On Wed, 12 Sep 2001 05:07:10 -0700 (PDT), "Jesse C. Chang"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
>
> > The American people have the power to stop this horror, yet they do
> > not exercise it. Are you any better than the 'terrorists'?
>
> It's great that you're trying to get the Americans on this list to think
> about the situation from a different PoV, but you're starting to sound
> just as overzealous as some of them.
Don't worry, I wasn't trying to imply that the American people are as bad as
terrorists. I was merely, as you have acknowledged, trying to get people to see
things from a different point of view. I figured that such a controversial
question would force one to think. Of course, it can also have the opposite
effect, and make me look "overzealous".
> IMHO the inaction of the American people stems from ignorance, or the
> belief that our brand of democracy really works (which might be one and
> the same). The U.S. Government is not really "for the people" - at
> least, not the way it is supposed to be.
>
> Either way, I do not dare put the American people on the same level as
> terrorists. The Government, possibly, but not the people.
That's the point I'm trying to make. However, the government is elected by the
people, for the people. If we can actually get the American populace to actually
_think_ about what is going on here, they will hopefully realise that _they_ are
the ones who can stop this. For example, they could vote for somebody more
globally responsible at the next election.
> But ideals do not exist (if they did, Communism would actually work),
> and we do as best we can. The U.S. Government did what it had to do to
> keep the Soviets in check, I suppose. I don't know all the facts, so
> while I may not be entirely happy with my government, I am not about to
> condemn it.
Fair enough. It'd be unfair to criticise something which you know little about.
Communism, as practiced by the likes of Lenin and Mao Tse Dong, is a convoluted
version of Marxism. Karl Marx formulated his theories with pure altruism in
mind, and he firmly believed that it would work. This ideal obviously cannot
exist, and so communism was formed. For communism to work, it had to be
dictatorial, and a dictatorship needs something to keep it in power. The USSR
and China used tools like force and propaganda to achieve this goal.
The USA, on the other hand, decided to fund and support anybody who would
officially oppose communism and support the US in return. This led to massive US
moral, military, financial and technical aid flowing into brutal dictatorships
like those seen in the Philippines, Chile, Panama, Indonesia, South Vietnam and
South Korea, despite the obvious fact that these regimes totally contradicted
the Anglo-American neoliberal ideals of freedom and liberty. IMHO, the USA was
not much better than the USSR, but they preferred to do things at arms-length by
aiding brutal regimes rather than doing the dirty work themselves. This made
things much easier to cover up, and made the glossing-over of school history
books a trivial task.
> Jesse
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
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