From: MaxPlumm@aol.com
Date: Sun Jun 08 2003 - 03:25:19 MDT
Damien replies:
> It was Damien who chose to use the phrase
>"oily omelette" in his harsh response to Spike.
"A sorrowful acknowledgement, in context, that perhaps control of oil
reserves in the middle east is a legitimate *realpolitik* motive for war on
Iraq by a high-tech, oil-dependant coalition."
As opposed to control of Iraq's oil reserves by a "legitimate" mass murdering
psychopath who admired, among others, Joseph Stalin. At least back then it
was being used for the benefit of the Iraqi people, right Damien?
> I have never read a post of Damien's in which he refers to a Vietnamese
>Communist "re-education camp omelette", a Castro or Mengistu's "famine
>omelette", or even a Saddam Hussein's "oily omelette".
"The occasion hasn't arisen."
And then Damien adds:
"But the general point seems to me this: there is a moral asymmetry between
one's standpoint on
(a) issues where one's democratic representatives and their affiliates are
making decisions on one's behalf,
and (not-a) choices made by people outside one's sphere of influence."
So, oddly enough, given your guidelines, such an "occasion" to criticize
brutal totalitarians such as Castro, Le Duan, and Mengistu would never arise.
"If your deputy is acting in a way you regard as deplorable, it's up to you
to speak out. If someone over in the next town or nation is doing so, you
might take a keen interest, but you generally have a lesser moral
responsibility to speak out."
Under what set of moral precepts? Given this rationale, Noam Chomsky and
other leftist authors of the 1970s writings and actions criticizing the Nixon
administration (their "deputies") for the bombing of the North Vietnamese and
Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodia as "war crimes" was just, as was their subsequent
denial of Pol Pot's holocaust. Any set of values that would place these actions
at the height of moral righteousness are patently absurd.
"If Australian, British or US decision makers act, allegedly in my behalf,
it's far more urgent that I take stock of their actions and speak up for or
against their choices. If someone in Vietnam, where I have no stake or
control at all, acts abominably, I might speak up as a concerned, distant
observer, but the moral situation is rather different, I think."
In what bizarre sense would you consider that so? So long as the legitimately
elected governments of the West are not the governments sponsoring and
authoring institutional policies of mass and arbitrary murder, you then accept and
approve of a status quo which tolerates those states outside "your sphere of
influence" acting in such a way? Unless one of them really bothers you, then you
"might" speak out.. But what recourse, then, is there for the innocent
victims of the Prague Spring, or Ho's "Land Reform", who spoke out and died for it?
Oddly enough, not all deputies can be voted out of office should they act in a
way contrary to the expectations and preferences of their populace..
"When Palestinian youths blow up Israelis, I am horrified; when Israeli
soldiers blow up Palestinians, I am also horrified, perhaps more so, since
it seems to me, from this great distance, that the power imbalance is in
the Israelis' favor."
Yet it seems to me, from this equally great distance, that the righteousness
imbalance is decidely in the Israelis favor too. I do not accept that a
democratically elected government and an authoritarian "state" which endorses and
encourages terrorism to be morally equivalent. I also believe that were the
situations reversed, the dictatorial thug Yasser Arafat's policies would more
resemble the Soviets toward say, Czechoslovakia in 1968, then they would Israel's
toward the Palestinians.
"When I hear that Saddam and his sons and regime tortured and murdered
people, I am horrified; when I hear that US jails contain a million or more
prisoners many of them incarcerated for using marijuana and subjected in
prison to rampant rape and brutality, I am horrified as well."
It is beyond the height of absurdity to suggest, as you do here, that arrest
in the United States for drug possession (no matter how much one may disagree
with said laws) is somehow on the same moral plain as the state sanctioned
mass murder, torture, and rape of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It is equally
preposterous to equate life in an American prison of cable television and weight rooms,
with one in Uday Hussein's Olympic complex torture chambers.
"In the
absence of those *realpolitik* global considerations, I think that friends
of America should be acting by preference to save the victims in the US
prisons rather than those in the Iraqi prisons."
I know I would certainly sleep better at night knowing I helped make the
world safer for potheads while innocent children and their parents starve to death
or are murdered in Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, or Vietnam. My previous statement
was of course sarcasm, and I find such a position as the one you are
advocating simply beyond belief.
"But we do live in a real
world, so I admit that to sequester the oil reserves for me and my friends
and for technological civilization it might, after all, be worth expending
the lives of the willing and those of the innocent victims. The guilty
victims can rot, as we all agree. But let's not pretend that this choice
led to an almost bloodless war. There was plenty of blood."
I have never said there weren't innocents killed. But let's not pretend that
200,000 plus innocents haven't died and wouldn't have continued to do so had
there been no war and Saddam Hussein remained in power. So, simply put, given
the two realistic alternatives of the Coalition removing Hussein or Hussein
remaning in power, do you then acknowledge that you preferred the outcome that
left the mass murdering tyrant untouched?
Regards from everyone's (at least within my sphere of influence)
anti-communist,
Max Plumm
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