Posted on 11/02/2001 11:59:31 AM PST by Starmaker
This question will be construed by many to be unpatriotic, un-American, and simply uncalled for. Many will scoff at the idea that such a question should even be addressed, but I believe it is one that we should ponder. Why? Because we are currently attacking another nation for carrying out acts of mass destruction that pale in comparison to what we ourselves have done.
Before I'm tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail, let me just say that I support the idea of a legitimate, just, and, yes, even moral war. I believe such a war can and should be declared when the security of the citizens of the United States is directly at risk. After all, the primary job of the federal government, contrary to the modern teachings of liberal and neo-conservative collectivists, is to provide for the common defense of the nation. If the security, liberty, and lives of its citizens are threatened, the government has a sworn duty to eliminate that threat.
Unfortunately, most of the conflicts we have seen in the last century were the result of the federal government ignoring its obligation to the immediate defense of our own nation in order to pursue more global concerns. Can anyone make the case that the conflicts we saw in places like Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia had anything to do with protecting the freedom of American citizens?
Now, the same people who were so quick to send soldiers off to kill and die for democracy overseas while ignoring the government's assaults on our liberty here at home are calling for unity in battling yet another foreign enemy. Perhaps our current predicament calls for some serious self-examination.
In our nationalistic frenzy we have been so intent on rooting out evil overseas that we have failed to notice the sins of our own nation. Again, I ask, what separates the U.S. from the terrorist nations of the world?
Many would say that we have a much greater respect for life and would never consider unleashing the kinds of atrocities we saw on September 11. Attacking innocent civilians with such cold-blooded calculation is beyond our comprehension. This kind of thinking lends credence to the old adage "ignorance is bliss."
During the last "just" war, World War II, the U.S. made it standard military procedure to specifically target civilians. German cities like Hamburg and Dresden were subjected to some of the most intense bombing raids in history. Even Japanese non-combatants in Tokyo could not escape the relentless firebombing. This policy of attacking civilian targets culminated in President Truman's order to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The result of these kinds of attacks throughout the war was a civilian death toll that climbed into the hundreds of thousands. Our government deliberately utilized this kind of warfare in order to strike terror in the hearts of foreign civilians. Sound familiar?
Needless to say, we do not have to look outside our borders for examples of the very evil we claim to loathe. Case in point, abortion. Since the unconstitutional Roe v. Wade decision was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1973, we have witnessed the government-sanctioned murder of over 40 million innocent children. This is an accomplishment that even the worst terrorist nations cannot claim. Why have we failed to unite against this particular evil?
It is understandable that Americans continue to feel outraged by the attacks of September 11. The media guaranteed that all of us had a front row seat to the grim scenes of death and destruction. We could not escape the gruesome images of commercial airliners slamming into skyscrapers, people hurling themselves out of windows to avoid being burned alive, or a million tons of steel and concrete raining down upon victims and rescuers.
Think of the collective outrage that would ensue if we were granted the same kind access to the carnage inside an abortion clinic. Imagine if we were to catch a glimpse of the bloody, twisted heaps of mangled limbs, see babies survive an abortion long enough to be tossed out alive with the rest of the medical waste, or hear the screams of mothers realizing, too late, the devastating consequences of their actions.
Are all these innocent lives worth it? Should we applaud the deliberate killing of over 200,000 Japanese civilians by our atomic bombs because it ended World War II a few weeks ahead of schedule? Are we to just accept the murder of 1.5 million children every year because of our distorted view of individual liberty and personal choice? Do we continue to tolerate the actions of a government that believes it has more important things to do than protect the rights of the innocent?
Foreign civilians, unborn children, national integrity— evidently, these are the sacrifices with which we are willing to live. Such a thing is to be expected when a society adopts an "end justifies the means" philosophy. In doing so, we have only succeeded in demonstrating that we are just as capable as any terrorist nation of committing acts of senseless violence with little or no regard for the sanctity of human life.
So, just what exactly is it that separates the United States from the terrorist nations of the world? Maybe the answer is more elusive than we care to admit.
redrock
Perhaps you should investigate the matter a little more? I'd suggest starting with the Population Research Institute. Here's a report from an OB/GYN, talking about the U.S. policies toward Kenya:
"POPULATION CONTROL - THE KENYAN PERSPECTIVE
By: Dr. Stephen K. Karanja, M.B.CH.B.M.MED O/G- Consultant Obstetrician/Gynaecologist
The first birth control clinic was opened in Nairobi, the Kenyan Capital, 44 years ago. The second one opened a year later in 1956 at the Port Town of Mombasa. These two amalgamated into the Family a Planning Association of Kenya (FPAK). In 1963, FPAK was affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation, thus becoming the first association in Africa south of the Sahara to join this monster which has nearly destroyed our society. Our nightmare just began.
Following publication of a report on the demographic trends by the Population Council (New York; 1968), which partly talked of still unproven adverse effects of rapid population growth on socio-economic development, the Government of Kenya was coerced to become overtly involved in birth control. Thus a young nation then bustling with enthusiasm, hope and ambition for its people who had endured the yoke of colonialism suddenly offered itself to imperialism like it had never seen before, as we will soon discover.
We were then only 7.9 million people in a vast empty country rich in resources but no people to exploit them. Believe it, we were said to be overpopulated - 34 years from then we are only 23 million - in this vast still empty land.
The United States of America has used vast amounts of money over time to destroy the people of Kenya. USAID and other Non-Governmental Organizations funded mainly by the U.S. Government have targeted our people with a ruthlessness that makes one shudder. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council (a subsidiary of the Rockfeller group), Population Action International, and the United Nations through its agencies like WHO and UNFPDA have targeted Kenya for depopulation at the expense of the integral development of its people. Some examples of the stark realities living side by side with the millions of dollars for population control include:
A mother brought a child to me with pneumonia, but I had not penicillin to give the child. What I have in the stores are cases of contraceptives.
Malaria is epidemic in Kenya. Mothers die from this disease every day because there is no chloroquine, when instead we have huge stockpiles of contraceptives. These mothers come to me and I am helpless.
I see women coming to my clinic daily with swollen legs – the cannot climb stairs. They have been injured by Depo-provera, birth-control pills, and Norplant. I look at them and I am filled with sadness. They have been coerced into using these drugs. Nobody tells them about the side effects, and there are no drugs to treat their complications. In Kenya if you injure, you injure the whole family. Women are the center of the community. The well-being of the family depends on the well-being depends on the well-being of the mother.
America has been a blessed country. This nation saved the world three times. During the first World War, the second World War and the Cold War. The American people can still save many in the world from preventable diseases. I do not believe that Americans want their taxes used to hurt other people. Why do you not stop this money being used for contraceptives and use it instead to provide clean water, good prenatal and postnatal care, good farming methods and rural electrification. Do the American people know that the millions of dollars spent for population control are used in the ways I have described? Why does your government not deal directly with our government but instead uses a third party like IPPF, which has no respect for the values of our people and our laws?
It is therefore clear, that contrary to what one is led to believe, American Aid to Kenya is not a reasonable attempt to bring about integral development, rather it is a comprehensive and highly organized campaign to kill off as many of our people as are necessary so that the U.S. and other developed countries can continue exploiting our national resources.
Therefor, for the first world to dominate the third world through contraceptive imperialism under the big stick of withholding development assistance for non-compliance makes us conclude that, not only the so-called Population Assistance to third world countries but even the "development assistance" has been tailored first to serve the interests of the richest of the rich of this world.
USAID is the single biggest supporter and promoter of population control in Kenya. The programs it funds are implemented with an aggressive and elitist ruthlessness. In Kenya the target are always the poor and the illiterate who are pressured and tricked into using dangerous drugs which are often banned in the west, or who are sterilized during childbirth without either their knowledge or consent.
You in the media, those in the White House and many in the United States Congress continue to deny these facts. We in Kenya are a people like you who are entitled to the same human rights and dignity as yourselves, but our right to live a normal human existence is ignored by globalist decision makers. If the funds you use to kill, maim, subjugate, dominate and break us to nothingness were used to cultivate our extraordinary resources, Kenya alone could feed more than half the African continent. Dear Americans, you cannot build your own security on the insecurity and degradation of others. You cannot build your own wealth on the poverty and destitution of people in the least developed nations."
We are not bombing the Taliban. We are bombing AFGHANISTAN.
The bombing will have little or no effect or the Taliban (something Rumsfield has already admitted) but it will kill thousands of innocent civilians. Millions more may die from starvation. After years of war and drought, this bombing may well be the difference between life and death.
Let's correct your sheriff analogy, shall we? It does have some merit if you use it correctly.
Because the sheriff refuses to cough up the bad guys, we blow up the town. Building by building. We start first with "military" targets like the stage coach office and the telegraph office. When they are all gone, we go on to random buildings. At the same time, we close all the roads out of the town so that the civilians are trapped inside the holocaust we made.
This is murder, pure and simple. As Pierce says, there is no difference between the US and the other terrorist nations of the world. Bombing to influence the policies of a foreign government almost never works. On the contrary, it usually rallies the people around the government and makes them more determined to get revenge. This is true whether the bombing target is the World Trade Center or some Afghan village.
That you indulge in this form of mental navel gazing simply proves your inability to actually apply logic to a debate at all. Instead of using it, you lecture others about it.
You war mongers deliberately conflate people and governments. This is how you justify killing Afghani peasants in the first place - because you don't like their government. They don't like it much either but, unlike you, they don't have the option of bombing from afar to express their disapproval.
Similarly, 83% of the Pakistani people support the Taliban while only 3% support the US. Then you claim that "Pakistan" is on our side. Bah! The government of Pakistan only supports the US because we bribe it and because they are scared of us. They will turn us when they get a chance - or the people will turn on them.
This war will not stop terrorism. It will make it worse. This will become like the war against Iraq. Ten years of bombing which changes nothing in the government but does kill innocents, while simultaneously increasing hatred towards the US.
The people of the world will turn still further against the US. It's amazing how quickly America managed to waste all the good will it had in the aftermath of 911. It started in the Moslem world. But the effects can be seen even in places like Britian.
If you are going to make false arguments, at least try to make them sound a little convincing next time.
Or least try to avoid showing off your ignorance.
What I have done to this article is a small taste of what your studio critics in architecture school do to design projects - that is if you went anywhere good.
If you wish to support this author's conclusion that we are the moral equivalent of the terrorists [in Afghanistan] then by all means do so, but you must supply your own arguments. This author has supplied none, none that in fact are demonstrative of the point he wishes to make.
Furthermore, you should try, somehow, to get from there to the notion that we are fighting an unjust war, regardless of how many people died in New York. Perhaps abortion is just provocation for such an attack on New York - but I would like you or one of your friends to write that proposition down in black and white and then standby to defend it, again, for my enlightenment because I myself fail to see how to construct the argument.
You compounded using this fallacy, with using straw man tactics to advance your political opinions. - Exactly what you accuse the articles author of doing.
- Now you want to change the subject -- to get me to defend the authors position. No sale.
- The author has made his position. You have made a mess of your own ethics in an attempt to smear his.
That is my position. You haven't refuted it, either.
BTW, I have never had anything to do with the design of a building. More evidence - as if any was needed - that you have no idea how to use logic. According to your "logic", I should conclude that you are a dead president!
Good grief man, have you never read Plato or Aristotle. You fall into the same logical trap that the author does. Saying that society is the better for a particular moral code that prohibits murder, theft, (or abortion for that matter), gambling, adultry, etc. does not thereby denigrate that moral code, and it does not make me a moral monster to argue that such and such things in our moral makeup are for the betterment of society, as you hope to make me out.
Let me try to be clearer, and please try to follow me. The generally accepted proposition is that it is false to assert that if the end is desireable (Proposition A) the means are moral (proposition B) In symbolic logic this would be written ~(A=>B). You cannot get from this statement to the statement that if the ends are desireable then the means are immoral i.e. B=>~A. But this is what the author has done, and you have done, and so many else do when the glibly use statements containing the words "means" and "ends." Peace is a desireable goal. One means to that end is a council of reconciliation, and most would regard this as a moral way to achieve peace. Cold blooded murder is generally regarded as immoral. It has nothing to do with this particular goal, however. It has to do with the fact that societies are worse off if their moral code santions murder. For the good of our society (overwhelming desireable end) we prohibit cold blooded murder.
What I think confuses you is whether ~B=>~A, i.e. whether a bad end implies that the means are always immoral. I have not advanced that thesis, and I don't know that it is true. I would have to say, though that if there is never a good result for society from a particular moral precept, I would have to question why that precpt is held - but that is a different argument irrelevant to the present one.
- Now you want to change the subject -- to get me to defend the authors position. No sale. I thought that the author's position was the subject. Don't defend his position, if you can't. I don't like it anyway.
The author has made his position No he hasn't and that is the point of all of this. He has stated an opinion which some here happen to agree with [I don't]. He has also filled the page with random musings which have led many here to think he has justified his opinion. He hasn't. I haven't undermined his opinion. I have just shown that his argument does not go from point A to his conclusion, [or any other conclusion that I can fathom] You have made a mess of your own ethics in an attempt to smear his. What ethics. You don't know my ethics. I have advanced no ethical principle other than the "strawman" that I am against murder. I have also advanced the logical proposiiton that the means used to an end are sometimes moral and sometimes immoral and we cannot know until we examine the means. The author uses these words "means" and "ends," but I cannot figure out what he is talking about. Neither can anyone else, apparently, since they are unable to explain it.
That is my position. You haven't refuted it, either. This is ungrammatical as "that" is somewhat ambiguous and we are left in the dark as to what "that" position is:
A. That the author is correct but you won't bother to defend him
B. That I am a moral monster because I disparage murder on the grounds that it is bad for society.
C. That I am a moral monster because I would use the bad consequences of murder on society as a "strawman" to illustrate the author's illogic.
D. That you don't understand the simplest precepts of logic.
E. All of the above.
Once you pick one, or state some other position other than I am a joke or full of crap, I will accept it or refute it as I see fit.
But liberating innocent US citizens (such as we did in Granada) is always a valid reason for military action.
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