At 09:25 AM 05/10/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Last night I watched the first part of a PBS television show on the
>Conquistadors (http://www.pbs.org/conquistadors/), which devoted one hour
>to Hernán Cortés, who did to the Aztec empire what Hitler did to the USSR,
but at least the USSR won! maybe "what Hitler did to the Jews" would be a
better analogy... not that any analogy works completely.
>... At least Hitler built the autobahn and launched Volkswagen.
>A modern day conquistador would have dynamited all roads and factories,
>except those that could facilitate the removal of blood-drenched booty.
sounds like what Bush the father did to Saddam..., except that actual
looting is out of style with the modern bureaucratic army.
>... At least with the Aztecs, you understand that they believed
>the gods would punish them if they did not follow a ritual. US imperialism,
>with all its science and advanced thinking, makes no such excuses.)
The War against Vietnam also had his religious justifications, as did the
whole Cold War Crusade. The Cold War also had its quasi-religious and
Manichean ideology of the "war of ideologies," with the Free World as the
Forces of Light and the Evil Empire as the Forces of Darkness.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
