Obama’s peace/love
I was expecting some naivete and pandering to the Left from President Obama’s foreign policy. But so far it is trending worse, much worse, than I thought it would.
Cue the violins (literally!) and butterflies here, for Obama’s most recent effort in Prague [emphases and bracketed comments mine]:
A misty spring sun on his back, US President Barack Obama stood before a crowd of more than 20,000 in a square beneath the walls of Prague Castle yesterday to lay out his goal of forging a world free of nuclear weapons, while acknowledging that he may not see it in his lifetime…
“I am not naive [if you say so. Perhaps a better description would be “delusional”].This goal will not be reached quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime [your naivete is not just a timing problem, it a conceptual one],” the 47-year-old leader said…
“Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be checked, that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction,” Mr Obama told his audience. “This fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable [nice ring to it, but that doesn’t mean the logic works. Sometimes it is good to acknowledge the truth and try to deal from there in a realistic manner. If it is impossible to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, you have to craft a policy that deals with that fact, not dream that you can put the cat back into the bag].”
The speech began with almost Disneyesque staging as the President and Mrs Obama climbed hand-in-hand on to the outdoor stage to string music, the skyline of Prague’s domes and spires behind them and a thick bank of carnations and roses at their feet [wow. Just wow]. But the message the President offered was grave and weighted with unexpected new urgency by the firing overnight of another ballistic missile by North Korea [oh, and I’m sure they’re listening, and trembling in their shoes. Fortunately, they don’t seem to be very good at the science of the thing—at least, not yet].
Among Mr Obama’s specific proposals was the creation of an international nuclear energy bank, from which nations would be able to draw nuclear fuel for the generation of energy and steps to support Iran in seeking nuclear energy if it proves it is not, in fact, pursuing nuclear weapons. He will also seek a new treaty to end all production of fissile material suitable for nuclear warheads.
Not naive, Obama says? Profoundly naive to the point of delusional, I say—unless Obama is just throwing some fish to Leftist and pacifist desires here and abroad, and fooling them as he fooled so many during the campaign by saying one thing and meaning another. Maybe he’s playing the deception (or, as Frank Barnes calls it, “misdirection”) game he plays so well. There’s some evidence for that, although it’s a bit meager:
The President meanwhile admitted to a significant let-out clause for the United States. Until all the world is rid of nuclear weapons, the US will be obliged to maintain a safe and secure nuclear capability “to deter our adversaries and reassure our allies”.
The article points out that “sceptics may regard such a ‘you-first’ approach as a guarantee that his stated goal of a world without such weapons will never happen.” Of course, if a feint and then protection is his goal, gutting defense in this country is a strange way to go about deterrence.
I refer you also to some excellent comments on Obama’s naivete at Richard Fernandez’s blog—
On Obama’s proposal to end the production of fissionable material suitable for warheads:
The key to nuclear weapons is plutonium, and the technology to turn it into bombs. (and yes”“you can make nukes from enriched uranium, but this isn’t practical for large scale production.) The elaphantoid fact in the room is that”“even if you “destroy” all the nuclear weapons you still have to store the plutonium in SOME PLACE. Its toxic. It doesn’t occur in nature. You can’t just grind it up into dust and throw it into the wind. And if it is stored in some place, you can retrieve it and build another nuke in no time at all.
The Djinn is out of the bottle, and its not going back. The bottle is broken. And anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.
Please read this comment on the strategic advantages of nuclear weapons for countries such as Iran. One of the problems with disarmament is that everyone must do it at once, and be trustworthy as well. Does any serious thinker on earth truly believe this is possible? And, if it were possible, would not the world have reached such a wonderful and naturally peaceful state that the existence of nuclear weapons would have become moot?
Here’s some realism for you, in that same comment:
For Obama’s dream to be reality, unlike Reagan’s, SOME nation would have to conquer the entire world, and run it like a Stalin-esque nightmare, wiping out everyone of different ethnicities and religions who did not like each other….Yes World Peace is quite possible. Simply slaughter about 4 billion people, and rule the rest like Stalin.
And here’s one of those skeptics who thinks Obama’s just pandering to the Left—perhaps:
There is a constituency that longs to believe we live in a word where we could just renounce our atomic weapons and everything would be fine. Obama wants their votes, and all they want in exchange is to hear him say the words, so he says them.
The rest of the Democratic Party is confident that he is just pandering to the kooks to further their own agenda. They are probably correct.
People who thought they were smart turned out on several occasions during the twentieth century to be wrong though, about who was pandering to whom.
Fernandez himself, as usual, has one of the best analyses around:
Here’s my philosophical problem with all forms of weapons abolition. Almost every example of a practical, peaceful society ”” with the exception of monastic communities where all the monk’s cells are unlocked ”” are based on the idea of a monopoly of violence in the hands of a consensus ruler. It’s called the King’s Justice. The opposite of the King’s Justice is not Paradise on Earth, but Hell on Earth: barbarism.
Now for the last 60 years, we’ve had a kind of Nuclear King’s Justice. First, the US Nuclear Monopoly, then the Bipolar World in which there was a monopoly of nuclear violence, but it was held by two rational parties paralyzed by mutual terror. This is the reason Armaggedon hasn’t happened.
If we disarm the King’s Men without making absolutely sure that weapons are completely eliminated, then the result won’t be peace but instability. Now if the US disarms, who holds the monopoly of violence characteristic of the King’s Justice? Either it is some international institution or it is the idea that violence will no longer occur because all the instruments of violence will be abolished.
But it is not true that wars will automatically decline with the abolition of nukes. One of the reasons conventional wars have declined in frequency since the Second World War is that not only were they trumped by the King’s Justice, but they always risked escalating into a nuclear confrontation. War became momentarily too dangerous. With the removal of nuclear weapons ”” total destruction ”” from the game, limited war becomes possible again. It becomes cost-beneficial to think in terms of national conquest, where today the risks would be too high.
If I could flick the switch and abolish all nuclear weapons today, China and India would become the most powerful countries on earth because in a situation without WMDs, the nation without [sic; I believe this should be “with”] the greatest conventional warfare capacity and the brutality to use it, would become the dominant power. What it would achieve is not the abolition of military effort, but a sea change in the military balance.
The following is what Obama’s remarks—and the crowd lapping them up—brings to mind for me (although those dancing, prancing horses are still delightful, aren’t they?):
Remember when you were 14 and drooled over the car mags? Same thing with the juvenile nations out there. Nukes are just cool.
Anybody else read a short piece to the effect that Kissinger and some other of the grownups had, strictly a social call, mind you, a chat with Putin? Apparently they saw eye to eye on a lot of subjects of mutual interest, and not limited to more arms control talks either.
This cheers me up somewhat. While I have no doubt that Putin could take our little President, spin him around, rip his head off, pee down the neck hole, pop it back on and send him home in an airforce 1 barf bag, I think he’s too smart to totally take advantage of the situation. A USA as helpless as Obama might desire isn’t in Russia’s interests, which is why this Kissinger visit may be significant.
armchair pessimist — Oh, ick. I experience similar horror and disbelief about Obama’s policies, but please, enough with the expressions of ODS>
Please read this comment on the strategic advantages of nuclear weapons for countries such as Iran.
Owning nuclear weapons means that you can only be taken over through subversion, no through any military action that actually wins, as the last play of the suicidal leader is a temper tantrum. So each of these states want nuclear weapons to prevent military action, and move them to the next level where subversion is the only way.
Now that I put subversion clearly as the only goal on the table, maybe, just maybe, we might realize that that is what we have been doing since the first bombs came up and we settled into this new paradigm.
One of the problems with disarmament is that everyone must do it at once, and be trustworthy as well. Does any serious thinker on earth truly believe this is possible?
No. Especially with the Russians who have nary ever completed a treaty or agreement. Yamentau mountain should be your clue. But also the fact that they have yet to destroy the missles we gave them money to destroy, and that there is a lot more material they have than we publicly report.
The killer point is not so much that they have them. the killer point is that cuba, and south America are letting backfire bombers carrying them land regularly. And that these bombers have been flying at air defenses for the past couple of years.
Yes World Peace is quite possible. Simply slaughter about 4 billion people, and rule the rest like Stalin.
Well the Marxist/communist/socialists defined peace as no more opposition to socialism. and dr planka thinks ebola would do well. a new thing in England things suicide is great, and a female priest this week said that abortion is a blessing from god. (I guess god needs a recall system for the babies that slip through).
The truth is that without nuclear weapons, the world reverts to the system just prior to it, where war socialism and all that becomes possible again. why? because there is nothing to self limit the conflicts, and so they go right up to unrestricted…
Meanwhile, we do a lot more damage with conventional weapons… and if any country really wanted to, they don’t need ANY nuclear weapon; they only need to accelerate a rocket from space with a solid iron payload…
The following is what Obama’s remarks–and the crowd lapping them up–brings to mind for me
Yeah… but if you study the Aquarian age, it’s the age of despots, and rulers… the ideas started with those funky Germans…
The aquarian age was to bring peace to the earth and have a single rule for 1000 years. Adolph Hitler claimed that his Reich would last that long and he paganized his people while destroying the judeo religions.
Problem is that so much of the good information in this area is completely swamped by tin hat information, and all the arcana of the wackaloons… in fact, the whole area is completey rife with all kinds of things. the longest running anti jewish propaganda is in this area, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and such… and the fact that our modern propagandists resurrected this again with the da vinci code and other codes movies.
The whole thing gets real weird real fast, but a lot of it tracks back to the Thule-Gesellschaft. They started as Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, but later became the Nazi Party.. hitler did not attend them before this change, however, if you look at the symbolism of that period, the symbol of the black sun was theirs, and that symbol is the same as the rays aroud mao, or stalin, and across the same political stretches. Coincidence? Not likely since systems empty of merit love their symbols and stories and things more than anything else. Nothing says I am in command more than golden epaulets.
There is no way to know… so much garbage and junk has been dumped around the theme of the golden age, new age, new world order, golden dawn, thule society, etc. However, what I find most interesting is how all their crap dots our media over and over… from video games like bloodrayne and castle wolfenstein… and lots of books..
Things get REALLY weird if you study end of world texts, which I don’t subscribe to, but cant avoid knowing if you dig… technically we are in the ending age of pices, and around 2000 was the start of the acquarian age. Then the stuff reads like end of the world texts.
And so many of them collide on 2010, and 2012… according to to some, the first transit of venus was 2004, and the next one with dawn on 2012.
and so much of the rhetoric from edenic movements, end of the world Christians, end of the world south Americans, etc.
Problem is that such people use such things to foment or manipulate more. in other words, regardless of validity, they work on others ideas of the world to push behavior.
This stuff spans EVERYTHING… so buried in it probably is some important stuff, but there is no way to sort it.
And it gets so weird with who is involved, linked, writing books, and so forth… on one hand it’s a whose who in history, on another hand it’s a whose who of unknown cranks…
Personally, they are playing every card they can…
He’s disengaging from the world. For all of the talk of the Transnational community, the New (new) left doesn’t want to be bothered. The developing, not so developing and other nations may be exotic holidays but offer nothing but hard work and trouble for an active foreign policy.
Look at France and Germany for examples. The rest of the world is for commercial trade for favored industries. Any sort of bribe or wink will be done to keep the export trade up that funds the welfare state. Human Rights, democracy, development are just words to be thrown under the bus.
Huxley,
Don’t knock –DS. Their BDS, which kept their troops hot and scrappy for 8 years, is one reason why we are even having this discussion about President Obama. His side hated better.
According to the Washington Post: “Barack Obama has proved in the past few days that he can work smoothly and productively with a wide range of foreign leaders – provided that he allows them to set the agenda. … What’s striking about Obama’s diplomacy, however, has been his willingness to embrace the priorities of European governments, Russia and China while playing down – or setting aside altogether – principal American concerns.”
and
“If [Obama] bows to the Paris-Berlin diktat, then his prestige as leader of the United States and the Western world will be crippled and the leaders of France, Germany, and other European nations will be encouraged to defy him further.” -UPI
Yes, the left’s propaganda campaign of deception and character assassination against Bush paid off.
Still that’s not how I intend to conduct myself. I will register my disagreement with such tactics wherever I find them.
huxley – I agree.
To the main point: Paragraph 5, quoting Obama, “Some argue that the spread of these [nuclear] weapons cannot be checked…” Substitute the words “longbows,” or “machine guns” into the proper slots, and you will see what a profoundly stupid thing our president is saying.
Here’s an Austian phrase for Barack:
Just because you put your boots in the oven, it don’t make em biscuits.
Why is it that some think that Obama is just pandering to the Left?
If a man who is a Red Diaper Baby and during his entire life hews and clings to socialism becomes POTUS, if he favors the collectivists’ views and expresses them publicly, WHY IS HE THOUGHT TO BE “PANDERING” TO THE LEFT?
He and his handlers worked hard during the general campaign to seem to be centrist. Now that he does not need the votes of the dopes in the Middle Muddle he does not need to pander to the Left. He can be himself.
neo-neocon: “Naive,” “delusional,” “uninformed” – they all seem to apply. However, I would also offer “ignorance of history,” especially as O’Bama was speaking in Prague, capital of the country of my paternal ancestors and victim of the Munich Agreement. If O’Bama knew his history, he would know that the Munich Pact, made without the participation of the Czechs, granted the Sudetenland to Hitler. The Sudetenland contained not only the vital defensive fortifications of the Czechs, but also was the home to practically all of their armament industries. Six months or so after Munich, in March 1939, Hitler simply walked through a open, and unguarded, door and occupied the entire country. Now O’Bama apparently thinks that if we and are allies disarm, others will also do so and universal peace will ensue. History says otherwise.
The man is an idealist on steroids. Why doesn’t he un-invent the wheel while hes at it?
Mark Steyn called him the oldest 13 year old on the planet…lol.
I’m confident that what Obama says now is basically what he thinks and what most American progressives think as well.
I was in that world from the seventies onward until the dislocation of 9/11 forced me to rethink everything.
What Obama says now would have made great sense to my younger self and I would have been astounded and grateful that an American president had finally arrived to articulate my convictions.
neo — Is it a delusion if most of the people around you share it?
huxley: Yes, indeed, it is.
(And, by the way, I was such an odd child that I ordered the above book by mail when I was about eleven years old. I thought it sounds interesting—and it was.)
As for your comment of 5:17 above, that’s the difference between you and me even back in our liberal days. I would have thought it very nice if what Obama had said were true, but I would have considered it naive even when I was a Democrat. That’s why I was more towards the Scoop Jackson side of liberalism.
It’s not that I didn’t fervently wish for peace and disarmament and all that—I did—but I always had enough cold logic in me that I didn’t see any way it could actually occur, short of a deux ex machina intervention.
Obama’s budget should give pause to those who think he is only playing to a part of the base….
I did read Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds back in college, but haven’t thought about it in a while.
According to Wiki:
A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. In psychiatry, the definition is necessarily more precise and implies that the belief is pathological (the result of an illness or illness process).
I was learning towards the psychiatric version, which would argue against a false belief held in common with others being delusional.
So labeling someone as delusional plays a bit of a game exploiting the two senses of the word — the person is mistaken and may be suffering some degree of mental illness.
This series reminded me of that little badge of moral self congratulation bumper sticker that reads:
“It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
Indeed. A great day.
Our new defense posture:
Bend over. Grab your ankles. Spread your cheeks.
Somewhere West of Moscow in his dacha Vladimir Putin is smiling, and he’s reaching for the phone to call his allies, the Iranian mullahs.
So I admit up front that this isn’t a piece of highly reasoned discourse, but I do have to say I listened to a radio clip in my car on the way home of Obama expounding on foreign policy and all I could think of was that he sounded like a fifth grader at the Model UN.
Extraordinary Delusions is one of my favorite books. I reread it every five years or so to get a booster shot of skepticism.
As far as nuclear disarmament goes, don’t liberals see the strategic flaw – that being the last to destroy your nuclear weapons puts you in the catbird seat? The payoff for deception is enormous, and even if disarmament were to be effected, the situation would be metastable.
How appropriate Obama is in Europe and “Hair” is being resurrected on Broadway.
As far as nuclear disarmament goes, don’t liberals see the strategic flaw – that being the last to destroy your nuclear weapons puts you in the catbird seat?
The progressive version goes “Don’t conservatives see the strategic flaw — that possessing nuclear arms means that eventually, by error or crisis, that nuclear arms will be used and millions, if not billions, die?”
These discussions often hinge upon who forces the onus of answering first.
Come to think of it “Hair” was unavailable for distribution through MWR, back then. Wonder why, too much realism I guess.
“”The progressive version goes “Don’t conservatives see the strategic flaw – that possessing nuclear arms means that eventually, by error or crisis, that nuclear arms will be used and millions, if not billions, die?””
This is to wrongly assume theres nothing worse than dying while standing your ground. Which easily gets trumped by enslavement or helping your enemy to kill you.
Their argument, in the weak version, has validity, Huxley. The problem is that the existence of nuclear weapons is a given. Can’t get that toothpaste back in the tube now, to use the family version of the old metaphor.
I’m not saying it’s a strong argument, Occam, but it is an argument and its logic is unassailable. As long as nuclear weapons are around, they will eventually be used.
If one believes that a nuclear war is one of the worst things that could happen, then long shots are worth trying, even cumbersome and risky disarmament strategies.
My current thinking is that in the long run a nuclear war is likely no matter what we do, but I would rather bet on some version of MAD with the US holding the biggest arsenal, than a more evenly balanced multi-nuclear world.
Eventually I hope that as the standards of living and global integration rise — which will happen with time — that we will be able to negotiate more fruitfully and inch our way back from WMD.
The weakness of the libs’ and Leftards’ argument consists in their unrealistic appraisal of certain regimes’ character and intentions. Our policy has been one of deterrence. And our “first strike” options during the Cold War were crafted to take out the enemy’s missile silos and boomer submarines. Initially, our deterrence posture early in the Cold War was to target Russian cities, population centers, military installations, and industrial capacities. We did not entirely abandon those targets, but as our technology advanced and we could target more precisely we put their nukes at Priority Number One.
Russia objects to our ballistic missile defense system because that system deprives Russia and its proxies and allies of the ability to carry forward nuclear blackmail. Our enemies and their water carriers here in the States label this defensive system as an offensive weapon. There is a certain Orwellian logic to that.
This is to wrongly assume theres nothing worse than dying while standing your ground. Which easily gets trumped by enslavement or helping your enemy to kill you.
True. But in life things are usually not so simple, and when they are that simple, people will still often choose survival over dying.
I recommend reading Robert Heinlein’s 1942 short story “Solution Unsatisfactory”. While his guess about the nature of atomic weaponry was incorrect, I think RAH nailed the political aspects pretty well…
“The progressive version goes ‘Don’t conservatives see the strategic flaw – that possessing nuclear arms means that eventually, by error or crisis, that nuclear arms will be used and millions, if not billions, die?'”
And yet the progressive solution guarantees that tens of millions will die and billions be enslaved and impoverished.Whether the enemy is communism or fascism or islamo-fascism, the record of history is clear on this.
@pst314
The fact is that some progressives don’t care if those billions die because it means that they will have a crisis that can’t go to waste. They’ve managed to convince the Soft Left that there are no downsides to playing this way, when really it’s only the Hard Left that has nothing to lose. The Soft Left will be the ones that will be enslaved and destroyed if nuclear war breaks out, or if the Hard Left comes up on top.
We seem to be marching inexorably along the road to serfdom. I wish that we still had Friedman and Hayek these days.
It’s not that progressives don’t care, it’s that they can’t imagine that they might be wrong. They live in a world of moral black-and-white in which they are, fortunately, in the right and anyone who opposes them is in the wrong.
The template for today’s progressives was formed by the civil rights movement in which there was really no question that those who opposed segregation and Jim Crow might be wrong.
Progressives imagine that most issues of the day reduce to simple human responses. Of course, blacks, women and gays should have equal rights. Of course, no human should have to live with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Of course, no one should have to starve given current prosperity. You don’t need to know much about history to know those things, and they can be accomplished by moving in a straight line towards them.
I still agree with those imperatives, but it’s clear to me that the world is complicated, there are always trade-offs, and that there are bad actors in the world who can’t be listened to and reasoned with like regular folks in an encounter group or normal schoolkids on the playground.
Wm Kristol’s editorial in WaPo makes the point that even were it possible, the elimination of all nuclear weapons would not get rid of war, it would only put the world back in 1939, the arena of conventional warfare, where the winner is whoever has the most men and the most money. China supposedly has millions of excess, youngish men without a lot to do, and the Olympics Festival showed us, chillingly, how good the Chinese are at compelling lock-step behavior among the masses. China has at least a trillion US dollars that they could use in more “productive” ways that buying bonds backed by a rapidly-deflating currency . . . Why buy the T-bills when you can just go take the country?
The purpose of nuclear disarmament is not to get rid of war, but to get rid of the possibility of nuclear war. As JFK put it in his Address on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty:
But those dangers [of conventional war] pale in comparison to those of the spiraling arms race and a collision course towards war. Since the beginning of history, war has been mankind’s constant companion. It has been the rule, not the exception. Even a nation as young and as peace-loving as our own has fought through eight wars. And three times in the last two years and a half I have been required to report to you as President that this Nation and the Soviet Union stood on the verge of direct military confrontation — in Laos, in Berlin, and in Cuba.
A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history. A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 6o minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, “the survivors would envy the dead.” For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors. So let us try to turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world’s slide toward final annihilation.
They live in a world of moral black-and-white in which they are, fortunately, in the right and anyone who opposes them is in the wrong.
Aren’t conservatives generally the ones arguing against moral relativism?
This is to wrongly assume theres nothing worse than dying while standing your ground. Which easily gets trumped by enslavement or helping your enemy to kill you
Nuclear incineration vs. slavery? That’s not much of choice really. The way I see it, you’re free to stand your ground with your gun in one hand and your NRA membership in the other, either way, until they come for you.
As far as abolishment of all nukes, all you really need is an army of nano robots patrolling the Earth 24/7 to pinpoint the location of material and ensure no one is able to process. Our socialist leader (who I report to directly) has assured me that’s just around the corner.
Logern Says:
“Aren’t conservatives generally the ones arguing against moral relativism?”
In some moral matters. They also strongly argue that the personal is not political and or there is a need to compartmentalize various areas of life into different spheres. In the end, you’re not evil for not being in with the conservative political program.
But in the end, the left can claim to believe in relativity and the value in examining other points of view… but it’s just more of their BS.
I believe in a few absolutes (don’t murder being one) but otherwise am pretty open to the idea I can be wrong.
huxley Says:
“The template for today’s progressives was formed by the civil rights movement in which there was really no question that those who opposed segregation and Jim Crow might be wrong. ”
I think it goes back further. They had a foot in the social gospel movement. Their current arrogance can even be seen in their old terms ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’…
Here’s another fun one.
It is my opinion that nuclear arms have prevented a world conflict larger than WWII. MAD has worked for quite some time. Perhaps because it’s mad.
Socialism wants everyone to give up, except for those who would rule the rest. The way I see it, those who are socialist are so pissed at the haves that they are willing to have nothing, just so no one else does either. The journey of life becomes quite dull, almost meaningless to me, if the route one is to take is known at the onset. No one to cheer for, nothing to aspire to. What I find so humorous about hope and change is those who hold those views. If you mean gimme, then say it.
I remember Mark Twain saying something about truth; that it should be dressed in tights, not a bulky over coat.
Thomass — I think the moral certitude of progressives goes back further too. The Social Gospel is one such example. The Abolitionist movement another.
Progressives were right about some things like civil rights and labor reforms, but they came to believe the rest of their agenda with the same uncompromising moral fervor.
Interesting tidbit: I looked up Wiki’s page on the Social Gospel movement and discovered that the question “What would Jesus do?” which we currently associate with conservative Christians, was originated by Charles Sheldon who was committed to Christian Socialism.
Some have said Bush was a Christian Socialist.
It is my opinion that nuclear arms have prevented a world conflict larger than WWII. MAD has worked for quite some time. Perhaps because it’s mad.
It did work that way and the nuclear stand-off of the Cold War allowed Europe to heal from WWI and WWII in a way that would have been impossible otherwise.
However, there were close calls, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. If a full, horrific nuclear exchange had occurred, no one reading the history later would have been surprised.
But not everybody buys the premise that a nuclear war would be all that bad.
In Krushchev’s memoirs he says that Mao was quite willing to have one, telling him that there were so many Chinese that there’d be plenty left afterwards. This scared the beejezus out of Krushchev. Today nukes are the only demographics Russia has a chance of winning. I wouldn’t scap them either. Even a responsible democracy like India is worrisome. When they successfully exploded their first bomb, a very high member of the government wanted to issue commemorative bottles containing soil from the test site. It had to be explained to him what radioactive meant.
Then go down the foodchain to the nuthouse places, where life is cheap. They’re drooling for nukes, and will get them. The only deterrent their dear leaders understand is the certainty of their own deaths if ever they fire one off.
My only hope for the miserable decision the American electorate made in November is that he is an instinctive babbler and con artist and never speaks his mind.
My bet for a nuclear war has long been India-Pakistan. Here’s a discussion between Pakistani Brigadier General Aman and Peter Landesman writing for the Atlantic.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200203/landesman
“I insisted Benazir [Bhutto] accept [painting of several Pakistani leaders watching a rocket roar across the sky] as a gift,” Aman told me.
We both looked up at the painting in silence. “A rocket ship heading to the moon?” I asked.
Aman tipped his head to the side. A smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth. “No,” he said. “A nuclear warhead heading to India.”
I thought he was making a joke. Then I saw he wasn’t. I thought of the shrines to Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons site, prominently displayed in every city. I told Aman that I was disturbed by the ease with which Pakistanis talk of nuclear war with India.
Aman shook his head. “No,” he said matter-of-factly. “This should happen. We should use the bomb.”
“For what purpose?” He didn’t seem to understand my question. “In retaliation?” I asked.
“Why not?”
“Or first strike?”
“Why not?”
I looked for a sign of irony. None was visible. Rocking his head side to side, his expression becoming more and more withdrawn, Aman launched into a monologue that neither of us, I am sure, knew was coming:
“We should fire at them and take out a few of their cities–Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta,” he said. “They should fire back and take Karachi and Lahore. Kill off a hundred or two hundred million people. They should fire at us and it would all be over. They have acted so badly toward us; they have been so mean. We should teach them a lesson. It would teach all of us a lesson. There is no future here, and we need to start over. So many people think this. Have you been to the villages of Pakistan, the interior? There is nothing but dire poverty and pain. The children have no education; there is nothing to look forward to. Go into the villages, see the poverty. There is no drinking water. Small children without shoes walk miles for a drink of water. I go to the villages and I want to cry. My children have no future. None of the children of Pakistan have a future. We are surrounded by nothing but war and suffering. Millions should die away.”
“Pakistan should fire pre-emptively?” I asked.
Aman nodded.
“And you are willing to see your children die?”
“Tens of thousands of people are dying in Kashmir, and the only superpower says nothing,” Aman said. “America has sided with India because it has interests there.” He told me he was willing to see his children be killed. He repeated that they didn’t have any future–his children or any other children.
huxley Says:
“Thomass – I think the moral certitude of progressives goes back further too. The Social Gospel is one such example. The Abolitionist movement another.
Progressives were right about some things like civil rights and labor reforms”
I’m not sure it’s a straight line between here and the Abolitionist moment. It always seemed like a classical liberal issue from my POV.. Up until Stalin made the Negro Condition a propaganda meme; progressives were (in general) as racist as anyone else in the US (re: racist). What’s worse, due to their belief in a strong state and a right to play with people’s lives; they did more harm than the average racist/s. To blacks in order to weed them out to improve the population (to make it easier to have a large social safety net)… to Mexicans with forced deportations to help Union labor… Now they look back and say those progressives had some unfortunate conservative tendencies… ahhh, double think…
PS
The point of support for the civil rights reforms were strengthening the central state (a recurring theme for the progressives)… It was a convenient issue. Just like the financial crisis is today.
Abolitionists had some fancy ideas. It took people like Lincoln and Catholics (Underground railroad) to actually do something about it.
High and fancy ideas amount to nothing without real sacrifice.
The thing is, Obama will demand sacrifices of everyone except himself or his little band of corrupt brothers.
“My children have no future. None of the children of Pakistan have a future. We are surrounded by nothing but war and suffering. Millions should die away.”
Islam in a nutshell. Since it cannot give it’s people a reason to live, it gives them a reason to die. We all ignore Islam at our own peril.