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Richard Jernigan -> A reply to Ruphus (Oct. 2 2014 22:37:02)
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So as not to further hijack the luthiery thread:
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Thank you, Richard, for explaining your perspective.
Like always I like your sincere approach, and you mention points that make me agree partially. However, there is still too much suggestion of upright and ethical intensions regarding US regency.
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And just to point out in between:
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I am pretty loyal to my country. To the politicians? Not so much.
I am all with you on that. And if either the polls were genuine or the people actually informed about what is going on, the majority of American people with greatest certainty would had never allowed the adminsitrations ( and slim / ridiculous political range of two parties, that make in fact for no actual choice) they have had / are having.
You remind me of an English friend. At a time before the coal miners destroyed the Old Labor Party, he asked me, "Why do you Yanks bother with elections at all? Both parties are just the same." I thought he had a point.
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You are too forbearing in the examples, and thus come to omitting major contents while pondering about the illegal aspects of above mentioned instigations. Be that how a subjective dismissing of a societal form cannot morph into justicial nor into ethical justification for foreign operations and sabotage, or how the Iran-Contra affair would have been illegal for the essential involvementt of cocain dealings alone.
( A "Just-say-no!"-state that ships and sells drugs en gross to then buy weapons from which again will be supplied to massacring low-life ... And that only to prevent another people´s society of choice ... How on earth can there ever been tried to interpret anything of human concern and integrity in such an unspeakable action and agenda? ... Honestly, Richard! )
As is so often the case, I failed to make myself clear. I was not trying to justify Iran-Contra. I was tying to point out that in criminal law the perpetrator's state of mind often has a strong bearing on the seriousness of the offense. This was meant to lead in to the Reagan administration's state of mind while committing the offenses of Iran-Contra. They thought they were doing the right thing.
Why do I say this? Among other reasons, my father was a friend of the Vice President, George H. W. Bush, and I knew Richard Perle, one of the leading neoconservatives fairly well. Bush was an educated and cultured member of the old East Coast moderate Republican establishment, unlike his son, George W., a relatively simple-minded Texas true believer.
Perle, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Policy, was later co-opted by big financial interests, but at the time he was still driven almost exclusively by ideology. Perle was one of the few Cold War leaders who frightened me. He not only feared and hated the Soviets and the Chinese, he mistrusted our allies almost as much.
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If the American admin´s concern about `socialist´states and for that matter any even just remote approach to a people´s sociietal form had been for worries about people´s freedom and democracy as you suggest, the American constitution would had laid down for direct democracy in the first place.
You paint with a broad brush. The group who later formed the nucleus of the Federalist party, of whom Washington, Adams and Hamilton were leading members, were attached to the idea that significant property should be a qualification not only for public office, but also for voting. The group who later formed the nucleus of the Democratic Republican party, of which Jefferson was the most prominent member, envisioned a republic of yeoman farmers, as the King James version of the Bible puts it, "each with his own vine and fig tree." The Constitution was a compromise between these two factions, between the slave economy of the south and the inchoate industrialism of the north, etc. None of their visions of the future ever really panned out.
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Further the American societal form would had never been lackey of a plutocracy, but instead a howsoever struggling or flourishing kind of people´s state, - which after all noone in his right mind would try to paint the American and any country´s state as.
( Everyone should be knowing to whom existing variations of states belong.
Not a single one is actually what it is displayed to be, ergo a state of and for the people. And the USA reigning is among the last in the descending rank of democratic listing, far after examples of alikes say in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, or several in Latin America.)
I tend to agree that few countries, and no large ones adhere to the prevailing myth. But these "rankings" are based on criteria that make the answer come out the way whichever author wants them to. Greed has far too much influence on American politics, as do a number of ideological forces I disagree with.
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The truth behind the American policie´s hysteria against all hypothetical authentic democracy is the threat that a democracy and fair society as a lively example would be presenting to the US oligarchy.
The oligarchs in the USA are well aware about the American majority´s original sense of justice, which after all once gave the big landowners and financial aristocracy strenuous opposition.
A solidarity and vehement rebellion that the US´ upper crust since traditionally dreads like nothing else in life. From there undermining nothing as aggressively as a democratic societal form that could remind American people of what they were once heading to in a land of the free.
Nothing ever warded off like it. Not even ancient violent mysthicism that demands all other kinds of conviction and belief to be wiped off from earth.
Rather has such a lethal beast been fed than allowing even just the labelling "socialist" on an even just strategically worthless spot at the Hindukush.
I find it ironic that you lecture me on the thought processes of the "US' upper crust". I am a somewhat hybridized member of it. I am a 12th generation white southerner on the side of my father, who was a high ranking military officer. Two of my great grandfathers were significant slave owners, and were appointed to high ranks in the Confederate Army. From age four to age seventeen I spent every summer on my family's feudal domain in far south Texas.
On the other side, my mother's father was a prosperous yeoman farmer who ran for the U.S. Senate on the Socialist ticket, and polled 49% of the vote. He campaigned against the gold standard, the grip of the railroads and banks on agriculture, and the influence of the giant "trusts" like Standard Oill upon politics. My other two great grandfathers fought for the Union.
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You are mistaking masters from Boing, Lehmann Brothers or Unilever with people´s representatives, Richard.
As it happens one of the clients of my consulting business was a Senior Vice President of Boeing Missiles and Space Company. Another was the Chief Engineer of Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. Both were self made men, one from a lower middle class background, the other from a working class family. Both worked their way through college. Neither appeared to be under the power of Satan, as nearly as I could tell.
When the financial sector was still dominated by the old upper crust, there was no more thievery and depredations than there is now under a newer generation of self made men and technocrats. In recent years greed has been more generalized and pervasive than it seems to have been during the era of the robber barons.
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I remember well how German people and administration were downplaying the Third Reich and the power behind it. Our history school books that were reducing the cruelty to the SS and claiming that the Wehmacht had no notion of the progroms, etc.
And I know that some time not too far in the future American people will realize and acknowledge the US goverments´ending / post WWII underhandedness as what it actually was. From Fat Boy over Ukraine and further, to the fullest.
The Navajo have just been ( howsoever meagerly, with in the end altogether 2,5 billion bucks for all Indian tribes jointly. Ashaming sum and gesture still) compensated, and blatant injust finally been officially admitted.
The disingenuousness from after the last World War shall not be taking as long to be finally confessed.
Ruphus
You would be hard put to find any nation in history which acted according to today's standards of personal ethics. I doubt there will be one any time soon. As a child I was old enough to perceive American attitudes during WW II. People passionately feared and hated the Germans and Japanese. After the war we had sense enough to follow an updated version of the Roman policy, and make them our allies.
Stalin destroyed not only communism, but socialism in the USA. During the Great Depression, when they saw the utter collapse of capitalism, large numbers of the intelligentsia and the labor movement became Communists or fellow travelers. These people supported Franklin Roosevelt's welfare state initiatives. But the Communist Party USA was under firm control of the Comintern, which was subject to Stalin. When Stalin's enormous crimes became known in the West, American Communist Party members resigned en masse, and the right wing was given a stick to beat socialism with. The Soviet repression of Eastern Europe rekindled the existential fears of the American public.
From youth to middle age I had a close up view of the attitudes of the American establishment during the Cold War. I cannot say the American people, or the U.S. establishment were shining paragons of virtue. What I can say is that I think they were less evil than Hitler and Stalin. They caused notably less damage and suffering than either of those two, or Mao Tse-Tung. Chairman Mao was by all accounts a civilized and educated person, but unfortunately a dedicated ideologue. We have had and still have our own share of dedicated ideologues, but they have not caused quite as much damage.
Capitalism is an imperfect system. Freedom of speech has its ill effects as well as good ones. "Pure democracy" would, in my opinion be found to have its flaws, if it ever were to be put in practice. The employee owned company I still have an interest in was the best place I ever worked. But later they had to eject one of the principals. When it was his turn to occupy the rotating presidency, he thought it made him the boss.
We, our cultures, our economic and political systems are all works in progress. There is no magic cure for our troubles, nor is there any evil conspiracy to blame for all of them.
To me your views seem Manichean--couched in terms of pure good and pure evil. You seem to share the general American view that evil must be stamped out absolutely. You just disagree about what is good and what is evil. I believe that campaigns to absolutely stamp out evil, or to pursue righteousness at any cost, have been some of the greatest causes of human suffering.
Eastern religions and philosophies tend to avoid an extremist posture. One might say that they recognize on some level that we humans have not yet evolved to our highest aspirations, nor have our cultures done so either. They try to keep things in balance, reining in and damping down tendencies the West might call evil, instead of trying to stamp them out absolutely.
They also counsel moderation in righteousness, since nobody is perfect.
RNJ
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