: DDN: No. I’m just trying to encourage you to examine your premise about war and calamity. You’re closing statement was “War and calamity can't be good under any circumstances”. I’ve pointed out that “God” apparently thinks that war and calamity ARE good under MANY circumstances having created a great deal of it in the Old Testament and threatening (promising?) to bring more in Revelations. Since you are a worshipper of the “God” of the Holy Bible, clearly there’s a major incompatibility here between your sociology and your THEology. I don’t see that you have any choice at this point other than to confess one of the following:: 1) That you believe “God” is WRONG for creating calamity and war or
: 2) That there ARE circumstances under which war and calamity are good
SDF: I thought that in the last half-century or so it was mainly the US government that was largely responsible for creating wars -- the US was entirely responsible for creating the phony regime "South Vietnam" (against the dictum of the agreed-upon Geneva convention, which decreed an election to unite North and South Vietnam to be held in 1956 AT THE LATEST) and sustaining it through warfare for two decades, at a cost of two million lives... then there's the 100,000 or so children that have died due to the embargo upon Iraq, and we should certainly count that phoniness in Kosovo as US aggression -- it's like a State Department official said during the bombing: "We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get."
And then there's the nonsense the US government is planning today in Colombia, kind of like that nonsense visited upon El Salvador and Nicaragua in the early 1980s with the blessings of US guns and money, not to mention the fun the Secret Team had with the governments of Haiti, Panama, Guatemala (1952, getting rid of Rios De Montt), Iran (1956, installing the Shah), Brazil (1964, replacing Goulart with a dictatorial junta), Chile (1974, ousting Allende after his election), the Phillipines (since the US conquered them before WWI) etc. etc. A good place to start unbrainwashing oneself in this regard is Howard Zinn's book A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, or anything of Chomsky.
It's like Gary Nash et al. say in HISTORY ON TRIAL: there are two versions of patriotism at work in the history wars, one intent upon sugarcoating history to make the US government look good, the other intent upon telling the truth to make the US government a better government. (I'm paraphrasing because I'm not using my computer at home and the book is at home.)
Stu's position here is ambiguous: on the one hand he wants to shoot all communists on sight, so that a "nation founded on such lofty ideals as freedom and democracy" could defend a kleptocratic dictatorship like "South Vietnam," on the other hand, he finally admitted that "The U.S. policy caused atrocity in the Vietnam conflict" -- in looking at Stu's argument, keep in mind that it mirrors Barry Stoller's reflection about Bolsheviks -- defending the idea of fighting and dying for one's beliefs is used to justify war on both sides, which tells us nothing about how one belief is any better than another. Anti-communism, of course, was so plastic that it was used to defend killing anyone who exercised their right to free speech outside the boundaries of the US and its territories. Denouncing war, on the other hand, begs the question of why Stu spent all this time endorsing war in these threads.
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McSpotlight: Ooops, sorry for the double post.
