Sure, there are some who know the the right reasons for the government being evil and cannot do much about it. However, one cannot take that into account during a war – that there might be some people who are friends with you, unless they have an organized resistance, like the French Resistance and can help you win the war. Otherwise, there is no way to identify them, but these types of people, like Ayn Rand in the Soviet Union, would welcome an attack by a free nation, even at the risk of their own life, because they know the worse evil is not death, but slow strangulation of the spirit.
If so, then holding each individual living under a government responsible for not overthrowing that government is collectivism; it is judging an individual based on the actions of the people living around him.
The first entry from “Collectivism” on the Lexicon
Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.”
“The Only Path to Tomorrow,”
Reader’s Digest, Jan, 1944, 8.
War is necessarily collective action, but that is not the same thing as collectivism.
edit: I make this point because it leads by implication to pacifism if collective action must always be avoided, along with outlawing corporate dividends (collective profits), team sports (collective play) and possibly even to objections against the economic principle of the division of labor society.
Imagine if we’d handled the Chinese in Mao’s time the way it seems some want to deal with Iran. I mean, look at this rhetoric, coming from a country’s leader:
Look at World War II, at Hitler’s cruelty. The more cruelty, the more enthusiasm for revolution.
Let’s contemplate this, how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world. One-third could be lost; or, a little more, it could be half… I say that, taking the extreme situation, half dies, half lives, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.
We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution.
The weeds of socialism are better than the crops of capitalism.
How can it be that we didn’t nuke 'em? Korea, Vietnam…
And how did they come to be financiers of our deficits?
My overall point regarding innocents in war is that since one cannot identify them and seek to omit them while destroying an evil regime, then one cannot go into a war thinking that one is killing innocents. It has to be all-out destruction of the regime, no holds barred, and if that means killing millions of civilians like WWII, then so be it. They declared war on us, and given recent events like the accidental burning of a Koran and those savages wanting to kill all of our service members in Kabul, then their innocence is far overrated.
Once again, you are not thinking about other consequences and your view of modern warfare is extremely simplistic. You basically view this as “dead bad guys = good.” Sure, that’s great, as long as it’s the only consequence. Can you not think of any other potential consequences of carpet bombing a country in the Middle East…maybe…in the oil market? Or maybe…creating a power vacuum that draws in multiple countries throughout the region? What do we do when that happens? Exterminate the human population of the Middle East?
From a moral standpoint, after finally admitting that there are innocents in war zones, you place the blame for their deaths on the government. Why is that an acceptable stance in foreign policy, but not in domestic crime? Imagine a family living in an LA neighborhood that is essentially run by a gang. This gang is not just a problem in their particular neighborhood, but that neighborhood is just their base of operations from which they commit crime throughout the city. This family is innocent (though maybe not in your view, since they don’t voluntarily risk their lives by trying to destroy the gang), and the police are certainly within their rights to combat the gang. Is it a reasonable tactic for the LA Police to lay waste to the whole neighborhood, innocent family included?
If not, what is the salient moral difference?
From a rational moral / political standpoint, the enemy must be destroyed after attacking us, both intellectually and physically. Done rationally, we would not have engaged in war with them and claiming that “Islam means peace” when it clearly doesn’t. They would have to be demoralized – i.e. Islam is evil, which it is – and their centers of Islamic theocracy would have to be annihilated – no holds barred. And if we did it right and engaged both a physical war and a moralizing war, then they would be disarmed in all senses.
As to going into a neighborhood that has a gang located in it, yes, some of the responsibility is on those who live there to co-operate with the police and to call in crimes, which they often do not do – implicitly giving moral support to the gangs. That’s not to say that the police can go in there guns blazing and killing anyone in the neighborhood, but they could set up screening posts and check out who is who to destroy the gangs. Often, people who live in those neighborhoods do not want the police in their neighborhood, so what is law enforcement supposed to do when the locals do not co-operate? I think they could go in there and question anyone and get the bad guys.
If you cannot see the difference between a local gang and a whole country with an ideology dedicated to destroying the West, then you’ve got some integrating to do.
If not, what is the salient moral difference?
The moral justification for police forces is to increase the protection of individual rights within a country by acting within the country. Justice is individual and case-by-case and policemen are deployed in small teams to exert the appropriate amount of force.
The moral justification of military forces is also to protect individual rights within a country, but by acting outward to destroy rights violators on the scale of countries. Military forces act together on the scale of divisions and armies in collective action do destroy the enemy’s ability to engage in collective action.
There is no individual justice in war. Is this a new thought to you?
Right, and in a free society – one that respect individual rights – the police are well controlled in favor of innocent until proven guilty, individual to individual. It would actually be illegal for the police to get a couple of tanks and mow down a neighborhood. But that is, in part, because it is localized; and has to be dealt with in a localized manner.
For something like all-out war, it is impossible to go door to door and weed out those who support Islamic Terrorism; and insofar as that terrorism is supported morally and legally and funded by the Islamic State, then that Islamic State must go. Which means destroying as much as can be destroyed until those left agree to never attack us again. Besides, many people don’t seem to get the idea that you get the type of government you deserve – in the long run – and that we got socialism to various degrees because that is what the majority wants. Likewise, it is not as if some small minority of Islamic radicals took over Iran and created a theocracy by forcing others to give in to it – no, it came about because they take Islam seriously – including the passage that says wage every type of war and stratagem against the infidel. When a whole country is infected like that, the whole country must be attacked to defend the freedom of Americans.
So am I the only one who thinks this is a bad idea simply because we can’t trust the minds posing as leaders to do any of this right? There are two issues here. The debate over the moral authority to do it and then we have the actual implementation including victory conditions, military strategy, and the long range exist strategy including post war international policy.
The long and sad history of US war efforts post World War II, and certainly anything even coming close to Middle-East policy, has demonstrated that our leadership would have boondoggled something straight forward like Operation Torch or Overlord, let alone complex situations in a multi-country and mixed ideology/religious theater such as the Middle-East. I give you Afghanistan as Exhibit A. Patton unleashed would have mowed through there in a week and been home by Christmas. MacArthur got Japan back on track as a westernized ally in a decade in a half. After ten years we are still in Afghanistan pussyfooting around with no legitimate victory let along an ideological ally being realized. More important is the complete lack of reasonable progress towards such a thing and it could be argued we are actually losing ground since we can’t bother to identify victory or post conflict interests. The only victory we will have after ten years of playing “Whack a mole” with religious fundies and the local kids they recruited due to blowback from inept rules of engagement will be the political sound bites delivered for an upcoming election. Ten years from now I predict both parties will be blaming the other since one got us in and the other got us out, both having plausible deniability for failing to kill a bunch of nut jobs who already want to be die in the name of their religion.
To make it short and sweet: If we are going to do it then we damn well need to do it right or not at all. As far as I’m concerned, the current mess and escalating blowback is a monument to the principle of compromise. We are paying for having a political correct war where we fail to want our cake and admit we have no plan to eat it. Until we get leadership that can reach down and find a pair of principles any of this is a nonissue simply because they can’t be trusted to manage a movie theater let alone a military theater of operation.
I’m off to watch Patton. That’ll cheer me up.
To make it short and sweet: If we are going to do it then we damn well need to do it right or not at all.
Exactly. There would be little point going to war with some country, and then living with guilt, and apologizing to them, and spending billions rebuilding, and so on and so on. In other words, if we were the kind of country who could do the moral thing, going to war with some country could well be the right thing to do in a context of a moral country; but, that does not imply it is the right action for the U.S. – as it is today.
You just gave me practical reasons, not moral ones. Those are not reasons why it’s okay to consider innocents in an enemy country to be collateral damage, while not holding the same logic to innocents living in a gang-run neighborhood.
In any case, the practical distinction is disappearing, especially in asymmetric warfare where the enemy does not pose an existential threat. This is demonstrated every time an errant bomb kills civilians in Pakistan, and US officials issue profuse apologies. People in general are far less willing to tolerate civilian deaths than they used to be, and there is every reason to think they will continue to get less so. A couple of recent books discuss this trend: The Better Angels of our Nature and Winning the War on War.
I gave the moral argument: They attacked us on 911 and celebrated the fact and supported the terrorist attacks then and since, so it is moral to act in self-defense and to destroy those countries. The moral argument for killing “innocents” is that their death is not our responsibility – it is the responsibility of the country that attacked us, and the truly innocent who are morally against Theocracy would welcome the attack on their country to overthrow their government. Ayn Rand has said similar things about the USA going to war with the Soviet Union – she would have welcomed it, even at the risk to her own life because the USSR was destroying her life anyhow.
I do agree with the several previous posts who said if we are to do it then we need to do it right and to stop apologizing every time we kill a “civilian” (in quotes because their standing army is not the one attacking us, and all the terrorists are “civilian” in that sense). The outright moral cowardice displayed by Bush and then Obama in fighting this war is why it is stretching on for so long. WWII against formidable armies and navies only lasted about four years, and the Islamics have nothing anywhere near the magnitude of Germany and Japan. We are not winning because we don’t have the moral fortitude to win.
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Returning back to the topic of the thread, Obama and his place of birth.
A literary agency published a booklet listing its authors with a short bio for each one. Obama’s bio claims he was born in Kenya. Full story here.
The story breitbart.com published has an editorial preface from the senior management:
Note from Senior Management:
Andrew Breitbart was never a “Birther,” and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of “Birtherism.” In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.
Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.
It is for that reason that we launched “The Vetting,” an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)–not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.
It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below–one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review_._
It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.
Although breitbart.com is part of the conservative and opposition media, this is admirably objective in assessing the relative worth of this document as evidence. I would further reiterate that the State of Hawaii is the final authority over the authenticity of their birth certificates and so long as they stand behind their document there is no basis to legally contest Obama’s citizenship.
Of course breitbart.com published this anyway because it is not the legal arena where this matters but the marketing arena of persuading voters. Obama has been doing his own marketing at various points in life. It is entirely appropriate that since Obama’s entire career has been hype and marketing that some of that should be turned against him. Live by the hype, die by the hype.
The story, as Brietbart’s organization insinuates, is that Obama & Co. have lied about his background to make it sound more interesting. This is entirely consistent with his public character and it doesn’t surprise me. To be fair, its also consistent with the public characters of most politicians. This supports Thomas M’s assertions that Obama has been lying about his past, his character is sketchy, etc. Not that Thomas would have predicted this.
Son of a Kenyan finance minister? I guess we found another composite character, huh?
The (latest) Elizabeth Warren controversy over her claims of being a 1/32 Cherokee is similar to this Obama controversy, Apparently she isn’t really Cherokee at all but she claimed to be and so fulfilled Harvard’s diversity quotas by being both female and a minority, which benefited Warren’s academic career. I speculate ( I can’t resist, it is one of those induced conclusions that seems so clear yet impossible to formally justify) Obama may be in a similar position of having claimed to be Kenyan to qualify for student aid or to strategically position himself as a foreign student as a ploy to gain admittance even if it was not really true. This is consistent with his having had so many of his student records sealed yet still being able to claim honestly to be an American citizen by birth qualified to be elected to the presidency.
So, what are the implications of this new evidence with regard to allegations of forged birth certificates or selective service cards? Can a sane-sounding narrative be presented to explain the “forgeries” as a cover-up for loan fraud?
I don’t think any sort of credence ought to be given to Obama’s god damned lying about this that and the other thing, especially with regards to his birth certificate and using his Kenyan ancestry to get into Harvard and who knows what to become the President of the United States. I’ve also read an article that claimed that Obama was a Muslim but got converted to Christianity (with having to renounce Islam) shortly after taking office. Seem that man (if you want to call him that) will try to lie his way out of anything, so long as he can gain power from it. Bosch Fawstin is a FB friend of mine who is an illustrator who has been focusing on current affairs that are newsworthy, especially with regard to Islam and Obama. Here is his blog with his take on the Obama birth certificate controversy.
Brian0918, Breitbart’s vetting crusade is explained as being a response to a media that won’t vet Obama, but will vet Romney. If this is true, it would be an acceptable reason to focus on Obama. But I tend to agree with you; Breitbart seems to be better than other organizations at vetting candidates. If they were truly dedicated to truth I’d expect them to give us some unique info on Romney as well.
In the comments of the pjmedia article, someone made a mention of a news article that once upon a time mentioned that Obama was born in Kenya. I searched for this article, and found this.
http://www.infowars…ma-kenyan-born/
That infowars article links to an archived article from 2004 showing that the Associate Press mentioned Obama being Kenyan-born when he was running for the Illinois Senate. And just in case something happens to the archive, they’ve posted a screenshot of the article.
The archived article: http://web.archive.o…ews26060403.htm
Readers should take note that this AP story, was syndicated world-wide, so you should be able to find it in major newspapers, archived in libraries world-wide.
Apparently during a debate (Obama vs Keyes in October 2004) Obama admitted to being born in Kenya, saying that he’s running for Senator, not President. I can’t find that though. The video of the debate I watched was missing a part and I’m too tired to spend more time on it now.