Santorum was here on Florida's Treasure Coast Tuesday, holding forth at the Community Christian Academy to parents and grade school students, a horror of which some are particularly proud. It's an "up-close look at politics in action," said school officials.
That live action, these politics, included a prayer by the 'Reverend' Dan Holland, affiliated with the school and the pastor of Community Baptist Church in Stuart, Florida.
"I like what he said in the South Carolina rally, where he said ' I come from a place where they have a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other'"Rick Santorum doesn't need a script, because he really isn't saying much and with such an audience, it doesn't matter whether he makes sense or mangles facts or makes them up. Rick speaks from the pulpit and anything said Ex Cathedra will not be questioned by this crowd. Besides, it's precisely what they want to hear: Barack Obama is the worst president this country has ever had, who hates capitalism, wants to take away what God wants you to keep to yourself and is destroying our natural order of things. Don't forget this is a religion that demands that women be subservient, hints that black people should stay in their place and since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would vote for anything that hated Democrats.
Santorum's ever predictable message was about "family Values" "fiscal responsibility" and "ridding the White House of Barack Obama." One can take the last of the three as the real message since my idea of family values does not include veiled calls to armed crusade and lying about the economy.
An all-white group of 350 heard him say:
"we have to have a candidate who stands proudly, consistently, aggressively, forcefully for the values that made this country the greatest country in the history of the world."Presumably that greatness was attained with Bibles and guns and anyone suggesting that we are in any way sinners, transgressors or less than perfect instruments of God's Christian ambitions, can go straight to Hell along with that apologist Obama.
They heard him howl about That Commie, apologist, freedom hating Obama bailing out Wall Street from the excesses and crimes the Republicans encouraged them in instead of using "free market forces" which would as any legitimate economist would likely tell you have brought that "greatest country in the history of the Universe" down to the level of Haiti. Still, the problem of galloping poverty isn't lack of resources, said Santorum, contradicting himself,
"the problem is in the home, the problem is in the churches, the problem is in the community. The people living in these woods are not the federal government's problem. . ."Let's use poverty, disease and misery to fill the pews, because a just society is a commie, secular humanist Christ-hating society.
Perhaps he could have explained to me why the Republican's promise to provide jobs instead of food stamps while it's 'not the government's problem' isn't honest or consistent -- or how unlettered country folk with bibles and guns are going to help in the new anarchistic utopia he offers them -- but trying to present Rick Santorum as a rational candidate with any further agenda than dismantling all the rules that keep markets free, creating a new Christian aristocracy and most of all, hanging up that "White's Only" sign over the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a scam and a con and a farrago of flim-flam as great as any in the history of the world.
People like me can wonder how dismantling our entire economic system, refusing to pay the bills, can be called Conservatism, or any of the other radical, ultra-Chauvinistic, Denialist and dishonest rhetoric that smells more like Attila's unwashed hordes, but the blue-hair church ladies, their God smitten and brainwashed children and the rest of the angry Community Christian Academics don't seem to care. There's just something wrong out there and they don't know what it is and the sick Mr. Rick and his sanctimonious rabble are at hand to point out the enemies and heretics for the burning.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteSantorum is one of the all-time greats, a future hall-of-famer in the Cooperstown of Crazy Talk. The Gingrinch would be the perfect nominee for the Republican Party as it now stands. As a Democratic Party lizard, I hope he wins in Florida, though it looks like it might be a close race.
While the candidates vie to impress the ignorant and vicious hordes who are busy making their judgment, the broader American public is busy giving the president's SOTU Address a 90%+ level of approval, or so I hear.
Nothing these ignorant brutes say about the president contains a scintilla of truth, and it's at times painful to watch them defecate all over themselves vying to outdo one another with petty lies based on nothing but unacknowledged racism and pure fantasy. Witness all the garbage about how "weak" Obama is on defense even as he congratulates Leon Panetta on the Navy Seals' rescue of a couple of hostages held by Somali pirates. If any Republican president had presided over such an event, you'd never hear the end of it. If Obama presides over it, it didn't happen.
I have to wonder if this level of denial can result in cerebral aneurisms or fried synapses, but it's so common here -- the absolutely convoluted logic behind their beliefs.
ReplyDeleteI had a guy tell me last week that the reason our schools weren't teaching US history much before 1964 (news to me) was because "those Liberal revisionists" thought the country was an evil country before the Civil Rights act. I confess I became tongue tied where "what the fuck are you talking about?" froze in my throat. And of course - we're the best country that ever was and if you don't agree, we'll beat the shit out of you -- that's how great we are.
Seems like everyone is talking ( tongue in cheek) about the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse. I would welcome it. Brain eating zombies are very much like the rest of the piously demented residents of Baptopia and it's legal to shoot them.
I suppose it's the guns and bibles that have made this country the greatest country in the history of the world. We've been upgraded. Didn't we used to be just the greatest country in the world? The history of the world is much broader in scope.
ReplyDeleteFascinating how so many pseudo pious folks mingle their piety with bullets. Vince Gill sings a song about a man whose wife takes his car keys to keep him from going out drinking, but she forgot to take the keys to his John Deere tractor. When he comes home from his night on the town, she greets him at the door with "the good book in her left hand and a rolling pin in her right." I love country music but I can't think of a country song about Bibles and guns. I'll just have to write my own. Captain, you are my muse.
I'm a Real American
I love my wife
I love my kids
So I rise with the morning sun
Pack up my gear
in my pick up truck
Work until the day is done
chorus
Don't need no government handout
Ain't nobody giving me none
I got my Bible in my left hand
And in the other one I got my gun.
I love my church
I love my God
Say my prayers most every night
I love my country
and my old John Deere
and I try to do what's right.
repeat chorus
It needs a third verse; I need a collaborator!
There may have been a greater country back in the pre-Cambrian, but not even the Dino remembers that far back. It's not so much the delusions of grandeur that worry me, at least not all by itself, but when a country decides that it's chosen by God to rule the world, and has enough nukes to melt the Earth's crust and goes into full Spanish Inquisition mode when anyone suggests that the US has ever, at anytime and to any degree done something less than grand, well. . . I start think of getting the hell out.
ReplyDeleteI get out my Bible
I get out my gun
Put some gas in the truck
Gonna have some fun
Oh baby
Gonna have some fun tonight.
The GOP slate is the sorriest bunch of candidates in memory:
ReplyDeleteGingrich - the quintessential demagogue, panderer and verbal abuser with a gigantic character disorder;
Santorum - the quintessential “moral” Inquisitor who wants to criminalize the normal, healthy intimate lives of citizens everywhere;
Romney - the quintessential corporatist parasite who staked his reputation on insider trading, tax dodges, and asset-stripped bankruptcies that may meet the definition of “legal” but are by no mean “ethical”;
Ron Paul - the quintessential eccentric and hypocrite whose actions and newsletters contradict his pious words about “freedom” and “liberty;”
… each one of the above representing an aspect of America that is fundamentally WRONG.
Well done Captain! Now we need someone to record it. I'm partial to Willie Nelson.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is major danger in the delusion that this country is the chosen one of the Christian God. I think that we have a blind spot in our history that allows us to forget that we were the nation that used a WMD on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, we tell ourselves that we had good reason to do so and that we actually saved lives by ending the war sooner rather than later, yet it was the U.S. who first employed a WMD on a massive scale.
Octo,dear brother, your assessment of the GOP's sorry lineup is so thoroughly on target.
I am torn as to what to say in this forum at this time. You see this country was the first to place the power of governance entirely in the hands of the people through the form of government (representative democracy) the radical founders gave us.
ReplyDeleteAs with all nations America has it's flaws, we have made mistakes, yet we have done good things that are easily forgotten. Were it not for America Europe's history would be much different. After we (the collective allies) destroyed Europe it was America that financed the rebuilding. The argument with respect to Truman's use of the Atomic bomb is valid, unless the nation was willing to lose many more of it's sons. Perhaps we should not forget it was America who was sleeping in 1939 when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
I could go on, but it is now 3:40 AM and I am ready for bed. Suffice to say America is not perfect by any stretch. However, it remains the best place yet for most. Otherwise rather than millions attempting to get into the U.S.A (many illegally) people would be trying to leave.
I for one tire of both the ultra rightwing and ultra leftwing demagoguery. While I generally (but not completely) agree with Octo's assessment of the republican candidates there are certainly democratic candidates that have been lacking.
It is my hope, and it ought be the hope of sensible conservatives and libertarians all across this great land that a new breed of limited government, and true liberty loving politicians (think classical liberalism) emerges and puts forth idea's that are conservative and libertarian yet recognize the realities of the 21st century.
RN,
ReplyDeleteSometimes I find these exchanges to be frustratingly circular and unproductive, and part of the problem lies with slogans, catch phrases, and platitudes lacking in definition or description. There are elusive weasel words that change meaning depending upon who is using them, often disguising a hidden motive or purpose. Words and phrases like “limited government,” “liberty,” and the “realities of the 21st century.”
What exactly IS limited government? Does this mean eliminating the EPA, Health Education & Welfare, and the Department of Oops? Does this mean an end to clean air and water, food safety, and drug safety monitoring? Do you prefer having salmonella with eggs for breakfast, or drinking fungicide with your orange juice? How about the health, safety and welfare of your grandchildren? Would you prefer they drink arsenic-laden water, a leading cause of leukemia in children?
When I hear this shit about limited government, do you know what it says to me? It means there is a corporatist lobbyist who wants to eliminate the public cost of safety monitoring and put those finds back in their personal pockets. It means the Walton family wants to eliminate food inspections to further enrich themselves - even if means millions of people will be sickened by tainted food. It means the Koch brothers have a monopoly on formaldehyde production and don’t give a dying duck or a flying fuck if it causes cancer, although they are hellbent on squeezing another $$$ billion from their filthy franchises.
Why are subsidies for oil companies more important than Pell grants for struggling college students? Why? Because oil companies have far more political and economic clout than college students, and can afford to spin any public message they want even if those messages are decidedly against the public interest.
If limited government mean lower taxes, have you bothered to ask: “Lower taxes for whom?” For the lobbyists who represent the bloodsuckers who spin these talking points? Messages spun by the puppet masters from Cato and the Heritage Foundation, which are funded by the corporate overlords of American serfdom?
Someday, a rude awakening will force you to climb off your fence and confront your true economic self-interests. These slogans, catch phrases, and platitudes mean nothing and do nothing. Meanwhile, those on unemployment will suffer the continued ignominy of peeing in a bottle. Octopus is in a very bad mood today.
Far more people will killed in Tokyo by conventional bombs than in Hiroshima and of course mass destruction of populations were pioneered by Japan and were examples of mass brutality that far, far exceeded anything the US has ever done. Countless Koreans were killed in their biological warfare WMD "experiments" Whole cities and districts were murdered in Korea and China and the Philippines. Hundreds of thousands of women were kidnapped and raped until most of them died. Millions deliberately starved, millions blown to bits by terror bombing -- hundreds of thousands buried alive or beheaded for the sheer sport of it. It would take a very long article just to list the atrocities. Sorry, it would have been a far better world had we nuked them on Dec 8th, 1941. They'd already killed huge numbers by then.
ReplyDeleteWere all the armada of battleships and carriers and armed military might arrayed against us not a WMD? These murderous bastards killed millions and millions of civilians and still deny their guilt even today. The number of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasake was nearly infinitesimal in comparison the the tens of millions who died by the unspeakable brutality of the Empire of Japan.
I've ofter thought that it was odd that nobody in the US criticizes the British for firebombing Dresden - is it the nature of the weapon or the number of civilians it kills that matters? It seems the answer is yes. Better to murder tens of millions than nuke thousands to stop it.
Many members of my family were in Nanjing, Shanghai and Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded. Most can't even talk about it and frankly, my efforts to read up on it made me too sick to continue. Suffice it to say, even the Nazis were disgusted by the scale and magnitude of the horror. Not only did the Japanese public support it, they committed mass suicide when faced with defeat, invented modern suicide bombing and were working on an atomic bomb of their own which they certainly would have used without the squeamishness Americans feel, ex post facto. that may be the reason that there was an attempted coup to keep the emperor from surrendering - they were only weeks or months from having a nuke of their own, having been given the U-235 and the technology by Hitler. There's evidence that a test bomb had already been fired off the coast of Korea in early 1945.
Had we not stopped that war, only the Russians had the forces to defeat Japan and were in a race to do that before we could. We certainly would have had additional casualties running into the millions and amongst them would certainly have been my father. I owe my life to Harry Truman.
One of the things that disturbs me about liberal pacifism is that it puts the lives of genocidal mass murderers of tens of millions of people above the lives of those who fight against them for their survival and survival of civilization. This country's military might prevented the enslavement of most of the world by genocidal, racist madmen and I'm glad of it.
Tutti,
ReplyDeleteI think most people agree that government ought to be carefully limited – it's the cornerstone of the American Revolution, no? But as Octo says, the problem lies in determining what those limits ought to be and for whom they are set. If one advocates that the so-called free market should decide everything, that is to assume that the free market is a pure sphere unsullied with base human tendencies such as greed, indifference, or even outright "I got mine, screw everybody else and give them an incurable disease, and while you're at it, chop down all the trees so they don't even have a nice view while they die" malevolence. Or at least that unfettered capitalism will magically deal with those tendencies when they arise. But that doesn't happen: collusion and the perks that come with monopoly and hegemony take care of any such fantasy. (I'm referring to control over information flow, for one thing, so that nobody can even figure out what's going on, much less do anything about it.)
Utopian ideals are nice and the Ron Paul philosophy is one such set of ideals, but we can't go home, can't return to a supposedly simpler state of things when everybody respected everybody else and observed all the necessary limits. History tells us as much. Not only aren't things the way they used to be – they never were the way they used to be. Ideologues, it seems, can never quite figure out that someone will insistently abuse the rights and freedoms and ideals they trumpet as the world's savior. They offer only the equivalent of social and political perpetual motion machines. I say with David Hume regarding certain kinds of speculation, "cast [them] into the fire, for [they] can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."
Anyhow, what makes this country remarkable is its promise, not its performance. Our behavior has generally fallen short of our ideals, sometimes catastrophically, inexcusably so – and of course not everybody in this country ratifies them. But the ideals persist, and they're worth something not only to us but to people all around the globe. We still expect, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, that we'll get to complete the transaction promised by that "blank check" the founders presented us. And it's a good thing we do, because otherwise our history would be a depressing thing to contemplate.
"Anyhow, what makes this country remarkable is its promise, not its performance."
ReplyDeletebloggingdino - Bingo, in one short sentence you nailed it. How each individual views the "best way to fulfill" the promise will naturally cover a expansive number of possibilities.
All of the concerns expressed above in response to my comment are certainly valid. My point is, as both you and Capt demonstrated, is by understanding the realities and then affecting change that leads to a better America. This, my fine progressive leaning counterparts is what Americans certainly want and expect.
Octo, I am sorry you do not approve of my word usage. Perhaps it is because of a inherent distrust of those who view the road to insuring individual liberty (free from acts such as the Patriot Act), securing fiscal stability, ensuring that only regulations that make sense are on the books, simplifying the tax code and closing loopholes, and ending crony capitalism differ a bit from your own?
My point is Octo... no one has a lock on the "right way" to do much of anything. We all have our own beliefs, judgement, and we all have a right to try and sway others. However, just as in business, elected government officials must learn to sit down and hammer out bills and expenditures that make sense for the nation. It is up to the leadership to make a joint decision and (ideally) mutually present and support the decision to the American people.
We may disagree on the best road to reach the promise... but... as Americans we damn well owe it to ourselves, our children and our grandchildren (as well as the legacy of our founders) to get to the promise together. Or at least make the path a bit smoother for those who come after to travel.
At this juncture we sure as hell are not doing good job.
What this liberal pacifist thinks is that every nation, including our own, always has a reason for its actions. No matter what the end result of the action, each actor has an explanation as to why that action had to be taken. Regardless of the reasons, regardless of how many people were killed in other venues, this country used a weapon of mass destruction against two cities and killed children and their families and left millions to suffer the health effects of the exposure to radiation.
ReplyDeleteAre other nations innocent? Of course not but that doesn't make our own actions any less inhumane. Perhaps the most dangerous human trait is the ability to engage in wholesale massacre and salve our conscience by declaring it to have been necessary. In doing so, we never have to wrestle with the morality or ethics of what we have done. In essence, we behave like children. One sibling hits another and when the parent intervenes, the response is "Well he hit me first." That's not really the important issue, who hit first, the issue is that violence is unacceptable. Unfortunately, many of us never learn that lesson, so we continue to make excuses for our own violence while condemning that of others. The result is that we do very little to address the need for ending violence; we just roll merrily along secure in the belief that our own actions always adhere to the moral high road.
The U.S. is not any worse than any other nation, but neither are we any better. Our history is chock full of morally reprehensible acts that cannot be justified--the destruction that we wrought on the indigenous population when we discovered America, our infrastructure based on slave labor, the entire structure of Jim Crow laws that post dated slavery, the denial of full citizenship to women, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and our general policies of interference and expansion into other countries.
Until we face our own culpability, we stand no chance of rejecting our reliance on violence as a solution to resolving the world's problems.
Sheria,
ReplyDeleteYes, necessity indeed. Milton was right in PL when he made his narrator describe Satan's justification for ruining mankind "necessity, the tyrant's plea." I would only add that America's definition of what's necessary has expanded alarmingly in the last few decades: we attack entire nations simply because we're allegedly afraid that someday -- we're not quite sure when -- they MIGHT get up to no good against us. "Just in case maybe in the next twenty years they might turn hostile" is the new necessary. Smoking guns and mushroom clouds and all that.
Only when ALL nations accept that which Sheria has so eloquently expounded can ANY nation feel safe in laying down it's arms and sleep without fear
ReplyDeleteDino, I agree that our definition of whats necessary has expanded. I'm a fan of science fiction, and your comment recalls to mind a film called Minority report.Set in the not too distant future, law enforcement arrests people before they commit crimes based on the predictions of a group of psychic individuals as to who will commit a criminal act. It's the ultimate channeling of fear.
ReplyDeleteYes, yes, that's all very nice, but pace the distractions and wobbly defenses above, sometimes a necessity is a necessity and ignoring the deaths of 40 to 60 million civilians caused by the Axis powers in a war they started when bemoaning the collateral deaths of a couple hundred thousand incurred in the process of stopping them is hypocritical. Do we not blame the Japanese government for ignoring the warning we gave them to evacuate much less refusing to surrender rather than sacrificing their own children?
ReplyDeleteIn the conquest of Japanese held islands, tens of thousands of Japanese civilians murdered their own children rather than face the disgrace of defeat and destroyed themselves too rather than smear the honor of the Emperor, the son of God by surrendering. It takes something I cannot understand to describe these people as innocent victims of nasty, sinful uncaring America. For God's sake, they've built shrines to people worse than the Nazi war criminals we hanged and the men who loosed weaponized poisons and diseases on their enemies and sold their wives and daughters into sexual slavery are still heroes.
Sorry, but I'm not sorry and I will not forget. The rest of Asia still condemns them for refusing to admit any culpability and seems astonished that we alone join them in the denial. Do we hate ourselves so much that we ignore history as well?
Why, why, why, in our orgy of Liberal self-flagellation, are we not talking about the destruction of Tokyo and Berlin and of course Dresden which far outweighs the civilian death toll of Hiroshima and why have you forgotten how we were losing tens of thousands of men and ships in a day and why is it insufficient to argue that the future of civilization was more bleak than at any time in history. Is it that we suffered 75% casualties in bombing Europe and no casualties in the two planes that stopped the war in the Pacific? Didn't we pay a big enough price in the hundred thousand US men killed by the Japanese and their suicide bombers?
This is pacifism in it's most malignant form if we're arguing that we didn't deserve to stop the massive destruction of human life and liberty by its most evil entity, unless we maximize the cost in our own lives by limiting our power to fight it? Should we have used clubs and spears or passive resistance, or just surrendered to set a good example?
No attack by the empire of Japan in Asia failed to include the deliberate and gruesome destruction of civilians and prisoners. It was a war deliberately designed to use atrocities against civilians as a fundamental strategy. If you haven't read The Rape of Nanjing or about the Bataan Death March, perhaps you should. It equals or exceeds the horrors of the Nazis and yet nobody seems to remember - why is that?
ReplyDeleteHow else would any of you stopped this war - or wouldn't you have bothered because of "principles?" Would it have been better if we had destroyed such Naval targets as Nagasaki with a huge fleet of bombers as we did in Tokyo or maybe leaflets asking them politely to stop the rape, murder, torture and pillage? It certainly seems that this is the argument and it certainly seems we're deliberately ignoring the fact that the Japanese pioneered the use of WMD in their attempt to subjugate half the world and were at the threshold of becoming a nuclear super power.
You all know, of course, that they were warned that we were going to use a nuclear weapon and you know that they certainly knew what the results would be and chose to let their people die. You know that even after the
bombs of August, the Japanese generals staged a coup because they wanted the entire population to fight to the death, don't you? It was the bomb and the bomb alone that stopped the war and yet some seem to want us to have done the same sick thing and fought on and on until we had lost millions more and been forced to a stalemate wherein Japan owned Asia.
No, the end does not by itself justify the means but that hardly means that no end justifies violence. Bringing up the irrelevant historical misdeeds of the US is simply a rhetorical distraction and perhaps a subtle way of saying we don't deserve to live and therefore even a feeble self defense is immoral.
The US played a large part in saving the world from the greatest horror in human history and for that alone I would thankfully preserve it and in enduring gratitude defend it against such arguments.
Captain, I am philosophically opposed to the taking of human life; however, that does not mean that I believe that someone has to be condemned and someone has to be praised in evaluating the use of violence to solve conflicts.
ReplyDeleteI can't speak for others, but my view is that one moral disgrace does not elevate an equally moral disgrace to the status of moral good. That is the game that humankind has played as far back as there is recorded history. Each side is always convinced that it has acted in a necessary manner to preserve something--its way of life, its form of government, or its place in the world order.
To get bogged down in the who was more wrong or more right debate is to indeed take on the persona of the five year old whose defense is, "He hit me first."
If we, as humans, are to ever move beyond violence as a solution to our disagreements, we have to first stop justifying the use of violence. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. We cannot persist in the belief that violence is acceptable because we are morally right, no matter who that we is. The atrocities by the Japanese,the Dresden bombings, are all horrific events, as was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The horrors that we wrought are no less horrible because we can offer rational justifications for our actions. Those people who lived ordinary lives in those cities, had no more control over the actions of their government than we have over ours. Indeed, based on the very structure of their government, they had less power over theirs.
Wars and acts of war are perpetuated by old men who sit in large buildings and make decisions that cause the deaths of others. It is of little use to announce that we killed for the right reasons while they did not. Dead is dead. Either we are opposed to violence as a solution to disagreements among nations or we accept that the opposition has just as much belief in the rightness of their actions as we do in the rightness of ours. In which case, we will all continue along, secure in our own rightness of approach, killing each other in the name of justice, freedom, or whatever cause in which we place our trust.
In the long run how much does it matter whether or not a child is killed by a bomb dropped in a good cause and one dropped in a bad cause? Shouldn't the goal be no more bombs?
cont'd below
Regardless of our motivations, no matter how moral, shouldn't we still feel sorrow for the deaths of millions? Our past misdeeds as a country are far from irrelevant. One of the significant elements of the belief of many Americans in our own exceptionalism is a core belief that we have only been a force for good. That we are indeed the greatest country in history, surpassing all others. That sort of arrogance is what makes us believe that we have a duty to intervene in the affairs of other nations and point them in the "right" direction. It's behind our decision to invade a sovereign nation on an unfounded premise that Iraq had WMDs and the misguided belief by many Americans that Saddam Hussein was the author of 9/11. A little humility is in order;we need to recognize our own sins before we can challenge others for theirs with any credible moral authority.
ReplyDeleteRight now, we teeter on the precipice of some type of military conflict with Iran over Iran's development of a nuclear weapon. I fear Iran's growing nuclear capabilities, but I also think that it is fair to point out that of all the major powers, we had barely developed atomic power when we chose to use it. Does that make us evil? I don't think so; I never said it did. Is it something that we need to fully acknowledge as a crime against humanity. Yes. In doing so we take a moral high ground not of superiority but of acknowledgement that we speak with authority as to the devastation that can result from a decision to unleash the power of weapons of mass destruction. The parent who engages in fisticuffs with a neighbor over a disagreement has little credibility in later telling her child, "We don't hit people." To regain her credibility, she must acknowledge her own wrongdoing and explain to her child that she acted wrongly and then the parent must reject the use of violence to resolve disputes if she hopes to show her child that violence is not acceptable.
As for the transgressions of other nations at other points in history, I believe that they too need to refute violence. However, I tend to focus on the U.S. because it is my homeland.
My views have nothing to do with re-fighting WWII. What is done is done. It is about what philosophy we choose to pursue in the here and now. Do we continue to dance with violence or do we find a new dance partner?
Sheria, it is my belief the only justification for war (violence) is in response to an act of aggression against a nation and her people by another. As distasteful as it my be when this happens retaliation becomes a justifiable act of self defence, or self preservation.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately there are few to dance partners like you in the wide world of envious nations.
Sheria, it is my belief the only justification for war (violence) is in response to an act of aggression against a nation and her people by another. As distasteful as it my be when this happens retaliation becomes a justifiable act of self defence, or self preservation.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately there are few to dance partners like you in the wide world of envious nations.
Sheria,
ReplyDeleteI'm only responding to the idea that the US committed some great sin by using a certain kind of force to stop the worst crime against humanity in human history -- as though it were the kind of explosive that made it evil while other kinds aren't worth mentioning although nearly all the deaths were caused by those other means.
I have made no statement about attacking Iran or Panama or Vietnam or Iraq or Cambodia or Laos or Spain or Mexico or Granada or the Philippines or some other target of our martial spirit I somehow missed.
In WW II we had war declared on us and were attacked in a war that had been going on since 1937 and had already claimed vast numbers of civilian casualties. We stopped it and in my mind, that act justifies our existence and permitted the world we live in today -- one where democracy flourishes more than ever before.