THE US, UN AND IRAQ V

Actually, i was responding to Gel. I simply can't accept tarring the west exclusively. If you want to see an amazing pollution of the biospher, visit China sometime. The industrialized west has no lock on the faults which are justifiably ascribed to it.

man does not now nor has ever loved mankind, mankind is not a very lovable creature.

Set, I thought I was saying that it's not nice to kill even under the mantle of saving lives. Bush has killed a lot of people. Evidently I said more, to the point of offending you. I would apologize if I knew what grievance to address. I will however try to be more insightful when quoting in the future.

Well, as a "leftist historian," let me point out two things:
First: the practice of history is revision. As new information becomes available, old info is re-interpereted.
Second: The charge that historians are trumpeting the superiority of "other" cultures against the west is ridiculous. The stumbling block of this frequent accusation is that we don't really condone the idea of "superior cultures."

A lot of lay people, for whom history is dates, battles, and biography (mainly due to the fact this is the easy way to teach history without having to worry about content to secondary school students) are confused about the recent (post 1930) emphasis on the roles of women and other previously under-studied groups in current scholarship. This is not some "plot" to destroy "traditional values" (as my neo-fascist brother in law refers to it), but an attempt to better understand human civilization and the parts played by those whom scholars in the past (largely white, protestant males) have ignored. I do 15th century popular piety, and spend most of my time on lay-people: artisans, merchants, etc.. as well as "the poor," that amorphous mass that can only be discovered through anthropological methods, and by close reading of texts for little bits of gold amongst the grime.
My advisor is working on a book on a group of Muslim merchants active in the Pyrenees in the 14th and 15th Centuries. Another group that has been poorly studied. I doubt he is likely to assert that the Muslims are "better than the Christians, or vice versa. My own choice of subject does not mean I think that battles and kings are worthless, just personally uninteresting.
The apellation "revisionist historian" is sort of like calling someone a "human person."Only perjorative if one fails to understand the parameters of the term.

Gel, i wasn't offended, just saw in this an extremist left revision of history. I shouldn't have assumed about what you meant.

HB, get a grip. I know as well as you do, and probably better, what the revision process in history means. I also know crap history when i see it. Popular works such as the "People's History of . . . " series seriously distort history in order to advance an agenda of political rectitude. Such writing does a disservice to history and the search for truth, whether historical or otherwise.

You apparently assume that all i know of or care about in history is battles, kings, etc. In that you display your ignorance of me, which is not a subject of much interest to me. I object solely to that school of extreme left "historical" research which accentuates the story of those previously marginalized in historical research to the point of distorting the historical record with regard to the actions of men in western culture.

I rather suspect that there is something more than a little personal in your sneering response, but then, i've seen this as an attribute of how you respond to those with whom you disagree, such as your deplorable attack on Bill a few days ago. I can assure you that your opinion of me, and of my opinions, is not an issue for me. I can also assure you that i don't care one whit about your opinion of my historical reading and what it means to me.

Setanta, I did not mean it as a personal attack. Sorry you took it that way.


I don't really consider things like this to be history at all, but populist entertainment.


I don't know of any serious scholarship that does this.
As for my sneering tone, perhaps you are seeing what you yourself have recently displayed?

Telling It Right
December 19, 2003
By PAUL KRUGMAN

"This is a very, very important part of history, and we've
got to tell it right." So says Thomas Kean, chairman of the
independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks. Mr.
Kean promises major revelations in testimony next month:
"This was not something that had to happen." We'll see:
maybe those of us who expected the 9/11 commission to
produce yet another whitewash were wrong. Meanwhile, one
can only echo his sentiment: it's important to tell our
history right, not just about the events that led up to
9/11, but about the events that followed.

The capture of Saddam Hussein has produced a great
outpouring of relief among both Iraqis and Americans. He's
no longer taunting us from hiding; he was a monster and
deserves whatever fate awaits him. But we shouldn't let war
supporters use the occasion of Saddam's capture to rewrite
the recent history of U.S. foreign policy, to draw a veil
over the way the nation was misled into war.

Even the Iraq war's critics usually focus on the practical
failures of the Bush administration's policy, rather than
its morality. After all, the war came at a heavy cost, even
before the fighting began: to prepare for the Iraq
campaign, the administration diverted resources away from
Afghanistan before the job was done, giving Al Qaeda a
chance to get away and the Taliban a chance to regroup.

And while the initial invasion went smoothly, since then
almost everything in Iraq has gone badly. (Saddam's capture
would have been a smaller story if it had happened in the
first flush of victory; instead, it was the first real
piece of good news from Iraq in months.) The security
situation remains terrible; the economy remains moribund;
gasoline shortages and power outages continue.

To top it all off, the ongoing disorder in Iraq is a clear
and present danger to our own national security. A large
part of the U.S. military's combat strength is tied down in
occupation duties, leaving us ill prepared for crises
elsewhere. Meanwhile, overstretch is undermining the
readiness of the military as a whole.

Now maybe, just maybe, Saddam's capture will start a
virtuous circle in Iraq. Maybe the insurgency will
evaporate; maybe the cost to America, in blood, dollars and
national security, will start to decline.

But even if all that happens, we should be deeply disturbed
by the history of this war. For its message seems to be
that as long as you wave the flag convincingly enough, it
doesn't matter whether you tell the truth.

By now, we've become accustomed to the fact that the
absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - the
principal public rationale for the war - hasn't become a
big political liability for the administration. That's bad
enough. Even more startling is the news from one of this
week's polls: despite the complete absence of evidence, 53
percent of Americans believe that Saddam had something to
do with 9/11, up from 43 percent before his capture. The
administration's long campaign of guilt by innuendo, it
seems, is still working.

The war's more idealistic supporters do, I think, feel
queasy about all this. That's why they lay so much stress
on their hopes for democracy in Iraq. They're not just
looking for a happy ending; they're looking for moral
redemption for a war fought on false pretenses.

As a practical matter, I suspect that they'll be
disappointed: the only leaders in Iraq with genuine popular
followings seem to be Shiite clerics. I also wonder how
much real commitment to democracy lies behind the
administration's stirring rhetoric. Does anyone remember
that Dick Cheney voted against a resolution calling for
Nelson Mandela's release from prison? As recently as 2000
he defended that vote, saying that the African National
Congress "was then perceived as a terrorist organization."

Which brings me to this week's other famous prisoner.
While the world celebrated the capture of Saddam, a federal
appeals court ruled that Jose Padilla must be released from
military custody. Mr. Padilla is a U.S. citizen, arrested
on American soil, who has been held for 18 months without
charges as an "enemy combatant." The ruling was a stark
reminder that the Bush administration, which talks so much
about promoting democracy abroad, doesn't seem very
concerned about following democratic rules at home.


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/19/opinion/19KRUG.html?ex=1072837004&ei=1&en=5ace84d081159e17

I posted this yesterday. It seems appropriate to repeat it here after Krugman's article in the NYT. "gels, Nothing like a little democracy in action for the Iraqis. They've already managed to take away some of our civil rights. They talk about "democracy" but haven't the slightest idea what it means."

Wholly aside from the merit of your argument, who are you directing your anger at, Set? The nonsensical tripe you 're denouncing is a quote that Gel took from Samuel Huntington ... I dont usually agree much with Huntington, overall, but I dont quite see what he did wrong just by posting a Huntington quote, either ...

(My opinion: the West won the world both by the superiority of its use of ideas and its superiority in applying organized violence.)

Talk about tripe, though, is there any chance of us doing without 'funny' pictures of Bush in diapers and so on? They're about as funny or appropriate, IMHO, as timber posting pictures of trainwrecks on the Democratic presidential candidates thread.

I agree with your tripe, nimh. :wink:

Actually, the Huntington quote itself, taken out of context like that, doesnt say anything about how "the poor, technologically backward cultures are morally superior to ours", that Setanta reads into it. It doesnt even say that the Western ideas etc were necessarily NOT superior. All it says it that it took a "superiority in applying organized violence" for the West to "win the world". As sweeping generalisations go, I wouldnt disagree much with that.

As for "absolving other cultures of the lust for slaughter which history all to clearly demonstrates", the quote also doesnt say anything about which culture had a greater or lesser lust for slaughter - merely that the Western countries were, eventually, superior in applying it in an organised way.

I simply disagree, Nimh, that the west necessarily ever had a corner on the application of organized violence, until such time as technology gave them an overwhelming advantage. And technological advantage arises from the yeasty brew of intellectual freedom (albeit, often limited) and individual initiative which gave them the advantages in trade, and therefore economics. I am unfamiliar with the gentleman Gel quoted, but it is much the same tripe as is usually advanced to somehow "excuse" other cultures for those flaws of the group which prevented the development of ideas or hampered their implementation. It is also a convenient excuse for the resentful to make themselves out to have been hapless victims of a vicious culture which stalks the world looking for other cultures to destroy. It smacks too much of lamebrained political rectitude theory to me.

And why does everyone assume that i am angry?

Ironically enough, in the context of our posts, Huntington is the political scientist who launched the notion of a "Clash of Civilisations" governing the (future) conflicts of our era into the political arena ...
... where many nationalists and many of those who claim to be defending the superior, Western culture against the inevitable cultural onslaught to come have gratefully picked up on it ever since to posit that Easterners, Middle-Easterners etc are simply too inherently culturally different to <fill in: ..understand and use Western notions like democracy succesfully, ..live together with in succesful multicultural societies, ..etc etc).
All, I'm sure, counter to the nuance of much of Huntington's actual words - I wouldnt know, I didnt read his books.


Exclusively an issue of style, I'm sure! :wink:

It's all about emoticons, set.

Try this.

That is the stupidest crap I've ever read :wink: Where did you get your education, in a shithole Why do you even bother

Or, you could just complain that they don't have a sense of humor.

Don't follow Sofia's advice! I tried the emoticons once and was only compared to Maliagar. :-(

I occasionally use them but I think they are misinterpreted as often as words are.

Say no more.
Done.

What ever happened to maliagar? Haven't run across him in quite awhile.

And that they had no compunctions in doing so. The application has to be planned to be effective.

Dunno, I asked him to help me open the debate room with a debate but that was the last I saw of him. Not that I think he wanted to avoid debating me, that's just the last I remember (waiting for the answer).