Right but you have the rightr to assume that they weren't. Let me ask you something, who have they been strongger in resisting? We have twice the military on the gorund than Sadaam Husein did in the last years of his tenure.
Errm...
You know how he gained that grip?
By commiting genocide and killing thousands of Shia men, women, and children and by gassing hundreds of thousands of Kurds.
If we did the same thing, they would simmer down too, but we can't do that because no matter what you people want to think, we are the good guys.
Right Sec, we killed one hundred ing ( no one else listened) citizens, and are responsible for the state of 25,000 homlesess children, if that aint genocide, What the is?
And whottt, look in the spurs forum and the chat room you are my favorite poster/ chatter-guy-person-thingy; but why not attcak my views on imperialism instead of one statement on the possibility of communism being liked by the people inside a communism nation.
I did...and you aren't the first person I've argued with when they have tried to label the US as an imperial power...I get a tremendous sense of irony at the US being labeled an imperial power, mainly because those that do it most often are Europeans, who just happen to live in the countries that were the most recent Imperialistic World powers...and whose Imperialistic screwing around in the mid-east we are now being forced to clean up.
They have never understood the differences between us and them...they think we are like them, but we aren't, and we never have been, shared Democracies or not....their centuries old Aristocracy is still in power to this day, within a Democratic structure, ...while we are a populist nation.
That "US the imperialist" sentiment that comes out of Europe is simply their intellectuals assuming that we will behave the same way their countries have in the past, the same way they do to this day in unseen ways...there is also a lot of that sentiment in the mid-east...and it's simply untrue...just look at our history...then look at theirs.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen an Islamic mouthpiece run off a list of US transgressions against the Islamic and Arab peoples of the world...and countless times they attribute to us wrongs that were done to them by the Europeans. This is one of the main reasons I have lost a lot of respect for the views of the intellectual left and the reasons used to justify terrorist attacks against the US.
Furthermore,
I do not think spreading Democracy is imperialism in any way shape or form. I also don't agree that the Irqis and Afghanis were massively opposed to a Democratic Society...
Beyond that, we aren't exactly imposing a Democracy in Iraq...there's a chance that the government chosen by their National Assembly will be a Theocracy...we don't want that to happen, we are trying to discourage it, but if that method is chosen by a Democratic process, by their people and their elected officials...we will not stand in the way, and Bush has gone on record already as saying this...
So I disagree with that take strongly.
Bush is a lot of things, silver spoon, greedy, maybe even dumb etc...but one thing he isn't is a false patriot...he truly believes in American Pie and thinks it is the solution...and I just happen to agree with him, because the alternatives are worse.
Last edited by whottt; 01-14-2005 at 08:06 PM.
The ultimate example of this so-called imperialism is the war in Iraq. I simply can't believe that you started this diatribe just to discuss imperialism.Huh? No, I have been attacking imperialism, if my motivies were to attack our presence in Iraq it should have little effect on my over-all anti-imperialist essay.
No. But many people lived in fear. Many people did without even when the resources were available to help them. And people had few opportunities to do what they really wanted to do.Damn...were not going to get over this hump huh? Alright, did Saddam's regime account for the complete distruction of Iraq's economy, the loss of essential infrastructure, or the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his citizens in his last two years in office?
Is it worse now? It undoubtedly is for a lot of people. Probably for most of them. But you can't evaluate our impact on that nation yet and hope to accurately uncover the positives and negatives of our actions. It's too early to do that yet. You can't say 'the war is bad because the people are living in a crappy environment' and claim to be using any kind of foresight.
The book isn't closed yet. It's entirely possible that the people are going to begin implementing a system that will lead to prosperity. The U.S. needs to leave first and their needs to be some sort of stability there. What is the situation going to be like in two years? Five? Ten? Will the citizens of Iraq consider themselves to be better off than they were under Saddam? Will they consider the war to be the best thing that ever happened to them in five years?
We simply don't know yet. Was Saddam's rule better for the people? Will the war create stability and prosperity in the long term? Since we can't answer those questions yet, you can't possibly speak of our impact on the region in terms of 'bad' or 'good.'
Theoretically, yes. I agree that it's best to leave people alone in most cases. But that doesn't mean that chaos can't lead to something good faster than natural progression could. Out of chaos comes clarity. We simply don't know what is going to happen. Again, our actions there could turn out to be a net positive for the Iraqi people...or not.You have to allow a people the right to progress at their own pace, deciding that we will be making more progress by changing them earlier than they are ready for will always create chaos. Are you actually arguing with me here?
You claimed that we know more about Iraq than Iraqi citizens do, and that's simply false. It may be correct that we know more about what's going on militarily and politically, but thinking that we actually know more about the nation is simply arrogant. We can't even begin to understand the culture. We don't know the geography as well as they do. We don't know what it means to be an Iraqi.Really is it? How many Iraq's watched our presidential debate? How many Iraq's get to hear president Bush's speeches about our plans over there? Do you know how many Iraq's know about the elections coming up? Do you think they know it is for a cons utional convention. Remember we knocked out their electricty grids so many of them dont have the ability to watch the news. (we don't speak in arabic you know)
And it's possible that Iraqis know more about current events than we do. How many Americans know that the upcoming election is for a cons utional convention? Not many. And it would be great for the people to hear Bush's speeches about the country, the inability to listen to them doesn't result in ignorance. Don't underestimate the power of culture, word of mouth, and observation. I simply can't believe you really feel that you know more about Iraq than the Iraqi people. That epitomizes American arrogance.
I don't know that it's ever acceptable for a nation to create a long-term government in another nation. But it is acceptable, under certain cir stances, for a nation to occupy another nation and govern it until stability is assured. If the U.S. was attacked by another nation, sometimes taking over that nation and creating a stable environment might be the only way to alleviate the threat. And while that isn't the case in Iraq, it has been the case in the past and could be the case in the future. If your national sovereignty is being challenged, you have every right as a nation to protect it.altight, you claim to be anti-imperialistic, you claim the war in Iraq is not justified, can you specify when it is morally acceptable for one culture to creat the government for another one?
Is it possible that Iraqis were happier when Saddam was in charge? Yes. Is it possible that Iraqis are happier? Yes. A nation is always going to resist an outsider. Warring groups can unite to push away an outsider. That's a given.Right but you have the rightr to assume that they weren't. Let me ask you something, who have they been strongger in resisting? We have twice the military on the gorund than Sadaam Husein did in the last years of his tenure.
And it's too early to know what the result is going to be. It not as simple as looking at the resistance and using that to guage the Iraqi people. Time, natural opposition to outsiders, and instability all complicate things.
I agree that we shouldn't be a roadblock. We shouldn't be there in the first place. But now that we are, we need to stay until there is some sort of stability. If we leave now, increased chaos will most certainly follow.My point is that we will be the reason it will take time, and we have no right to be a road block in their political evolution.
And while I agree that we shouldn't be there, it's possible that the war will end up being a positive for the Iraqi people. We shouldn't be there, but it doesn't mean that the people aren't better off with us there anyway. We simply can't tell yet.
Yes, because we have nothing else to compare it to. We don't know what those areas of the world would look like today had Europeans left them alone. You can speculate, but you can't say that imperialism was undoubtedly a net negative for those people. It's complex. Good things and bad things resulted from imperialism. It's easy to see the negatives, but it's more difficult to see the positives.You can not seriously beilieve this can you? After all the debate between myself and sec27row3 or whatever about the history of imperialism and you imply the possibility of a net gain?
Either way, what happened in the past simply helped to shape our world. I think we can both agree that economic imperialism is abhorrent today, but we can't really know about a world that we weren't a part of, especially when we don't know what that world would look like today had imperialism never existed as an idea.
I agree with that. Unfortunately, the right doesn't have a clue either.THe left hasn't got a clue how to solve the mid-east problem...not a ing clue.
The best thing we could have done to change things would have been to leave.It was time to change things in the middle east.
We accelerated it's demise, but Communism failed because it doesn't have the economic principles necessary to sustain a developed country in today's world. But I guess it comes down to the same idea: an economic system that encouraged national prosperity over individual prosperity is always bound to fail.3.Americans hate communism because it takes away the freedom of the individual, it takes away the desire to excel, to compete,...and it did not fail in the Soviet Union on it's own, it wasn't some great mass realization of the Soviet Leadership across the board...it failed because of us. It failed because it wasn't the will of the people, not matter how mighty the military forces that imprisoning them were. It failed because a government doing the thinking for millions could not defeat a country of near equal size and resources in which the government has millions thinking for it .
There is a great point in there, although I'm not certain that it is the one you are trying to make. America has been guilty of economic imperialism and meddling in the affiars of others for decades, but our standard of living is as high as it is because of it. Whether you like those policies or not, and I don't like many of them, I realize that we would have crappier lives if other people in other places hadn't been exploited over time.And make no mistake about it, if not for America it is very likely that you and I would not be able to pursue our own interests in life, and it is even more likely that we would not be sitting here in a public forum...criticizing our government...
I know that's not the point you were trying to make, but I think it's related.
That's true. I think that communism's ability to restrict freedoms is part of the reason for its failure. The economic implications of communism represent the other reason.Those people over there aren't stupid....there hasn't been a major communist government yet that was put in power by the will of the people, they were all put in power by corrupt governmental splits or military coups where a minority gained control of the military weaponry and used it upon the helpless peasantry to impose it's will.
While it might be a stretch to call it imperialism, our country has been involved in exploitation in the past. We haven't followed the European model of full-fledged political imperialsm, but we've engaged in a limited form of economic imperialism, for better or for worse.That "US the imperialist" sentiment that comes out of Europe is simply their intellectuals assuming that we will behave the same way their countries have in the past, the same way they do to this day in unseen ways...there is also a lot of that sentiment in the mid-east...and it's simply untrue...just look at our history...then look at theirs.
You don't always need political control of a nation to exploit it.
I agree with your take on Bush. I'm not a big fan, but I think he's genuine most of the time. I simply disagree that his view of the world is the correct one.Bush is a lot of things, silver spoon, greedy, maybe even dumb etc...but one thing he isn't is a false patriot...he truly believes in American Pie and thinks it is the solution...and I just happen to agree with him, because the alternatives are worse.
Brodels, the Phillipense (it's late i dont care how you spell it), i'll address the rest of this tomorrow
Chile. Allende in the early seventies became president winning a democratic election.
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