To say that the Paris attacks are terrible is easy. To follow the consequences of that statement is hard.
First, let us start with responsibility. Those most responsible are those who commanded the attacks take place, and those who carried them out.
This seems evident.
Let us make another statement: Absent the Iraq war, there would be no ISIS. If ISIS is responsible, then no Iraq war means no Paris attacks.
The Iraq war was an attack on a country which had not attacked the US, Britain, or any other coalition member. It did not threaten any coalition member. It did not have “WMD” in any meaningful sense of the words.
No Iraq war, no Paris attacks.
If you want to punish those responsible for the Paris attacks, on that list are George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair, among others.
Nor can a case be made that they did something defensible which had unfortunate consequences. The crime they committed was the same one for which the Allies hung most Nazis: starting a war without caususbelli. At Nuremburg, that was held worthy of death because of all of the crimes that follow logically from war.
It’s hard to tell how many deaths the Iraq war has caused, but put it from hundreds of thousands to well over a million.
Those people are just as dead as the Parisians. Most of them were civilians.
It should be, but isn’t, an unexceptionable statement to say that the people most responsible for their deaths are the people who ordered those deaths, and the people who killed them.
“Just following orders” should be out of style as an excuse, but it isn’t.
Legitimate violence, to many, is violence sanctioned by a state. Since Bush and Blair were heads of state, their violence is legitimate.
Yet the International Criminal Court regularly tries and imprisons Africans for killing people with the power of the State.
This ethical spiral goes nowhere good. It is impossible not to conclude that what matters in violence is only who commits it. We kill civilians in large numbers. We say that our soldiers are only following orders. We are still killing large numbers of civilians in foreign countries.
We would never accept this excuse of someone who carried out the attacks in Paris, that they “were only following orders.”
There is no way to cut through this knot that does not involve an appeal to authority, that does not come down to: “We’re okay with killing people with whom we don’t identify.”
ISIS claims to be a state, and claims the right to order violence. It claims the right to kill innocents. So does the West. The history of medical sanctions or of direct attacks on civilian infrastructure like sewage does not allow the argument for “collateral” casualties to be taken seriously.
I am unable to see, on the basis of any ethics that isn’t tribal, particular, or supine to authority that the Parisian attacks are more worthy of condemnation than either similar attacks that occur regularly in the Middle East. I am also unable to see what difference it makes to the dead if they are killed by a “terrorist’s” bomb or bullet, or a bomb or bullet used by a “soldier.”
Either civilians are off limits, or civilians aren’t. Either war crimes that got Nazis hung are war crimes for everyone, including Americans and British (or French, in Libya) or the Nuremburg trials were simply victor’s “justice”; simple vengeance.
We should expect propaganda from the state. We should expect hysteria. But we should not allow our own thinking or sympathy to fall subject to it.
The Paris attacks are terrible. They are not more terrible, or less terrible than other attacks of similar sort, no matter who carries them out.
I will accord “the West” the ethical upper-hand when I see Bush, Blair, and their cronies on the dock for their crimes.
Because I will tell you this: While every life has value, and every murder is a tragedy, more murders are worse than less murders.
If we want to avoid the next Paris attack, we will try our own criminals and cease our violent meddling in the affairs of other countries. Because, for the time being, we will not, the regularly scheduled tragedies, here and abroad, will continue.
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Matt
Blessed be the peacemakers.
Bill Hicks
A true accounting cannot stop with Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc, but must also include the generals and admirals who planned and carried out the war along with those in Congress (including Hillary Clinton) who voted for it. Also included in the dock should be the commandant, guards and torturers at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and of America’s other military gulags.
Nuremburg, after all, was not just about trying the top Nazi leadership but also their enablers within the German military and paramilitary (SS).
James
I wonder how many people embracing #AllLivesMatter the day after Paris, were rejecting it the week before. Human tribalism is both ingrained and so fundamental to our existence as to be nearly invisible to most.
BlizzardOfOz
Bingo. Is it not a farce, prima facie, for a victor in war to purport to judge impartially its defeated enemy? And indeed the Allies ignored or covered up worse atrocities by their own side. Churchill was the first to deliberately firebomb civilians, and is there a worse atrocity that nuking 2 cities off the map? The post-war order persists to this day, and with it the victors’ same system of pretend justice, with separate standards for themselves and everyone else.
This seems right to me. By the same token, you’re acknowledging a declaration of war with an an enemy state. We should not allow its combatants, its sympathizers, or any mass of people some of whom will form a fifth column, to exist in our societies.
V. Arnold
@ Bill Hicks
I have recently watched the movie “The Nuremberg Trials” twice; it would be a good idea for people to re-watch, or watch that movie; especially the very end, telling what happened to the those given life sentences.
In lieu of the U.S.s’ “Operation Paper Clip”; the Nuremberg trials were indeed a show; our behavior over the last 70 years makes the trials a cruel sham.
highrpm
“There is no way to cut through this knot that does not involve an appeal to authority, that does not come down “we’re okay with killing people we don’t identify with”.”
beautifully expressed. brings to mind a sentence of roger garaudy, from his chapter “marxism and religion” in the book, Marxism in the Twentieth Century,
“as soon as
Christianscease to reject ALL violence — by accepting military service and engaging in war — then to refuse to share in the violence that is essential to the battle that is fought in the name of respect for the human person, for the liberation of man, comes uncommonly close, in fact, to making that respect an excuse for, and a factual participation in, the hidden violence that maintains the existing order and oppression.”by now, the state authorities of the west have gone so far off the rails, the violence that maintains this deadly order and oppression is full view, painfully obvious to those with the cognitive skills of an 9th grader. wtf have we devolved to? we boomers can’t anymore muster the moral outrage we showed as youngsters protesting the vietnam war. and certainly our children can’t/ won’t. me included. its way way past the time to march on washington. but all i can muster is romanticizing a lone hike off into the middle of nowhere and burying my head in the sand. hell, in actuality, i wouldn’t make it one mile out.
El Guapo
This:
“We should not allow its combatants, its sympathizers, or any mass of people some of whom will form a fifth column, to exist in our societies.”
is a great example of the lizard brain in action. Its also exactly what the lizard brained ISIS jihadists want. Funny how that works.
Jeff Wegerson
Blowback chickens coming home to roost?
I don’t get it. Is NATO stupid enough to risk war with Russia using an attack on Paris as an excuse to insert itself into Syria.
Oh right. Attacks like Paris take months to plan. Russia wasn’t there.
Could Russian intelligence have seen it coming? Could U.S. intelligence been so incompetent to have not seen the Russian counter move? I suppose both could be true but like an aircraft carrier these things take time to turn around.
V. Arnold
Paris (France), Britain, and U.S.; boo hoo.
You reap the thing you sow.
Innocent’s? There are no innocents in this Orwellian nightmare sown by the deep state and shadow governments of the U.S. and west in general.
Any who live in/under democratic governments, are directly responsible for the actions of their governments. Until this is understood; this insanity will continue unabated…
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
VA contradicts hirself. (“Hirself” because I don’t know VA’s gender)
If Deep States and Shadow Governments exist, then we are slaves, who have no effective control over what our masters and overseers do.
Since slaves can’t control what their masters and overseers do, slaves can’t reasonably be considered responsible for what their masters and overseers do.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
(Not for the first time, I wish all blogs had edit features.)
In other words, countries which have Deep States and Shadow Governments are not truly democratic; hence, the commoners can’t reasonably be considered responsible.
Bill H
I posted at my site earlier today,
“I will probably be excoriated for this, but I have a question. How many innocents did the French kill in their leadership role of bombing Libya to get rid of Ghadaffi? I don’t know, but it was certainly a great many more that the 129 dead in Paris. How many innocents have died in Libya as a result of it having become a failed state due to France’s intervention? Again, probably a number 100 times greater than the number of French dead.
Do not sow what you are unwilling to reap.”
I do not suscribe to V.Arnold’s deep and shadow governments. I do subscribe to the people of a democratic nation bearing responsibility for the actions its elected government. My response to a similar attackion in this nation would be the same.
Chris Collins
Might makes right simple as that.
yellowsnapdragon
@Jeff Wegerson. Could Russian intel have seen the Paris attacks coming? Yes, I believe so. Just before the attacks Russia leaked a modern plan to take out an American city by an underwater drone armed with a thermonuclear weapon. http://www.moonofalabama.org/2015/11/russia-resuscitate-long-dead-nuclear-torpedo-restablishes-nuclear-deterrence.html#more
My reading of events is that Russia knew something was coming that would cause the west to escalate in Syria and the Russian response was to remind the US of MAD. Then there was an indication that Putin is planning to pursue the sponsors of terrorism *in coordination with the US*.
http://www.fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/11/putin-to-pursue-sponsors-of-terrorism.html
Make of that what you will. I don’t know what it means.
yellowsnapdragon
More evidence Russia, France, Iran, Syria knew an attack was coming http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.686257
Bill Hicks
@V Arnold — while it is true that Operation Paperclip and the rise of the Cold War meant that some useful Nazis were let off the hook altogether and some got much less punishment than they deserved, the follow up trials did result in the imprisonment and occasional execution of thousands who conspired with the regime. While it is true that because of postwar politics Nuremburg was highly imperfect, but it was still a fairer reckoning than any group of war pigs has received either before or since.
More to Ian’s point, however, the modern day war crimes tribunal are indeed a sick joke as long as those who planned and ordered the Iraq War (and other unprovoked acts of Western aggression) remain unpunished.
nationalist
“we’re okay with killing people we don’t identify with”.
Yes. Just like we care more about our own kids than other kids. And our own people and civilization than others. There is nothing wrong with these sentiments, and nothing wrong with tribal ethics. In fact if the west is going to survive then we need to return to this.
I’m not in favor of our Mideast adventures, but even accounting for that, these attacks couldnt have happened if liberal fool like you didnt allow millions of muslims into Europe over the last 20 years.
Mandos
No one can afford present-day modern technology and tribal ethics simultaneously.
nationalist
why not? Most other non white countries put their own people before others, even the tech advanced ones, for example Japan.
BlizzardOfOz
Mandos,
While you can disavow tribal ethics for yourself, you can’t force other groups to do so. The result is that in a “multicultural” country, the clannish groups push out the universalist ones. Hence in the US, Jews pushed out Wasps, to the point that now the US military is deployed largely in service of Israel. The paradox of it is that Japan, the most restrictionist country of all, secured for itself a non-clannish society. Whereas the universalist European countries are well on their way to being submerged in Mideast-style tribal conflicts.
different clue
At first I found myself regretfully agreeing with this logic. But then, after some disorientation and confusion set in, I realized what was wrong.
France did not support Bush War II against Iraq. France tried obSTRUCting that war every which way it could. So this logic of balancing ethics does not apply to France at all. It is completely irrelevant to France. The French are completely entitled to think and feel whatever they like about the people who did this.
I also notice that Ian Welsh appeared more personally upset over the vastly lower casualty list at Charlie Hebdo . . . because Ian Welsh felt his own personal Free Speech interest threatened. I don’t remember seeing anything written here about how France had created the Charlie Hebdo killers. (If I missed it, I am sure I will be corrected in the most vitriolic and hostile terms. And that’s fine).
So since France has zero ethical conundrums here, because France had zero involvement in bringing ISIS into being in Iraq, the French are entitled to do whatever they think necessary and convenient to eliminate the sources of these attacks without any kibbitzing from me.
The blog Sic Semper Tyrannis (which is blogrolled here) has lately featured a guest blogger of mixed French-Lebanese ancestry named Patrick Bahzad. He has written some things on this subject which might be worth studying.
As to what the DC FedRegime should be doing . . . in a perfect world the DC FedRegime as well as other Western regimes which currently support ( and help make up) the Axis of Jihad would change sides and support fully and without reservation the legitimate government of Syria and its allies Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and any others in doing whatever may be necessary and convenient to terminate all aspects of the rebellion in Syria. The message for our governators is . . . You are either with Assad or you are with the terrorists.
Mandos
Japan is used as the special exceptional example, but it is only “safe” for the world to have a Japan when it is also pressed into pacifism, maintains a very low birth rate, etc. It also won’t really last much longer unless they manage to create a “minority” of robots, which I gather they are trying to do. This hankering after a simpler time when people didn’t mix through large immigrations, there were firm national-tribal borders, women had a specific domestic role, etc, etc, is just not compatible with a massively interconnected global industrial economy. For every Japan there must be a USA.
nationalist
This hankering after a simpler time when people didn’t mix through large immigrations, there were firm national-tribal borders, women had a specific domestic role, etc, etc, is just not compatible with a massively interconnected global industrial economy.
Assuming that is true…so what? National integrity and living in a way that is in accordance with nature is more important that serving the global economy efficiently.
V. Arnold
My comment is not contradictory; but rather shows the way forward and it’s not through the ballot box.
Those of simple mind cannot see the present reality in front of them, and thus deny any meaningful future course of action.
Hugh
ISIS is a totalitarian death cult. It can not be reasoned with. It can not be negotiated with. What you need to understand about such entities is they split the world into the ultimate us versus them. If you are not 100% under their control, you are an enemy, a target. We can all manufacture rationales for why Paris might have been attacked: its colonial history, its recent involvements, its treatment of its Maghrébin minority, but all these are incidental and miss the point. Paris was attacked because it was vulnerable, it is a powerful symbol of Western culture, and such an attack would be geat advertising and a display of ISIS’ reach. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the normal world fundamentally misunderstands the totalitarian one because those of us in the normal world keep trying to apply our normal world ideas and values to it when, in fact, it operates not on any set of rules but on the basis of terror.
Sure, Bush, Cheney, Blair, and their whole sick crew of neocons had a role in laying the groundwork for ISIS’ creation, but so has Iraq’s corrupt sectarian Shia-dominated government, so has Saudi Arabia’s virulently anti-Western, xenophobic state spported form of Sunni Islam, so have the World War I imperialists who drew lines on maps rather than creating viable countries.
And beyond these are the vast secular forces of overpopulation, global climate disruption, resource overuse, and environmental destruction. Our kleptocratic overclass certainly exacerbates these even as they are dwarfed by them. If you want to blame them for ISIS, fine by me, but failed and failing states and would-be totalitarian terrorist movements like ISIS are our future, unless and until we, together, resolve these underlying existential crises. Get used to it.
Ian Welsh
There is no scenario where the West does not invade Iraq and various outside actors do not destabilize Syria where ISIS exists in its current form. None. Furthermore, that there would be backlash for the Iraq invasion was, yes, predicted at the time.
As for France, they lost their “didn’t go into Iraq” credit when they led the intervention in Libya, turning it into a shithole, not to mention their meddling in Syria.
Anyone who thinks the same people who turned the Middle East into this shithole can fix it with more military force has an extraordinary inability to learn from experience.
Suckers. God our elites must love such suckers. Fear and tribalism, works on enough of the people far too often.
different clue
France was not attacked by Libyanoids citing France’s shit-holing of Libya. France was attacked by ISIStas for some “reason” or other. Citing “Libya” as a reason to accuse France of reaping what it sowed regarding ISIS seems a desperate diversion to me. Now, it is fair to reference French anti-Assad meddling in Syria . . . which I did not think enough about . . . as helping to create the vacuum which ISIS helps to fill along with the other jihadistas and islamistas.
Speaking of “anyone who thinks the same people who turned the Middle East into this shithole” etc. etc. etc. is another diversionary attempt to prevent and abort honest thinking. An honest thinker will admit that neither Russia nor Iran nor Hezbollah nor the Syrian Arab Republic itself were involved in turning the Middle East into “this shithole”. Russia/Iran/Hezbollah/SAR itself are working to reVERSE the shit-holing of Syria which is being advanced by people OTHER THAN themselves. These 4 countries/groups that I mentioned are trying to reVERSE the shit-holing of Syria by carefully advancing against the Axis of Jihad’s pet shit-holers on the ground in Syria. The “R + 6” as Pat Lang has called them are pursuing a very reasonable plan against the jihadists. Those who are not with Assad . . . are with the terrorists. They might have the minimal honesty to come out and admit it.
The sooner the anti-Assad forces in Syria can be comprehensively exterminated from existence, the sooner the legitimate government of Syria can re-impose the level of order and control necessary to keep the West’s pet jihadis properly exterminated from within the borders of Syria.
Mandos
Except for all of us millions of inconvenient persons with complex, subaltern identities and cosmopolitan personal and life histories who don’t fit and don’t want to fit into the “national integrity”. There’s nothing “natural” about a nation in which you can’t possibly know all the people who live there. The only “natural” community is the one of your blood relatives and maybe physical neighbours up to the point were you can remember their names.
“Living in a way that is in accordance with nature” in the sense you seem to mean requires a great deal of mass killing, no “ifs”, “ands”, or “buts.” In the first place, we couldn’t support the world’s current population like that. I mean, we may not be able to do that anyway, but I wouldn’t deliberately aspire to kill everyone.
Hugh
If Syria was not run as a police state by an Alawite mafia, if it did not suffer from overpopulation and climate change induced drought, and if Malaki had not been a corrupt Dawa extremist, ISIS would not exist in its current form either, or at all.
But that’s not the point. Much as we see exceptional weather events proliferating due to global warming even as the link of any one such event to global warming remains inconclusive, so we are seeing the rise of increasing numbers of failed and failing states and ISIS-like organizations. These are due to problems with population, climate change, resource overuse, and environmental damage (and kleptocratic ruling classes), although in each and every case (much as with climate change), you can adduce various Western involvements to exclaim them, at least in part.
If there had been no US invasion, Saddam Hussein would have remained in power and along with him a minority Sunni-dominated government. As a result, the former Baathist officers and intelligence operatives of his regime would have had no reason to fabricate ISIS. So yes, ISIS would not exist in its current form. So what? Syria was a much better run police state, as police states go, than Iraq. It wasn’t ISIS which destabilized it. It was climate induced drought which did, and it is this which ISIS was able to take advantage of.
Iraq cracked apart due to the US invasion, but the fault lines were already there, and I would argue with Hussein’s genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds the process of cracking had already begun. Both Syria and Iraq illustrate the point that police states are very effective until they are not. And once they break, it is almost impossible to reconstitute the state in any form because of the lack of the civil institutions and society (anathema to the police state) necessary for this. Instead they revert to pre-state structures and identities: tribes, ethnicities, religions, and almost invariably collapse into a multi-sided civil war. Much of the world is filled with such states which are set to collapse, and under the pressures of population, climate, environmental, and resource issues will collapse.
Finally, I would point out that peoples of the world own their own histories. It is hubris to think that they are just puppets to those of us in the West either for good, the conservative line, or for ill, the progressive line.
V. Arnold
@ Hugh
November 16, 2015
None of this (your post) is new; it’s well documented and known by most who pay attention.
Your rehash enlightens nothing; what is your point?
As to your closing paragraph; the peoples of the world “are” puppets; because they lack the POWER to expound their histories. They are ground down by the very powerful who turn them into puppets. They lose ownership of their histories and narratives by the very hubris of the first world hubris and exercise of POWER…
highrpm
@hugh
”
ISIS is a totalitarian death cult. It can not be reasoned with. It can not be negotiated with. What you need to understand about such entities is they split the world into the ultimate us versus them.
”
then america has its own ISIS here, the rwa faction of the republicaners. shit, i grew up in that kind of mindf*k. it works its evil on us weaker ones who can’t/ won’t stand up to the wolfpack alpha’s , imprinting us with what’s know as religious trauma syndrome, pretty much causing lifelong life skills deficits. our pol’s are victims of the same, whose champion is aipac. until humanity renounces all violence as a valid means of dealing with group conflict, its going to continue in the tribal “us against them ” mindset and kill, kill, kill. so paris is just the most recent of ……. with …… to come.
BlizzardOfOz
Spoken like a rootless cosmopolitan. Good men are called to fight and die protecting effete intellectuals like yourself, and you can’t even muster a reciprocal loyalty.
In other words, national identity has been utterly destroyed in western countries by 50 years of mass immigration. There have been nations before and there will be again. Your assertions are nothing more than the anti-nationalist mythology propounded by the victors of WWII.
highrpm
@blizzardofoz
” Good men are called to fight and die ”
by whom? their idiot alpha leader-of-the-paks”. the insanity of elders calling their son’s to due mortal battle. this is rational — cerebral cortex — or “fight of flight” — amygdala? i as a father would not think of calling my young son to put himself on the line for my life. hey, but that’s the combined power of imprinting from birth the message of the star spangled banner and god sending his son to die on the cross. all of it tribal shit.
as far as confusing living in a community with individuality? boundaries are required, just like lane markers on roads. but, unlike driving cars where the consequences of violating boundaries is pretty instant and violent, the stronger bullying the weaker with their incessant imposing, we weaker ones typically back off and internalize to keep the peace. it is not uncommon in wolfpaks that the bottom rung omegas eventually quit the pak and go off on their own, at the risk of lower their chances of survival just to get the f*k out of a bad scene.
so why can’t we all abide the boundary of treating each other with respect? fear. fight or flight. humans have a cerebral cortex. wolves don’t. let’s start living that way. and f*k making an invisible sky god public. your beliefs that cannot be measured or quantified are a private matter, in similar fashion to what’s covered up by your clothes.
Larry
“It claims the right to kill innocents. So does the West.”
Rumsfeld’s term for it was “collateral damage”
Doorknocker
I think it’s rather far-fetched that everyone in the West is complicit and deserving to be terrorist targets. If so, presumably that would include the author of this post and many of the commentators. Or do you exempt yourself? The intellectual legerdemain you use to accomplish this will be highly entertaining to observe. And I doubt terrorists will take the time or be moved. (If in fact you do include yourself, then I applaud your consistency).
To solve the problem of unfair terrorist targeting I propose the following: social media apps that identify people nearby who ever wrote a blog, posted a comment, voted for an outside party, or staged a demonstration that excoriated the West. Surely that would work. Terrorists can consult the app and spare those people’s lives.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
“Your assertions are nothing more than the anti-nationalist mythology propounded by the victors of WWII.”
Nasty cynic that I am, I suspect that Blizzard and Nationalist would be happier if the other side had won WW2. 😈
Hugh
V. Arnold, what I wrote is not a rehash but a comprehensible context and frame with which to view events in the world. Progressives run around in circles and lose all connection and credibility with the much wider public because pretty much all they have is US or West = bad, end of story. It’s false. It’s simplistic. And it convinces no one outside of a few narcissistic progressives.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Though, given the massive disparity in material resources, the Axis actually lacked a chance in Areinnye of winning WW2.
They looked for a while like they might, but only because the Allies all made serious initial blunders–the French and British did not know how to use tanks properly (even though they had more and better tanks), Stalin foolishly crowded his forces within reach of one of the Ratzis’ patented blitzkriegs, and my country’s sailors thought Pearl Harbor was too shallow for air-dropped torpedoes to run successfully inside it (someone forgot to tell the IJN that).
The fact that three of the four main Allies overcame those blunders and crushed the Axis shows how little hope the Axis ever truly had, and what testosterone-drunken fools their leaders were to start WW2.
Mandos
That’s not ‘cynical’, they—or at least Blizzard—explicitly tell us this. Whatever their faults, and they were many, the people who erected the post-WWII order eventually left Germany one of the most prosperous societies on Earth. So he can’t be upset at how Germany as such was treated, when all is said and done; what he’s angry about is how the people who led Germany into battle were treated, and in particular, what the victors did to the ideology of those who were defeated.
See how both of them talk about the natural body of the nation, expelling what could become a “fifth column”, presumably by force and the threat of force, not merely those who are traitors. Where does that kind thing come from? Well, we know where, but I’ll go one deeper. It starts from an obvious deep yearning for the organic society, where everyone is like a cell or body part or fingernail or whatever of a whole. This is a thoroughly modern, biologized concept of nationhood, presented as a state of a sort of nature that doesn’t really exist in this world, as nature is full of strange and unexpected overlaps and blended borders and peculiar symbioses and complex interactions. I don’t understand the attraction of living as though one were a fingernail or an eyelash hair, and I never will. I suppose everyone who thinks this imagines that they will be a neuron in the cerebral cortex or something fancy like that.
Mandos
I won’t genuflect to those whom you would doubtless deploy to put their boots on the face of me and mine for the sake of your conception of corporeal nationhood.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
“I suppose everyone who thinks this imagines that they will be a neuron in the cerebral cortex or something fancy like that.”
Indeed, the people who want hierarchical societies tend to imagine themselves as masters, though I suppose there may be a few submissive types here and there who actually enjoy the idea of being slaves.
Kathryn
@blizzardofoz with all due respect this Rootless Cosmopolitan was created by the US military, being uprooted every 2 years of my entire dependent life and sent all over the world as ordered by the government. all that travel and exposure meant i never had a chance to develop a national identity – i’m sure there are millions of military brats who have similar feelings and not just a bunch of effete intellectuals.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Before anyone refers to me as a “rootless cosmopolitan”, I wish to state for the record that I have never left my home country of the USA (I can’t afford it), and indeed, I have not left my home state in nearly 30 years.
Nationalist
“Nation (from Latin: natio, “people, tribe, kin, genus, class, flock”
Yep nothing to do with blood and biology at all. Damn you are delusional.
And being part of an organic (real) community and contributing to the same is what fulfills most normal people. Of course you leftists try to pathologize all normal behavior with your “ism”s
Oh and yeah Hitler was the good guy, and the Soviet butchers and international banking cartel was the bad side. Just FWI.
PS “rootless cosmopolitan” is a byword for Jew lol. People who bitch about Wall Street so much should know that.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
One wonders what compels such people as “Nat” to flash their heinies (metaphorically) like that.
If I believed such filth, I would keep it to myself–in order to keep myself off government lists, if not from a simple wish to avoid embarrassment.
Mandos
They certainly had notions of tribes, families, genera, togetherness, defense, invasion, etc. They didn’t reify them into corporeal entities nor make a biological metaphor central to their thinking. That took the modern world, scientific racism, etc. The Romans were in no way some sort of ancient-world Nazis.
And it is typical of the extreme right to assume that their Blut und Boden-coloured glasses are worn by “most normal people”. Of course, if you define “normal people” to be a minority of people belonging to the dominating group who fret that they aren’t getting the benefit of such dominance, then of course “normal people” identify themselves as fingernails on the collective body of the race.
Most actually normal people contribute to their communities without this explicit racial consciousness.
Of course we know what the term refers to. Blizzard was accusing me of being a Jew polluting the organic body politic. I’m not Jewish, though—but it doesn’t matter. All I know is that it’s rootless cosmopolitanism or bust. Either the barriers dissolve and we figure out how to live in a multicultural stew or we face mass death.
BlizzardOfOz
@Mandos,
The Red Army raped and massacred Germans by the millions, and that’s without mentioning the deliberate British firebombing of German civilians. The Western allies turned over Axis civilians knowing they would be imprisoned, tortured, and slaughtered.
It looks clear to me that it’s not just the Nazis who were obliterated, but also the idea of nationalism altogether. There is a direct line to the current day, where you can only be an *international* socialist. Putting the interests of citizens ahead of migrant workers or refugees (or “refugees”) is a cardinal sin to both international communism and international capitalism.
Raciss!! (Although I do very much appreciate that you only slipped that in as a footnote, rather than making it the meat of your argument.)
Your wordy qualification is an admission that this state of nature in fact *does* exist, in blood ties that extend like concentric circles from immediate family, to extended family, and further outward (races or nations).
You may not like it being a migrant yourself, but what is the alternative? Even if you could bring about the perfect dissolution of blood ties, the best you could end up with is an atomized society without the bonds of shared history and culture. This leads to an atomized, bloodless polity where the only fellow feeling is that enforced by the state.
But of course, you can’t force others to relinquish their family ties, even if you manage to yourself. You end up with a balkanized society where various ethnic groups vie for power through politics or civil war.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
“The Red Army raped and murdered civilians by the millions, etc.”
Boo f**king hoo. Who started the war?
BlizzardOfOz
@Ivory Bill
Churchill.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Churchill started the war? On what parallel Earth?
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
BTW: Churchill was not prime minister of the UK when WW2 began.