21st January 2008, 1:17 AM
(I'll hopefully deal with the other parts later)
You say it yourself right there. Fascists are NATIONALISTS. They concentrate on building state power and the total autocratic rule of one person. Islamic theocracy as most Islamic radicals want it is something very, very different. State power? Kind of, but that power is not held by state authorities, but by religious ones who have power over the state authorities -- see the government of Iran, where the President is actually powerless. It is the religious authorities and religious police who actually run Iran... this is not just a semantic difference. Theocracy and nationalism are in many ways opposing forces, in fact -- nationalism wishes to build up the state at the cost of all else, and requires (or at least seems to end up resulting in) finding enemies for your people to focus on so there is an "other" to compare to. Theocracy, as practiced by either the Medieval Christian church or the current Islamic world, is NOT about nationalism. It is about religion, so all nations that share your religion are considered similar, friendly nations and all others are considered the "other". Why do you keep ignoring the fact that I keep emphasizing the fact that Islamic radicals are theocrats or would-be theocrats? Theocracy is not fascism! They do have similarities, but they are not the same -- just like how applied communism and applied fascism have similarities (Hitler's Germany vs. Stalin's Russia), but they are actually on opposite ends of the political spectrum.
In short, Islamic radicals do not want to build up state power. They want to build up religious power over the state, and want the absolute rule of religious law. Fascists want absolute power too, but absolute power held by the state authorities. Religion is not important to fascists, but total control of everything byt state authorities is -- hence the old saying that 'Mussolini made the trains run on time'. On the other hand, Islamic theocracies do not have an interest in having that kind of control. Look at how in Arab nations tribal identity means so much -- Iraq is not a nation of just three factions, but a nation of many tribes. People's identities are to their tribes, whose leaders follow the religious authorities's commands. This is a much looser, more diffuse control structure than a fascist state; Islamic states have no interest in building up the system of total state control that is the core of what fascism is. The comparison makes absolutely no sense, and exists only to inflame the anger of Americans so that they can be convinced to support wars against Islamic nations such as the ones in Iraq, Afghanistan, and prospectively Iran.
Rwanda: A major failure of the UN, and it admits that it should have done something. Still, UN peacekeepers did eventually come in and help keep things calm later on.
Iran: The latest NIE shows that those neocon fantasies are just that... I certainly admit to being worried by Iran, primarily thanks to their abysmal human rights record and sometimes unpredictable leadership, but war is not the answer... international pressure does work, as the halted work on the bomb shows.
Iraq: you ignored this one, but again, 1991-2003 Iraq is a great example of how UN action works, and works well. The sanctions against Sadaam, backed up with threat of force and the no-fly zones, did a good job of reining in Sadaam.
There are plenty more examples... UN peacekeepers have not always been successful because of the strong limitations they have on use of force, so when a nation starts up a real war again they can do little, but even so they have done great work in many places. Despite the horrific failure at Srebnica, I'm sure that the Bosnian mission did save many lives, for instance... in fact, UN peacekeepers are still in Bosnia, providing a vital independent force that is not Bosnian Muslim or Serb. NATO and UN forces in Kosovo serve a similar mission there. In Haiti they have been about all that has kept the place from falling apart even worse in these last few decades. The UN has also just gotten its first peacekeepers in Darfur. It is far from enough, as the Sudanese government is obstructing them in every way possible, but it's a start, and an important step up in prominence from the African Union soldiers there before.
I believe that the Bush administration is not actually making that effort. They have pretty much given up on fixing Iraq, and are just in a holding pattern until the next administration can come in and try to deal with the mess... if they were serious about it we'd hear things about progress of some kind, and we don't. So the solution is, get international help (UN negociators), have them sit down and talk, and seriously work at it until an agreement is forged. It can happen with effort, but this administration isn't applying that kind of effort. Of course, some of that effort is impossible given the way that the Bush administration hates the UN, and without the UN what we can do is limited, but even so, they could be doing more than they are.
What, are you defending good old "we'll trade with them and THEN they'll become more democratic!" I would think that the total failure of that policy in China, where the nation has industrialized but not democratized, would show how that policy doesn't work. No, I think that applying economic pain would actually work better... people need an incentive to change things on a large scale, and we sure aren't giving them that incentive now.
For the really bad regimes, like Burma, it is frustrating that it seems that all we can do is sit here while they repress their people and crush protests... I feel like we should be doing something more to get rid of the junta, but I don't know what real options we have... we can't cut off our trade with them any more than we already have. We could hurt them a lot by cutting trade with China, though, given that China is their major trading partner and some of that stuff China is buying from Burma is then resold to the US (endangered rainforest wood, straight from the jungles of Burma to your home!). I wish there was more we could do than that, but we can't go in and invade or something, as that always just makes things exponentially worse. As long as China is supporting them there's not much we can do without going after China, it seems... :(
Kissenger thought that if we bombed the Vietnamese people more, we would win the war. He was wrong, obviously. He was absolutely power hungry; why else would a Jewish man become close political allies with as well-known an antisemite as Richard Nixon? And he was absolutely a warmonger, as his support for the Vietnam war proves.
I bolded that last sentence for a reason... it is just such a horrific thing to say. That we could have "won", and that it was WORTH winning a war which pointlessly killed millions of people for absolutely no gain, is an unbelievable statement to make, and it really depresses me how the Republicans cannot admit the truth about Vietnam, even now so many decades later. Short of killing every person in Vietnam, we could not win. Five million deaths did not break them; more would not have either. Every person we displaced (virtually all of them, again, in the half of Vietnam WE ran), every person who our puppet dictators in the South Vietnamese government had killed, created more enemies than people it killed... despite the casualties and danger, the NLF kept up the resistance in the South for so many years because of the massive amount of popular support from the South Vietnamese government. How can you "win" when you have no allies and are only killing indiscriminately? Kissenger's "breaking point", the point where too many people have died and a nation gives up... they did not break as he expected, and clearly were not going to. Not that we were defending anything overly noble anyway.
As for Laos and Cambodia, both nations fell to Communism to a large extent BECAUSE of the Vietnam war, not after it. The long war destabilized and wrecked both nations' governments. US bombings (which were illegal but were carried on for years -- the infamous 'secret bombings') killed huge numbers of people, sometimes disrupting the enemy but always hurting the local government. Cambodia, in fact, shows the ridiculousness of American policy in the region every bit as much as Vietnam. We began bombing Cambodia to stop the Khmer Rouge communist-aligned rebels. We forced them into hiding, but also utterly devastated Cambodia, killing huge numbers of people and destroying the countryside. Bombers had quotas -- they had to drop a certain amount, whether or not there were targets, so they'd just have to drop on whatever they saw, or just bomb the forests or something.
When the bombings finally stopped at the end of the war, the Khmer Rouge came out of hiding. The Cambodian government had been ruined by the American bombings meant to "support" it, so it was easy for the Khmer Rouge to take over the nation. They proceeded to start a genocide that would kill at least a million people in a nation of only a few million, the "Killing Fields". By this point, China and Russia had split and China and the US were improving relations. Vietnam had aligned with Russia. The Khmer Rouge stuck with the Chinese side. Within a few years, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, with their stated purpose being stopping the Khmer Rouge from continuing their reign of terror. They took over a large part of the country and, indeed, stopped the genocide. The Khmer Rouge fought back, of course, and the war continued on at least a small scale through much of the 1980s. America? We backed the Khmer Rouge (Communist) mass murders! We did it through China of course, so that it was China actually supplying the Khmer Rouge while we only had to supply China in the joint effort, but we supported them, even going to the lengths of supporting the Khmer Rouge's claims that they, not the Vietnamese-led Cambodian government, should be Cambodia's UN-recognized government. Anything that hurt Vietnam was considered good policy in Cold War America... this only stopped after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
(and yes, I am being consistent on the trade thing -- I said that we should tax or limit (based on safety would be good, I think) Chinese imports now, not totally ban them... bans should be reserved for the worst of nations. Well, like China... but anyway, not like Vietnam or Cuba. Restrictions... yes. Total bans that destroy their economies well beyond the point where it makes any sense... no.)
Quote:OK, let's go over this one more time. Giuliani is a fascist because he's authoritarian. Islamists are authoritarians as well. Since being authoritarian is enough to be called a fascist - according to your own definition - I fail to see why Islamists can't be called fascists. So what we can do is either use your definition and call both Giuliani and Islamists "fascists", OR we can use the word "fascist" properly and in reference to extreme nationalism, the corporatist economic model etc. etc. and not call either Giuliani or Islamists fascists. Pick one. Not half of one and half the other.
You say it yourself right there. Fascists are NATIONALISTS. They concentrate on building state power and the total autocratic rule of one person. Islamic theocracy as most Islamic radicals want it is something very, very different. State power? Kind of, but that power is not held by state authorities, but by religious ones who have power over the state authorities -- see the government of Iran, where the President is actually powerless. It is the religious authorities and religious police who actually run Iran... this is not just a semantic difference. Theocracy and nationalism are in many ways opposing forces, in fact -- nationalism wishes to build up the state at the cost of all else, and requires (or at least seems to end up resulting in) finding enemies for your people to focus on so there is an "other" to compare to. Theocracy, as practiced by either the Medieval Christian church or the current Islamic world, is NOT about nationalism. It is about religion, so all nations that share your religion are considered similar, friendly nations and all others are considered the "other". Why do you keep ignoring the fact that I keep emphasizing the fact that Islamic radicals are theocrats or would-be theocrats? Theocracy is not fascism! They do have similarities, but they are not the same -- just like how applied communism and applied fascism have similarities (Hitler's Germany vs. Stalin's Russia), but they are actually on opposite ends of the political spectrum.
In short, Islamic radicals do not want to build up state power. They want to build up religious power over the state, and want the absolute rule of religious law. Fascists want absolute power too, but absolute power held by the state authorities. Religion is not important to fascists, but total control of everything byt state authorities is -- hence the old saying that 'Mussolini made the trains run on time'. On the other hand, Islamic theocracies do not have an interest in having that kind of control. Look at how in Arab nations tribal identity means so much -- Iraq is not a nation of just three factions, but a nation of many tribes. People's identities are to their tribes, whose leaders follow the religious authorities's commands. This is a much looser, more diffuse control structure than a fascist state; Islamic states have no interest in building up the system of total state control that is the core of what fascism is. The comparison makes absolutely no sense, and exists only to inflame the anger of Americans so that they can be convinced to support wars against Islamic nations such as the ones in Iraq, Afghanistan, and prospectively Iran.
Quote:Rwanda, Iran? Are these dreams you had? Rwanda ended when everyone was dead - or rather, when rebels finally ousted the genocidal government, and Iran for all we know is building a nuke right now with Russian help. The Europeans are just as freaked out about Iran as anyone, and the French foreign minister even said that they would support an armed intervention if need be.
Rwanda: A major failure of the UN, and it admits that it should have done something. Still, UN peacekeepers did eventually come in and help keep things calm later on.
Iran: The latest NIE shows that those neocon fantasies are just that... I certainly admit to being worried by Iran, primarily thanks to their abysmal human rights record and sometimes unpredictable leadership, but war is not the answer... international pressure does work, as the halted work on the bomb shows.
Iraq: you ignored this one, but again, 1991-2003 Iraq is a great example of how UN action works, and works well. The sanctions against Sadaam, backed up with threat of force and the no-fly zones, did a good job of reining in Sadaam.
There are plenty more examples... UN peacekeepers have not always been successful because of the strong limitations they have on use of force, so when a nation starts up a real war again they can do little, but even so they have done great work in many places. Despite the horrific failure at Srebnica, I'm sure that the Bosnian mission did save many lives, for instance... in fact, UN peacekeepers are still in Bosnia, providing a vital independent force that is not Bosnian Muslim or Serb. NATO and UN forces in Kosovo serve a similar mission there. In Haiti they have been about all that has kept the place from falling apart even worse in these last few decades. The UN has also just gotten its first peacekeepers in Darfur. It is far from enough, as the Sudanese government is obstructing them in every way possible, but it's a start, and an important step up in prominence from the African Union soldiers there before.
Quote:I'm not sure I follow your point on Iraq. What more do we need to do to "get them to talk"? Elected people from every ethnic group have been talking for a while now and not getting anywhere. There are some things we could do to help along those talks, including trying to stabilize the situation military-wise - and this, I believe, is what the current US policy is. What else do you want to do? Force them to make a decision? It'll just make the fighting flare up again.
I believe that the Bush administration is not actually making that effort. They have pretty much given up on fixing Iraq, and are just in a holding pattern until the next administration can come in and try to deal with the mess... if they were serious about it we'd hear things about progress of some kind, and we don't. So the solution is, get international help (UN negociators), have them sit down and talk, and seriously work at it until an agreement is forged. It can happen with effort, but this administration isn't applying that kind of effort. Of course, some of that effort is impossible given the way that the Bush administration hates the UN, and without the UN what we can do is limited, but even so, they could be doing more than they are.
Quote:Well, you need to pick one. Either we shut our door to autocratic regimes like China, or we try and build a "civic culture" in those countries - by trading, in all likelihood. You can't just shut down commerce and have them live in abject poverty then try and help them build a "civic culture", it's nonsense.
What, are you defending good old "we'll trade with them and THEN they'll become more democratic!" I would think that the total failure of that policy in China, where the nation has industrialized but not democratized, would show how that policy doesn't work. No, I think that applying economic pain would actually work better... people need an incentive to change things on a large scale, and we sure aren't giving them that incentive now.
For the really bad regimes, like Burma, it is frustrating that it seems that all we can do is sit here while they repress their people and crush protests... I feel like we should be doing something more to get rid of the junta, but I don't know what real options we have... we can't cut off our trade with them any more than we already have. We could hurt them a lot by cutting trade with China, though, given that China is their major trading partner and some of that stuff China is buying from Burma is then resold to the US (endangered rainforest wood, straight from the jungles of Burma to your home!). I wish there was more we could do than that, but we can't go in and invade or something, as that always just makes things exponentially worse. As long as China is supporting them there's not much we can do without going after China, it seems... :(
Quote:Kissinger is a textbook realist , and you mostly know him as a power-hungry whatever because he was very successful - any realist will look like a power-hungry warmonger, but most of the time you don't hear about them because they don't become media sensations like Dr. Kissinger did. Anyway, he's recognized as an authority on international relations and is widely studied. Who Ho Chi Minh would have sided with should the USA not have opposed him from the start is interesting but difficult to ascertain - IMO he would have edged towards the Third Way countries, IE I'll side with whoever gives me the most money, or I'll just take everybody's money and side with the Soviets in the end because they have the biggest guns anyway. That may be better than what happened historically, but it's not better than what could have happened - like, for example, winning the war.
Kissenger thought that if we bombed the Vietnamese people more, we would win the war. He was wrong, obviously. He was absolutely power hungry; why else would a Jewish man become close political allies with as well-known an antisemite as Richard Nixon? And he was absolutely a warmonger, as his support for the Vietnam war proves.
I bolded that last sentence for a reason... it is just such a horrific thing to say. That we could have "won", and that it was WORTH winning a war which pointlessly killed millions of people for absolutely no gain, is an unbelievable statement to make, and it really depresses me how the Republicans cannot admit the truth about Vietnam, even now so many decades later. Short of killing every person in Vietnam, we could not win. Five million deaths did not break them; more would not have either. Every person we displaced (virtually all of them, again, in the half of Vietnam WE ran), every person who our puppet dictators in the South Vietnamese government had killed, created more enemies than people it killed... despite the casualties and danger, the NLF kept up the resistance in the South for so many years because of the massive amount of popular support from the South Vietnamese government. How can you "win" when you have no allies and are only killing indiscriminately? Kissenger's "breaking point", the point where too many people have died and a nation gives up... they did not break as he expected, and clearly were not going to. Not that we were defending anything overly noble anyway.
As for Laos and Cambodia, both nations fell to Communism to a large extent BECAUSE of the Vietnam war, not after it. The long war destabilized and wrecked both nations' governments. US bombings (which were illegal but were carried on for years -- the infamous 'secret bombings') killed huge numbers of people, sometimes disrupting the enemy but always hurting the local government. Cambodia, in fact, shows the ridiculousness of American policy in the region every bit as much as Vietnam. We began bombing Cambodia to stop the Khmer Rouge communist-aligned rebels. We forced them into hiding, but also utterly devastated Cambodia, killing huge numbers of people and destroying the countryside. Bombers had quotas -- they had to drop a certain amount, whether or not there were targets, so they'd just have to drop on whatever they saw, or just bomb the forests or something.
When the bombings finally stopped at the end of the war, the Khmer Rouge came out of hiding. The Cambodian government had been ruined by the American bombings meant to "support" it, so it was easy for the Khmer Rouge to take over the nation. They proceeded to start a genocide that would kill at least a million people in a nation of only a few million, the "Killing Fields". By this point, China and Russia had split and China and the US were improving relations. Vietnam had aligned with Russia. The Khmer Rouge stuck with the Chinese side. Within a few years, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, with their stated purpose being stopping the Khmer Rouge from continuing their reign of terror. They took over a large part of the country and, indeed, stopped the genocide. The Khmer Rouge fought back, of course, and the war continued on at least a small scale through much of the 1980s. America? We backed the Khmer Rouge (Communist) mass murders! We did it through China of course, so that it was China actually supplying the Khmer Rouge while we only had to supply China in the joint effort, but we supported them, even going to the lengths of supporting the Khmer Rouge's claims that they, not the Vietnamese-led Cambodian government, should be Cambodia's UN-recognized government. Anything that hurt Vietnam was considered good policy in Cold War America... this only stopped after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
(and yes, I am being consistent on the trade thing -- I said that we should tax or limit (based on safety would be good, I think) Chinese imports now, not totally ban them... bans should be reserved for the worst of nations. Well, like China... but anyway, not like Vietnam or Cuba. Restrictions... yes. Total bans that destroy their economies well beyond the point where it makes any sense... no.)