[extropy-chat] letter concerning presidential growth

[Brett Paatsch]

Adrian Tymes wrote:

> --- Brett Paatsch <bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>> But that does not mean that there are not rational humanistic grounds
>> for being anti-American, and anti-Western, and anti-Australian when
>> the collective citizenry of America, or the UK or Australia are
>> morally culpable for not caring enough to hold their governments to
>> account for breaches of promise and further contributions to the 
>> erosion of human rights and the rule of law.  
> 
> What of those citizens who attempted to do so, and were thwarted
> by the other citizens?  Would you tar them with the same brush,
> for failing to lay down their lives (which it might have taken,
> in the face of that much opposition) for what you claim is just?

What about them?  They are minority instances of a class. They
are not the class.   

Democratic nation states like the US and Australia and the UK are
nations. They are real things.  The nation state is the political entity
that dominates at present. It is possible and sometimes downright
necessary to talk in general terms.  

The people who enjoy US citizenship are a specific class of people
in the set of people on earth. 

What that class of the people on earth does more than any other
class determines the progress or regress of humanity. 

Americans have a special responsibility to international law 
because they are Americans. When America breaks international
law its worse than when Libya does, or Australia does, because
it sets the moral tenor of the planet. It tells the people of the world
what sort of world the world is and what sort of humans succeed
in the world

I think America is on the slide.

I think that with the end of the USSR, and indeed slightly before it
successive US Presidents from Reagan, encouraged by characters
that might call themselves neo-cons, have increasingly dispensed
with the inconvenience of international law because they thought 
that *they* would not be held accountable by Americans. They
have gambled that Americans domestically would not care enough
about what they do internationally, and they have figured pragmatically
that foreign nationals don't vote and so don't count. They have thought
that they could weaken the UN and still make use of it. And so far, 
they have been right. 

If Bush is not impeached, the next US President will come to power
*knowing* that Bush was not impeached after invading a sovereign
country and member of the UN to find weapons of mass destuction
that didn't exits. What possible grounds could there be for
impeachment in the future that would top what Bush has done?

The next US President will think with good reason having
watched and learned the lessons of history that he or she is
untouchable and unaccountable because the system is such
and the citizenry is such that they will not care and they will
have diminshed mechanisms for holding him or her to account. 

And around the world politicans in 'democratic' countries will
look at the US as the template and they will see what works,
how the public is divided and manipulated and they will learn
and imitate. 

Brett Paatsch