favoured US cor[orates and actually made things worse for Oz primary producers, farmers and miners they certainly don’t want that for their country.
So I don’t believe if it wasn’t the US there would necessarily be a ‘new kid on the block’ eager to take over the exploitation.
Finally apart from refugees who now have bugger all say in which country they end up in poor buggers, most people migrate to NZ knowing that it isn’t the latest techno wonder consumerist society, and like the some of the locals many go to great lengths to ensure that they aren’t hangin off the coattails of rabid consumerist exploiters of people and resources.
That certainly doesn’t make NZ ‘better’ than anywhere else and is no indicator that anybody who lives in australia, nz or anywhere else in the world is better or worse an individual than individuals anywhere else.
All it does is suggest that without the US corporations and their ilk raping and ripping off there is a reasonable chance that someone else wouldn’t eagerly jump into their boots.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jun 3 2006 14:25 utc | 32
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