Gurdur

Mindmeld ! Mindmeld !

Farren

Orwell was a fan of communism, not Stalin, in his youth. The excesses of Communism in his life drove him away, and prompted him to write 1984 and Animal Farm. He once said (at least I think it was him) "A man who is not a communist at the age of 18 is heartless. A man who is still a communist at the age of 30 is brainless"

Gurdur

uh, sorry if I disagree to a small degree, Farren, but Orwell was never really a fan of communism as such, but more a fan of democratic socialism, in a very vague kind of way.

He saw at first hand the Communist purges and agitprop in Spain while he was fighting there (he got a bullet through the throat from a Nationalist sniper which ended his career there and had to go back to the UK), and while he was in Spain, he was with the POUM forces, a vaguely Trotskyist kind of Spanish party/militia.

Farren

No Prob. Thx for the history lesson

Gurdur

I didn't mean to sound nasty; just that George Orwell is rather a hobby of mine, and partly a role-model.

fatherphil

gurdur & zar, seems you guys rather take shots than discussing points. gurdur, i addressed your two points or questions. i laid out the irony, it really was not that subtle. as for knowing to which one i'm responding to, sorry its difficult for you to follow. just apply to yourself the parts of my post which seem relevant to you and you'll should be able to figure it out.

both of you, again, if you see no distinction between the two sides of this conflict then who are you rooting for?

gurdur, do you think orwell would have been in favor of saddam being removed from power?

Koyaanisqatsi

If I may chime back in, fatherphil, the question has never been about whether or not Hussein was a bad man. Bush is a bad man, too. Does that mean Russia or China or Canada now has the right to wage war against America in order to oust him?

Though I wish nightly this would happen, if it ever did I would defend to the death against anyone who tried to do it, because civilized nations are not supposed to do such things. You do not fabricate reasons to instigate war, yet we have done just that.

And, please, let's not muddy what I'm arguing; fabricating reasons to join a war is reprehensible, too, but a different animal, IMO. This has been a top-down fabrication of the most overt kind and therefore in a different class than either destabilizing a region in order to covertly instigate local wars or fabricating incidents like the Gulf of Tonkin in order to trick the American public into supporting a war.

We are now the terrorists; threatening the world to do what we tell it to do our we'll MOAB its ass. There simply is no way around that irrefutable fact. We have declared to the world that everything must be done our way or we will kill you. Not institute economic sanctions or bring about change through diplomatic efforts or even lead by example; blow you up is now our foreign policy.

Problem is, our way no longer exists; the constitution has been destroyed and our electorate overtly circumvented. Do you think that's just going to go away over time? That it was just this last election that was undermined by the most prestigious institution in our country (the Supreme Court) as some sort of temporary measure, or that a precedent such as what's happening in Iraq was just some sort of fluke?

What we have done is worse than anything Hussein ever allegedly did to his own people by a factor of at least ten, IMO, because it signals a fundamental shift in the American power structure's ideology; a shift that will take decades to undo even if a benign leader is somehow elected into office in 2004. The poeple who fabricated this war are not elected officials and they've been in power behind the scenes (apparently pulling the strings) for decades. They aren't just going to go away, especially now that it appears to have been a "success" (and by "success" I mean, of course, that a complete fabrication from top to bottom in order to obfuscate the fact that this was nothing more than a test run of the New World Order; akin to dropping the first atomic weapons in a dessert before we actually start using them on the real targets).

The only reason you can't see any of this as bad, of course, is because you're on the side of the victor's; the ones who fabricate the history, only this time, they've fabricated the present in order to shape the future as well and the very act of fabrication is what makes them more evil than their alleged enemy. Period.

In other words, it cannot be questioned that Bush is worse than Hussein by the simple fact that Bush instigated the war. That act alone catapults him to a higher strata of evil than Hussein, because, of the two, only we are supposed to be bastions of freedom.

Does freedom come at a cost? Absolutely, but we are the ones who are supposed to be able to bear that cost for the rest of the world; not unjustly raise those rates and determine through self-interest who must pay it.

This war has forever and irrevocably destroyed any possible delusions of grandeur America ever laid claim to by the blood of our soldiers past; the liberators having finally revealed themselves to be the oppressors and all in the name of freedom!

In case nobody here has actually read Brave New World, by the way, it is a dystopian novel and by no means a model for the "new world order" that is now upon us. A boot crushing a human skull is a boot crushing a human skull, regardless of whether or not that boot has a painted on it.

The Germans tried that once by posting Arbeit Macht Frei over a death camp and although it will take the world much longer to ferret out the American war criminals because they are so deeply robed in silken flags (and seemingly endless pockets), it doesn't change the fact that a head once severed means the body eventually dies.

Will it be dramatic or decisive? Probably not, but it has already begun and it will only be a matter of time; ironically occuring most likely through the very diplomatic, civilized actions that we just trampled under our tank treads. My money is on the newly strengthened EU slowly but surely cutting America's balls off the way you would a pit bull in order to tame it.

See, that's the inevitable problem with militarizing one's empire; guns have a nasty habit of jamming, backfiring and fragging your own troops and this particular experiment is only the tip of the iceberg for sure. Already "floaters" have been sent out over the airwaves about next possible targets, like Syria and Iran, but while we continue to think we're invincible (due more to our eating our own bullshit and thinking it a fine meal), the castration techniques will be put into place and implemented ultimately by the very people that think they're in power now.

Et tu, Brutus might as well replace E Pluribus Unum since ten, twenty years from now (or later) that's what will be the outcome of Bush, Inc.'s little dabble in the new world order and necessarily so. We (the people) just won't know it's happening until, of course, it's already done.

This party political broadcast was made possible by the lives of countless millions who are right now spinning in their marked and unmarked graves.

Pomp

In case nobody here has actually read Brave New World, by the way, it is a dystopian novel and by no means a model for the "new world order" that is now upon us. A boot crushing a human skull is a boot crushing a human skull, regardless of whether or not that boot has a painted on it.


That's 1984.

Zar

double post

Zar

Your mere saying so has no effect on the strength of the points which were indeed made.

For you it is just a simplistic matter involving "choosing sides" and "rooting" for the home team, like it was a football game. What a spectacularly one-dimensional way to think of things. This is about mass death, chaos, disease, national sovereignty, and the deep erosion of international law and order, among other things. "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists," is that it? Thanks, but no thanks, "Clone of Bush," but we've heard that line before.

First, it must be said that I do not give credence to any of the pretexts for this war, some of which were outright lies. The plagiarised dossier, the fake nuclear documents, and the non-existent al-Qaeda connection are but a few of the problems I have with this.

You want to know what I'm rooting for? I'm rooting for international peace. I'm rooting against empire. I'm rooting for patient diplomacy. I'm rooting for letting other countries find their own way and letting them die for their own causes without the United States choosing who wins and who loses by killing one group and sparing another. I'm against wasting the lives of our troops to fight civil wars for other people around the globe which we are not likely to provide a satisfactory end for. It is their business, not ours. Our meddling helps many people get into the dire situations they are in. Why should we think we can "solve" past wrongful interventionism with more wrongful interventionism?

And does, say, admiring or loving some aspects of the United States make anything its government may do right, just and proper? Of course not. Therefore, the burden is on each of us to make our respective cases for action. You cannot shortcut the discussion by appealing to wheteher or not we like our country more than we like, say, Iraq. Each act of illegitimate aggression takes something away from the greatness of this country and takes something away from us as a (supposedly) democratically minded people. Democratically minded people do not attack other countries to "install" what they think is best for them any more than people within a democratically minded state "install" their views into their neighbor's house at gunpoint.

The only viable case for war is an imminent, and I mean imminent military threat (not a cultural or political threat). No such threat was shown to exist. Therefore it was wrong for us to take this action.

Now, lets return to whether I see a distinction between our government and other ones. I do. Some governments are aggresors and military threats to others, some are not. Those in the so-called "civilised" world are largely thought to be in the latter category. Ours is in the former catagory. Most governments also tend to not attack other nations for no other reason than to install their form of society in them. Ours does, except in reality what winds up happening is they just get pain, suffering and death for our trouble, and then they get ignored because we have to catch the next episode of "Survivor" on TV. For the most part, it seems clear to me that nations in the past which have embarked on adventures of violent conquest to "spread" their kind throughout the world, especially in the last century, have been widely hated and reviled, especially by this country (at least in its mythology). One such example was the U.S.S.R. (Soviet expansionism was the reason for the cold war). Another was Nazi Germany. Its superior form of society was to be a model for the world, worth killing inferior peoples in order to establish. It was the United States that helped lead the charge into internationalist order, and preventing unnecessary war by housing the United Nations. A country that was once a force for law and order has now made its final step in a long slide toward reversion back to the law of the jungle.

What do you make of these distinctions?