How Many Russians Do You Hate?
If you couldn’t continue hating someone who hurt you, why would you hate any one of billions of people you’ll never know? It’s foolish, a waste of time and energy. Most people pursue their own opportunities, living and letting live...especially people they don’t know. It’s an important element of a well-adjusted personality. Wars and conflict get all the press, but the unrecognized history of the world is actually a more salutary chronicle. Through the generations, people in large measure have lived peaceably together, even people of different races, nationalities, and creeds. Peace, cooperation, and mutually beneficial exchange, not war and conflict, account for humanity’s journey from cave to skyscraper.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article, please click the above link.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article, please click the above link.
When I was inducted into the Marine Corps in 1968 I was aware that the Viet Nam war had been going on for several years. Several cousins had already served there. I had heard many quarrels for supporting or not supporting it. I expected that part of my training would be to let us know exactly what was going on there and what we expected to accomplish. One day as part of the basic training they took us in for classes on why we should kill the people we were expected to. The class consisted of arguments such as; They don't love their mothers the way we do. They don't take care of their children well, etc. I expected at least some patriotic bromides but was subjected to;
when we are given orders we obey no matter what. If we don't there will be chaos on the battle field and we won't accomplish our objectives.
I spoke with a navy pilot who had been in on the first bombing run caused by the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He stated that those on the ship were aware that nothing had happened to justify sending planes on a bombing mission but they were servicemen and expected to obey orders. I wondered what would have happened if all those who knew there was no 'cause' refused, would the war have started? Later the Pentagon Papers proved that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was invented to promote the hate to get people to war. Reminds me of a parody of a recruiting poster back then; "Join the Navy and see the world. Meet different people and cultures. Kill Them!
I don't know that there has ever been a war that was not started by conniving, lying leaders to accomplish a goal of controlling their own people as much as plundering others if they think it is possible. I suggested a method for fighting war to my commanding officer once. Take the leaders of the nations who want to go to war and send them to an island. Arm them and let them fight the war. When there is only one leader left send in a combat team and kill him. Install new leaders and ask if they have any problems!
they benefit from wars with no risk to themselves.
Threat-wise... they have a couple of barely-functioning carrier and battle groups, compared to about 30 that we could put to sea. They have less than a dozen subs, we have hundreds. They may only be out-numbered 5 to 1 in aircraft.. Lethality, no match for us even if there was parity... they never have been. The only thing they can do is pick on a third world country or go nuclear.
Economically.. Maybe 1/5 of the US..
Our only potential foe is China, they want to lead, 4 times our population, larger economy than we have, and they are catching up in technology (mostly through theft). They haven't figured out how a carrier catapult works though, we must not have had the plans for that online or those cheap Chinese gaskets keep breaking.
Our enemy is China, always has been. They are the Athens that looks at us like Sparta.
In the USA, the enemy is definitely anyone who supported hillary or sanders.
They "want" and "need" Trump to look like the family failures that most of them are, but he's not - he's had some "marriages" but his kids all seem to have their shit together.
Here's what they are scared to death of - a Trump political dynasty, and the first female president being Ivanka Trump some day, not the Hillary Clinton they wanted.
Look at how they have attacked Donald Jr. over a stupid email in the midst of the campaign and a 20 minute meeting with someone he thought would talk about reviving the Russian foreign adoption program. Suddenly that is the "smoking gun" they have been hunting for.
The double-standard is, Donald Jr. can't respond to an email from a Russian-born attorney residing in the US or whatever, but Hillary can approve vast uranium mining rights to Russian oligarchs while her husband is pulling down millions in speaking fees from Moscow companies. It's amazing. They (the dems) wonder why we're pretty much headed toward another civil war with those assholes (remember -they were the Southern political class..) and no matter how many days of 24 hour wall-to-wall coverage CNN can muster over a stupid email and 20 minutes to potential opposition research - they can't believe that the American voter thinks even less of them.
We're stuck... they have 50% of the country relying on a government welfare or social security paycheck to pay their bills and put food on the table with, we'll never completely be able to get rid of them, no matter how much damage they continue to do to the vitality and reputation of the United States.
Between healthcare healthcare healthcare, Russians Russians Russians, and Putin Putin Putin, I just want to throw up (after clicking off the television).
My wife and I pretty much only watch Netflix these days, I'm actually turning off the Dish service in August when the contract is up and just subscribe to FoxBusiness News and a few others with the new Internet cord-cutting services. That will work much better with our RV travels anyway.
Other than that, perhaps I'd slap around georgie sorass, chuckie shumer...maybe a few others.
For the rest of the parasitical humanoid classless creatures...I will admit, I do wonder if a swift bop upside the head would reset their brain...but of course, that doesn't qualify as physical animosity; therefore, does not qualify as "Hate".
Mystic me can get into that. Fly in the warthogs! Rat-tat-tat! Boom! Hallelujah!
Or how to love an enemy fanatically sworn to either convert, enslave and kill you, that last multiple choice bit most likely the end result regardless.
No need to waste energy hating evil fiends who simply need to be blown off the planet.
Me dino does not hate ISIS, Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Me dino does not hate mad dogs either but I know they need to be put down on sight.
Me dino fears all creatures who want to hurt me. That's why I'm a concealed carry and go to the range so I know I can shoot straight.
Fear of what a "I dream of open borders" El Presidente Shillary Clintonista would have Evil Hag done to the USA is why I built up an arsenal in my house.
Me dino does not perceive himself as having a hatred problem.
Methinks what I have is a fear for survival problem.
That leads to this question~Is that a problem at all?
That perhaps that we shouldn't be so alarmed about Putin?
That perhaps it's not so bad to be a little warmer towards him?
Am I reading that right?
I am just thankful I have better things to do with my feelings and can't be bothered with any hate other than on an individual basis. We should all hate cop killers, terrorists, rapists and a host of other evil doers but I try hard to not go there even though it is a real emotion.
I will say that I do have a degree of respect for the Russians and even the Muslims for their fidelity to their respective causes.
Just dont get between two muslims, jews, or mormons, and expect fair treatment. They stick up for themselves ONLY.
I dont know any Russians, but they cant be ALL bad- wasnt Ayn Rand Russian?
My two bits.
"Hate is stoked to overcome the natural desires for peace and prosperity and aversion to war. As a leader, you don’t sit the citizens down one-by-one and calmly explain to them why they should hate whomever you’ve chosen to fight. Rather, you make a frenzied appeal to a crowd, and let crowd psychology work its woeful wonders, with ostracism and worse for the few rejecting the appeal."
You mentioned the Iraqi war as an example of this hate to go to war, but I believe we weren't stoked by hate at all. Those that fought this war went to that war of their own volition because they felt the need (duty?) to protect our way of life here in the US. More than any other war that the US has entered into, the war in Iraq has changed people's minds about how we ought to view our soldiers returning home. There is a pride and respect for our soldiers that we never showed them prior to the war in Iraq and I think it is because we all recognized that we went to war not out of hate, but out of the need to protect our way of life. Protection is what the government is about, its what the state should only be about, and we should be coerced to pay taxes for that protection because we recognize that we can't do it on our own. We would like to think we can, but even the constitution points out the following:
"we hold these truths to be self-evident,... That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,"
I understand this to mean that the men that created the constitution realized that we need government for our own protection, because we can't do it by ourselves.
Again, I'm a big fan of your writings, and I would love for you to discuss these points with me.
You ask me to discuss your points and I will. As I discuss, I will make assertions that I have investigated and I believe are amply supported. However, I will not cite source material until the end of this reply, for ease of reading.
First off, I must admit that the paragraph from my article you cite would have been better if, when I talked about stoking hate, I had said hate not just against another country and its citizens, but against its leaders as well.
Sadamm Hussein had been an ally of the US in the 1980s when he made war against Iran, a US enemy since 1979 after the Iranian Revolution deposed the US-installed puppet, Shah Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi. The US provided arms, including, it has been alleged, the gas which Hussein used on his own people.
George W. Bush, his team of neoconservatives, and the US's putative allies Saudi Arabia and Israel, were bent on remaking the Middle East. Long before 9/11, the neconservatives had envisioned widespread regime change, especially in the Shiite nations of Iran, Iraq, and Syria (Saudi Arabia is Sunni, and Israel aligns with the Sunnis).
After 9/11, the US moved first against Afghanistan. This was perhaps justifiable, because that was where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were then located. The US invasion of Iraq was justified on two grounds: that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he had aided al Qaeda's 9/11 attack. The first was later discredited by both events (no such weapons were found) and subsequent revelations that the intelligence had been cooked. The intelligence community had given Bush and Dick Cheney not the truth, but what they wanted to hear.
The second argument has been discredited as well. No credible evidence has been found to link Hussein to 9/11. Other assertions have been made that Iran was involved. Both assertions are on their face implausible. Osama bin Laden, a devout Wahhabist (Sunni sect) hated secular Hussein, and it is doubtful that Shiite Iran would have aided Sunni al Qaeda. The only state actor for which the evidence indicates involvement would be that of Saudi Arabia. Most of the 9/11 coconspirators were from Saudi Arabia, and there is evidence that the they were aided by wealthy and powerful patrons within Saudi Arabia, some part of the government, some not.
Hussein was no threat to the US and the Bush administration knew it. However, a massive campaign to demonize Hussein, to make Americans hate him, (admittedly he was no angel but he had managed to hold Iraq together), was undertaken by the US government and mainstream media. The US invaded and deposed Hussein, and he was eventually executed.
Fourteen years later, the US is still in Iraq and Syria as well. Anyone who paid attention to the Iraq war recognizes that the US is using the same tactics against Syria's Bashar al-Assad that it did against Hussein: cooked intelligence, unproven accusations of atrocities, arming and otherwise supporting local guerrillas of dubious pedigrees and tactics, and other regime change machinations. In Syria, the US has actually armed and supported al Qaeda and its offshoots, ISIS and the al Nusra front. So we have been allied with the al Qaeda, the terrorist group we originally went after in 2002 in Afghanistan, and we're still in Afghanistan to boot!
Since World War II, the US has not conclusively won any of its military engagements. We've been in Afghanistan 15 years and Iraq 14. We're going on 6 in Syria. US-inspired wars have created millions of casualties and refugees, fomented chaos in the Middle East and Northern Africa, and stoked the terrorism they were ostensibly meant to stop. All without making anyone in the US one bit safer.
I have far more sympathy for Vietnam vets than I do for those who have fought in the Middle East. The Vietnam vets arguably didn't know better when they went off to war, and some of them were drafted. While kids nowadays get sucked into the military with the same slogans and jingoism kids have always got sucked into the military, the US's shameful record of interventionism is now clear and the armed forces are all volunteer. Anyone who is going to volunteer to kill or risk being killed for the US government at least owes it to themselves to investigate what that government has been doing the last 60 years.
I guess I went over the limit and got cut off. I will give you my supporting material in another post.
1. Saudi Arabia is Sunni, and Israel aligns with the Sunnis
A lot of conspiracies around 9/11 theorize that Israel played an active role in the 9/11 attacks to help certain US gov't authorities further their plans in the Middle East. I find this interesting if I can come to the same conclusions that you make in this statement.
2. Osama bin Laden, a devout Wahhabist (Sunni sect) hated secular Hussein.
The second one asserting that Hussein was a secular having ruled over a predominately Shiite sect of people in Iraq since the 80's. Something's wrong there because I would think civil war would have been going on during Hussein entire reign in Iraq. Great information and detail by the way. I agree with your sympathy for Vietnam vets, but mainly because they were mistreated when they came back home. I still give my respect to any man willing to fight for his country's freedoms even if the government has been corrupted by certain individuals to make war with another country. You are still correct in that peace, cooperation, and mutually beneficial exchange is the way that man should strive to live his life. You chose star wars, I'll pick Dr. Strange for a nice quote of the day: We can never lose our demons, only learn to live above them.
For number two:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/opi...
Hussein's Baathists were Sunni, which is the minority in Iraq. He basically kept a lid on Iraq through the bloody force, especially against the Kurds, frequent purges, and keeping his own family and clan in most of the positions of power. When he was deposed and executed, the country basically fell apart. Many Sunnis, dispossed by the Shiite majority, reconstituted themselves into the Islamic State.
Excellent, well done.
A simple saying comes to mind
"Be careful what you wish for"
the left's attack on free speech.
Then the whole deal with the Russians and the Trump campaign the Leftist Media and the Dimms bellowing for Trump family heads is reaching a crescendo. I start thinking they might need a dose of their own violence.
Extreme ideologies depend on stirring up extreme emotion in their populace to distract from the discomfort of lack of material goods, or personal freedom. Hate is definitely an emotion that hampers your ability to think logically and dispassionately, so the progressives do everything possible to stir up blind hatred against anyone who doesn't believe as they do. Left wing supporters are taught that opponents who use reason and fact are cold blooded and heartless.