16th January 2008, 10:29 PM
N-Man Wrote:Would you like us to discuss real, actual fascism? The corporatist economic model and all? Why is it so much of a stretch to describe Islamists as metaphorical fascists, when their societal ideals are actually quite similar to fascism - if for entirely different reasons - but not so much of a stretch to call Rudy Giuliani a fascist? Do you understand your own hypocrisy - calling Bush and Giuliani **"fascists" while refusing to acknowledge the term "Islamofascist" (which is, if as uninteresting as the term "neoliberal", at least somewhat vaguely accurate)?
As for the rest, I read your descriptions of "shredded civil rights", and I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I just don't believe that the things you cited constitute much of an affront to civil rights, unless used in particularly malicious ways.
As I said, there are not "islamofascists". They are theocrats, and the difference is important and significant. Fascists are not religious, theocrats are. It really does make a huge, huge difference.
Oh, and those were only a couple of things Bush has done to our civil liberties. Other things include revoking the right of habeus corpus, the Supreme Court nominees he chose revoking centuries of precedent in multiple cases (that 'centuries of precedent' one was when they said that police can break into your house with no warning if they have a search warrant. Before you actually had to get notification before they could do it; this right reached back centuries and was part of the British Common Law we inherited as the basis of our legal system. The conservative majority in the supreme court tossed that out, saying something like 'who cares if you're embarrassed by the police' or such.), all that stuff about indefinite holding of people who have not been charged with a crime (this goes so utterly, TOTALLY against everything that the American judicial system has ever stood for that it is simply astonishing that anyone even considered it, much less implemented it... previously habeus corpus had been suspended during wartime a few times, but always with the intent of bringing it back soon. Here the "war" can never end, so it is a permanent measure. The "War on Terror" is a gift that keeps on giving!), etc, etc, etc.
Quote:And yet, it did. After Tet is when politicians started motioning to "bring the troops home", renewing the enemy's energy and allowing him to make outrageous demands. Of course, it didn't happen instantly.
Relations between China and the Soviet Union became cold long before the 70s. Mao started being a little bitch soon after Stalin's death, when Khrushchev acknowledged that Uncle Joe was a bit of a genocidal maniac. It has been postulated that the USA could probably have invaded North Vietnam without causing a Chinese counterattack considering that situation (which was unknown at that point to US intelligentsia).
So you'd risk war with a nuclear-armed nation just on the THEORY that they might not attack? What a great idea... (during the Korean War, of course, China didn't have the bomb yet.)
As for Tet, it was a strategic defeat for the NVA and NLF, that is true. What it was most successful at doing was hurting American morale. But given that we never should had been in there in the first place and the whole war was based on lies and misconceptions (in addition to the whole "was Ho Chi Minh's government actually anti-American at the end of WWII?", you could also add on "the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a forgery and a lie -- quite simply, it never happened. That was the excuse for war. Thus, the war was unjustified and based on lies, but was fought anyway because of how badly the US government wanted to fight it." and "the government lied to the American people consistently and blatantly throughout the war, pretending that we were "winning" when we were not (invading a village, killing whoever you found there, and then leaving is not a "victory".), understating or ignoring Vietnamese civilian casualties and displacement (do you really want to tell the American people that we have killed millions of innocents? FIVE MILLION people died in Indochina between 1959 and 1975!), saying that "if Vietnam goes communist it'll all fall like dominoes" when that did not happen, etc, etc, etc...
As for China and the Soviet Union, despite their significant differences, they worked together in Vietnam for years. China and the Soviet Union both supported and supplied the North Vietnamese. That only changed in the early '70s when China made peace with the US... but by then, thankfully, we weren't thinking about invading North Vietnam anymore.
Quote:I guess all those people who died in Rwanda and Bosnia didn't live in the real world. Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of the UN - actually, I strongly believe in a one-world state - its problem is that it includes nations that are not liberal democracies. Those nations' governments should not be regarded as legitimate nor recognized in any way. If those governments were to be removed from the UN, then I have no doubt that it would have the moral imperative (and therefore the gumption) to act decisively.
Anyway, explain to me, in ten lines or less, what the UN, once it is "involved" will do in Iraq to solve or ease the situation.
Yeah, that's a real bind innit.
They need to hold talks between the three major groups, with international negotiators, and with clear statements that they would be rewarded for making peace, while continuing to fight would not be an option. Bush has given up and is just letting them fight and not talk; the important thing here is getting them to talk, not who gets them to do it. Either the UN or a Democratic administration could do the trick, I think, though of course any Democratic administration would get the UN involved too. Don't understate the capability of the international community... as I said, Rwanda ended when they finally got involved, Iran got rid of nuclear weapons because of European pressure, etc. Things could potentially happen in Iraq with the right international pressure, but we'll never know with anti-internationalists like the Bush administration in power here.
You are right, though, that having nations like Syria on the UN "Human Rights Commitee" is a disgrace and makes that body useless. The UN should be doing more to get nations to build democracy among the peoples of the world; it is a very hard task, but not an impossible one. As I said simply holding votes does nothing; you must instead build civic culture in nations that do not have it. Even though it does seem impossible, I think that it is... even in the Middle East, mostly devoid of such feelings, there are nations like Turkey that have real elections and government. Pakistan too, really, though its is more troubled of course. I don't think that not recognizing any autocratic nations is the solution, though... there are simply too many of them. We should punish the ones that are the worst human rights abusers for sure (China needs to be treated very differently... we can't because they make all of our stuff, but they need to be.), but punishing nations simply for being autocratic? No, we should be working on efforts to change them instead, within what is possible; not everything is.
Quote:Maybe. Vietnam was involved with the Soviets much earlier than you'd think. Ho Chi Minh was not so much pro-American as he was a proponent of the "Third Way" - technically neutral in the conflict between capitalism and communism, but really on the Soviet side. Third Way states were usually third world nations that weren't really communist, but naturally prone to seeing the USA as the enemy. Kissinger explained this fairly well in his book I mentioned earlier - third world countries could gain more, materially, by opposing the USA, since they were less likely to become confrontational than the USSR. Nasser gave the first example when building the Aswan dam by playing off the superpowers against each other, to see who would propose the most money, then finally denouncing the Americans as imperialists to gain points with the population.
Kissenger is a power-hungry warmonger... and as I said early on Ho Chi Minh did make some overtures to the Americans, which we ignored. Would he have ended up solidly in the Soviet camp anyway even if we had attempted to befriend Vietnam at the end of WWII and told France that we wouldn't support their effort to retake Vietnam (this would have led to a very quick failure of the French effort. We funded most of the French war in Indochina that ended in 1954.)? Possible, certainly, but we'll just never know, and it seems very hard to believe that that path would have led to a worse result than the one we got, given how horrifically badly things went there in the course we chose.