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

Jack Parkinson isthatyoujack at icqmail.com
Fri Sep 23 05:26:34 UTC 2005


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Lorrey" <mlorrey at yahoo.com>

Ok! I'll let it go after this! I just need to say:

To: "Jack Parkinson" <isthatyoujack at icqmail.com>; "ExI chat list" 
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Friday, September 23, 2005 12:26 PM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Re: Profile the Great Satan?

> --- 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.

As I understand it, the Swiss are occasionally called upon to do military 
service, each person is required to keep a weapon for this purpose. Some, no 
doubt take it seriously. My Swisss friends thought it was an embarrassing 
joke...

>
>> > 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.

BUT that's exactly when they SHOULD have resorted to violence! As a last 
ditch desperation measure. And - if they had decided to launch a pre-emptive 
strike earlier with sticks, stones and kitchen knives against the Nazi war 
machine - they would simply have been slaughtered sooner...

>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.

There is no such thing as people who don't stick up for themselves! 
Resistance always comes, it sometimes takes a while to build and that is 
all. Once again: Every act of violence is met with resistance - and massive 
violence is always met with massive resistance... Widen your perspective a 
little and you can see that the Israeli war machine was born out of the 
European pogroms...


>> 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?

Wrong questions! How could any of these disasters possibly be better than a 
peaceful, negotiated solution with no violence and destruction?

>
> You refuse to acknowledge that death in a death camp is a disaster for
> the people suffering the death.

Nonsense!

>But to you they are just a statistic,

Nonsense on stilts!

> not to be bothered with in your grand scheme of sophisticated left
> "perspective".

Ah! The pejorative labelling begins here!
>
>>
>> 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.

Breathtaking nonsense! Mandela is the first and only African leader to 
prevent his country from sliding into chaos and barbarism at the first 
opportunity that presented to start shooting...
>
>> And - he became a true and respected international statesman thereby.
>
> Primarily by the socialist internationale who he was already a comrade of

Rubbish! Mandela is respected by left, right and centre of every ideological 
persuasion and in every part of the world...

>
>> 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.

You want to revise history to make Gandhi an aggressor?  This is not a 
modest ambition!

Such strategy could not
> have been effective against, say, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Castro,
> or other socialist heroes of sophisticates like yourself.

I will choose my own heroes thank you! The characters above are notably 
absent from it...

>> 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,

The people of Dresden, and the crippled and deformed in Hiroshima etc may 
not see that as win-win.

>and both have shed
> their former militarism

Ok - but now you praise non-aggression and pacifism?

>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.

I never heard a German say that - and I've been travelling there regularly 
since the 70's

>
> 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.

Nonsense! Russia is a lawless mess - and try getting around on one of their 
passports...
>
>>
>> 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?

Those insurgencies were neither necessary nor wanted. If no-one is actively 
trying to destroy your or your families lives - there is no need to hide 
behind a rock and snipe at them! Sensible people stop fighting when the war 
is over. Intelligent people don't start wars in the first place

Jack
Quote of the day: Or what? You'll release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs 
with bees in their mouth and when they bark they shoot bees at you? - Homer 
Simpson.
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