From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jun 13 2004 - 02:20:11 BST
Some thoughts for all Davids and other MOQERS:
> David Robjant wrote:
> But the trouble with discovering malice and conspiracy is that once
> you've made a career out of it, it becomes addictive, and common
> sense goes on holiday. and later wrote....Maybe Pilger will
in future take Chomsky's advice and substitute "unaccountable institutions"
for "conspiracy". As far as I can see, the substitution don't make much
odds. What's the difference between an "unaccountable institution" and a
"conspiracy" again?
dmb says:
Conspiracy theories are addictive to those who use them to explain there
personal problems and personal shortcomings because it eases the pain, but
Chomsky is not one of these. And the difference between an institutional
analysis and a conspiracy theory is HUGE. The latter is based on fear, anger
and other emotions while the former is based on research and documentation.
But let us turn to Pirsig for some thoughts on the matter. In chapter 17
there is some very interesting stuff about how nations and other large
social institutions act and the confusion we have about that because of SOM.
"The metaphysics of substance makes it difficult to see the Giant. It makes
it customary to think of a city like NY as a 'work of man', but what man
invented it? What group of men invented it? Who sat around an thought up how
it should all go together?" ..."Sometimes people thing there are some evil
individual 'men' somewhere who are exploiting them, some secret cabal of
capitalists, or '400' or 'Wall Street bankers' or WASPs or name-any-minority
group that gets together periodically and has secret conferences on how to
exploit them personally. These 'men' are supposed to be the enemies of
'Man'. It get confusing, but nobody seems to notice the confusion." ...When
societies and cultures and cities are seen not as inventions of 'man' but as
higher organisms than biological man, the phenomena of war and genocide and
all the other forms of human exploitation become more intelligible.
'Mankind' has nver been interested in getting itself killled. But the
superorganism, the Giant, who is a pattern of values superimposed on top of
biological human bodies, doesn't mind losing a few bodies to protect his
greater interests."
Think about Pirsig's description of Hitler as essentially an
anti-intellectual assertion of social level values. Think about the
Victorian Americans, for whom the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Think
about the assertion that social values have always been aimed at controlling
biological values and how the instrument of control has always been cops and
soldiers and their guns. You add all this up and its starts to be clear that
war is an expression of social level values. And as WMD become more widely
available, this method of protecting society is increasing obsolete. We just
can't afford to act like crusaders any more. The guns have grown too large
and the world too small for this ancient nightmare to continue. I think the
intellect was born and is trying to take control becasue the alternative is
extinction or worse. And it no accident that this process began in earnest
following the senseless slaughter of WW1. And so all I see Chomsky and other
critics doing is applying an intellectual criticism of these horrors.
Further, since cops and armies are and always have been the instrument of
control in society, and since the leader of every nation on earth is
responsible for those cops and armies, any head of state can easily be
demonized as a murderous thug, even in cases where its not true. I mean, I
like to say that we know Saddam had WMDs because we have the receipts to
prove it. We sold him these weapons fully expecting that he would use them
to kill people. We also encouraged him, through ambassador April Glasspie,
to go ahead and invade Kuwait. She told him that we considered such a move
to be "an internal matter". This is what kills me about the whole
demonization of Saddam. (Not that it takes much effort to make him look like
a monster.) Same with Bin Laden. We trained and financed the guy fully
expecting him to kill the soviets on our behalf. And even now, while the
administration PRETENDS to care about democracy and human rights in Iraq,
complete ignore such principles in supporting the military dictator in
Pakistan and the anti-democratic coup plotters in Venezuala. I suppose we
liberals should consider it a victory of sorts that Bush feels the need to
pay lip service to these principles, but the democratic rhetoric is mocked
by their actual actions, which, as everyone knows, speaks much louder than
words.
All the complaints about Saddam's torture chambers are now seen for what
they are, a hypocritical double-standard. Now that all the Reagan rituals
are over, we'll soon hear about the legalistic parsing of words used by the
administration to circumvent the laws against torture. Nest week we'll all
find out about how this was not just "a few bad apples", but was rather the
result of policies developed at the very top of the chain of command,
including the secretary of Defense and the commader-in-chief himself. You'll
see.
David R said:
WMD's are
sufficiently dangerous to all that we cannot afford to have UN inspection
regimes disregarded - we need to know who's got this stuff and where - and
the seriousness with which the WMD issue is now being taken in Libya and
Iran is a testament to a genuine security gain here. Nor can we, either,
afford to have armistice terms routinely ignored by an aggressor nation, as
did Iraq for the full decade following the Kuwait war.
dmb says:
Again, the problem is hypocracy and double-standards. Israel has something
like 200 nukes. Are they not a threat to their neighbors. Is there a nation
on earth that DOESN'T have some kind of WMDs or would have them if they
could? How can a nation protect itself without them. Did we not just witness
an excessive amount of WMDs poured down on Iraq (FOX news put music to the
opening salvos and called it majestic.) I mean, by the Bush administration's
standards, any nation capable of defending itself at all is a potential
threat. This kind of threat would then include any nation we choose.
My only hope is that in the failure to actually find anything threatening in
Iraq, this insane policy of pre-emptive war will be entirely discredited.
And my greatest fear that such a policy will actually make sense some day,
when its proven with genuine intelligence that there really is an attack on
the way, and the policy will still be entirely discredited, that we'll be
the boy who cried wolf on a global scale.
David R
BTW, all opinion polling carried out *in Iraq* shows overwhelming public
support for the UK/US intervention - even if the other 30 percent have guns.
It's in the US and the UK that the polls go the other way.
dmb replies:
According to polls, Bush and the US are seen as a greater threat than Saddam
and Iraq. And now I think it is far more dangerous to be an American than it
was before this so-called threat was eliminated. The war is a giant
live-action recruiting poster for Bin Ladin and his ilk. So even if we
agreed on the goal of making the world safer, I think you'd have to admit
that so far at least, the war is counterproductive, that it is having the
opposite effect.
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