[extropy-chat] Re: Profile the Great Satan?

Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 23 04:26:55 UTC 2005



--- Jack Parkinson <isthatyoujack at icqmail.com> wrote:

> 
> From: "Mike Lorrey" <mlorrey at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Re: Profile the Great Satan?
> 
> > Switzerland is peaceful and free because every Swiss is armed with
> a
> > machine gun and the ammo to do damage with it. The willingness to
> > commit violence in their defense has kept them free. Their
> willingness
> > to trade with anybody only has made them rich as any banker of a
> lord
> > of war would. We can't all be bankers to warlords.
> 
> This makes the Swiss sound like testoterone-crazed, trigger-happy
> miltants! 
> Not so! Switzerland is tiny - and without significant capacity to
> impose its will by force on anyone. And, it would be walk-over for
> any medium power military machine. Your comment is just obscurist.

On the contrary, I happen to know some Swiss, do you? They take their
personal duty to personal and national self defense seriously.

> > There are six million dead in europe who didn't use violence and
> did
> > not live.
> 
> Really? What about the uprisings in Warsaw? The histories are full of
> tales of remarkable resistance across the entire theatre of WWII
> operations...

Now who is being obscurist? The jews of the Warsaw ghetto uprising only
resorted to violence in self defense after they figured out they
weren't getting out alive. There are a number of Warsaw jews who
escaped the slaughter. Our discussion of violence is its use in
initiating violence. The jews of europe were decidedly pacifist prior
to the Nazi pogrom, and most remained so during it, to their own loss.

> 
> >There are tens of millions of corpses across Turkey, the old
> > Soviet republics, and across China who didn't use violence and did
> not
> > live. You are lying the lie of the pacifist.
> 
> Perspective, perspective... I just wear different glasses and look at
> global as well as local implications. 

Bull. There is no perspective to tens of millions of innocent people
dead other than that they didn't stick up for themselves or didn't do
it soon enough.

> Every armed conflict is eventually a disaster if you widen your
> observation of the fallout far enough - from a dawn 
> shootout at the ok corral to carpet-bombing the bad guys in Asia ...

A disaster for WHO is the question? For the agressor, or its victims?
How was the US revolution a disaster for the US states? How was the US
civil war a disaster for the slaves, or the northern industrialists who
benefitted from their post-war migration and labor? 

You refuse to acknowledge that death in a death camp is a disaster for
the people suffering the death. But to you they are just a statistic,
not to be bothered with in your grand scheme of sophisticated left
"perspective".

> 
> Only the scale of each disaster varies and is revealed over time.
> Pacifism 
> is strength and economy if implemented properly! Nelson Mandela could
> have promoted a bloodbath in South Africa - and showed remarkable
> resilience in restraining himself and his followers. 

He had no cause to. Despite the treatment his people suffered, they did
not suffer a holocaust.

> And - he became a true and respected international statesman thereby.

Primarily by the socialist internationale who he was already a comrade
of.

> Gandhi freed modern India in much the same 
> way and HE will be admired forever because of that.

Gandhi clearly stated that the greatest crime the British committed
against Indians was to debar them the use of arms. He used pacifism in
a strategic way only because he knew the British considered themselves
a compassionate and moral people capable of outrage at injustice. His
pacifism was pure agit-prop and nothing more. Such strategy could not
have been effective against, say, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Castro,
or other socialist heroes of sophisticates like yourself.

> 
> The rare pacifist statesmen we do have promote win-win solutions.
> Know of any win-win wars?

Sure do. Japan is one of the top economies in the world, as is Germany,
as a result of the US pounding them into rubble, and both have shed
their former militarism and most of their former racism while doing it.
Many a German city today that escaped allied bombing now bemoans that
they never benefitted from the free razing services that other cities
enjoyed to prepare them for post-war redevelopment.

The Cold War has also been Win-win. The people of the former USSR are
now far freer than they once were, so they are far better off. Most of
the politically and economically astute in the world joke that the best
thing that can happen to their homeland is to be conquered by the US.

> 
> There is a fundamental law of nature that tough guys learn the hard
> way: Every act of violence is met with resistance - and massive
> violence is always met with massive resistance.

This is also a lie. You need to learn to distinguish one sort of
violence from the other. Otherwise, where were all the post-war German
and Japanese insurgencies?

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
Founder, Constitution Park Foundation:
http://constitutionpark.blogspot.com
Personal/political blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com


		
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