I have a comment about your mentality. You really come across as a huge defeatist with this post, eager to see the US decline in world power. If the US withdraws from the world stage, someone will fill the void. The overall level of military power might be reduced, but the US's relative position will be diminished.
I'm glad you posted this, since it further illustrates the mentality I spoke of. The difference is that I have an idea of a global peace that can work, and what can't and will see continual opression and war and injustice, while you are the person who doesn't and only understands the need for you to have things better than the rest of the world, an unwitting elitist who rationalizes things that make no sense.
You for example 'need' the US to effectively rule the world - anything less is 'defeatist'. No matter hiw much harming others and their having second class and oppressed status is needed for that - you don't really care, the thing that matters is your own situation of dominant power that the other 94% cannot have. You are so benevolent, if they let you have that, you won't mind their having some freedoms, but you would prefer to remain ignorant of the suffering cause by the need to exploit them. You have the mentality of the citizen of empires and colonizers throughout history.
Note the distorted language you use - not being the 'ruler of the world', the only nation whose ships have to be all around the world's oceans dominating the planet, means 'withdrawing from the world stage
Here's the key thing: you don't say a word, you don't have a notion, of any world system that is 'fair' and where nations 'get along' (even while you live in a nation where 50 states 'get along'); you equate the US not 'ruling the world' with hordes of barbarians showing up and sending the world into some sort of world chaos of violence. Again this is the colonialist's mentality - if you don't rule the world, it'll not do ok.
You thiink it's ok to insist the rest of the world make whatever sacrifices are needed for you to have the dominance you need to feel safe. ANd yes, they should thank you for this.
After all, you the master of the world, are keepikng the world safe. It should remind you a bit of the slaveowner's mentality, where they really throught they were benovently helping these inferiors.
I understand, you like to have a few peer nations - the Canad'a and England's - to keep they myth that you aren't really the master of the world, as long as they pose no conceivable threat.
It's a little like how the nobles each have peers and try not fo feel too much how they oppress the peasants.
This was the mentality that got us into Vietnam - those backwards people can't possibly run their own country, it's either us or China or the USSR to run them, so it better be us.
Your whole position is based not on any equality and 'equal rights' but on your side being the only one with the six carriers dominating the seas, and you getting to pat yourself on the back hoow benevolent you are.
Like the slaveowners and colonialists, you can say 'well I don't hear them complianing a lot, they must agree what a good system it is.'
As I said earlier, even peacenik American liberals have greatly benefited in the last 60 years from the US's military power and foreign policy. It has underpinned the world order and the economic stability much of the world enjoys.
Your first sentence - what a shock, the people of the colonial power got benefit from being so dominant.
Well, that certainly justifies any injustices doesn't it?
The second sentence is a great example of the self-righteous deluision of the colonialist I'm discussing. The Brits were infamous for saying the same thing when 'the sun never set' on their empire.
If Hitler or Stalin or Mao had ruled the world, the same could be said - they were responsible for 'providing the stability' that existed, er sorry, that 'the world enjoys'.
Just as slaves could thank their providers for the lodging and food they 'enjoyed'.
Who will take power and responsibility in shaping world events if the US declines? China? Russia? Iran? Brazil? India? We have already established that you personally trust all of those nations over the US
his is where you again expose the weakness of y ou position by stooping to lies as its basis
, but the question remains for others.... The track records of those countries does not lead me to believe they will be any more benevolent than the US has been.
Yes, this is the fallacy you offfer - that the only choice is WHICH nation should be the one dominant nation inthe world, and shockingly, you conclude yours is the best choice.
Funny, the others conclude theirs is. That's your problem. The answer is, none of them should be 'the one nation who is the only one out ruling the world'.
Any more than one of the 50 states should be the only one more dominantly powerful over the others.
What's needed is a global political structure more stable for co-existence than having one nation who is 'benevolent' to rule the world - and oh sorry about all our excesses.
I know the mythology you follow on this - the moment we're not there to run the world, another Hitler will arm his nation and try to rule the world and oh no we can't deal with it.
So you use that to justify a limitless appetitie for our benevolent world rule. And ignorance is very handy for dealing with any ugly side to that to keep on sleeping nicely at night.
Just repeat the mantra about how the world should be so grateful to us for providing such wonderful security, and no problem. Just like colonizers and slaveowners.
We can hardly help but be 'the bad guys' under your approach, like every other group that rationalized dominating others that they were such good benevolent rulers.
A system based on a priviliged class exploiting others for their prosperity is IMO inherently immoral and unstable. It works great for a while - we've had slavery a lot longer than we haven't here, and we had institutionalized racism until 1965. easy to forget the 400 years before that - but look back at any such system and put yourself in the other guy's shoes and you know better, there needs to be a better system than 'benevolent domknance'.
As India prepares to become the world's most populous nation, and a leading world economy, should they really still be an English colony being exploited for the benefit of the english under the arrogant views about how it's 'best for them' to have the civilised Brits in charge? From the Indians' point of view? For all the problems blacks have in the aggregate in our society today, is the answer a return to some sort of inferior position? Would our President agree?
I'm not saying to make a global United States government in which every nation is a 'state' under a bigger 'federal' world government. That's a larger topic.
But we can create some better and more stable global political system that protects the sovereignity and rights of each nation and region better than our war-based system now.
Rght now it's sort of 'you have all the rights you want - as long as you don't lose a war'. Ask Vietnam in the mid 50's when the west set up their colonial system (or the centuries before as cololonies) how many rights they had. Ask Colombia how many rights they had when they US took Panama away from them to build the canal. Ask the kingdom of Hawaii how many rights they had when the US ships showed up. Ask the buffer counmtries around the USSR how many rights they had when the USSR took them after WWII. Ask Mexico how many rights they had when we took half their country in the mid 1800's, ask Iran how many rights they had when we removed their democracy in 1953 to install a tyrant.
Tonight I picked up a book, "Overthrown: America's century of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq". I opened to a random page, and here's what it mentioned:
Following the US invasion thast Americans were celebrating, the leading politician in Puerto Rico wrote:
"The North American government has found in Puerto Rico a degree of autonomy larger than that of Canada. It should hgave respected and enlarged it, but only wanted to and did destroy it...Because of that and other things about which we shall remain silent, we shall not celebrate our 25th of July. Because we thought that an eras of liberty was dawning and instead we are witnessing a spectacle of terrible assimiliation... because none of the promises were kept, and because our present condition is that of serfs attached to conquered territory."
It goes on:
"The first decades of American colonial rule in POuerto Rico were an unhappy time. They began with an act of Congress, the Foraker Act, that established the rules by which the island would be governed. It vested absolute power in a governor appointed by the president of the United States. There would be an elected, thirty-five member House of Delegates, but its decisions were subject to veto by either the governor or Congress. The only Puerto Rican who testified at as congressional earing on the act was Julio Henna, a veteran civil rights campaigner.
"No liberty, no rights, nio protection" Henna said in an eloquent summary of its provisions...
During tge early years of the twentieth century, four American corporations gobbled upmst of Puerto Rico;s best land. On it they planted sugar, a crop suited to large scale farming. The big losers were families who grew coffee, which is known as the 'poor man's crop' because it can be cultivated on small plots. By 1930, sugar accounted for 60 percent of the country's exports, while coffee, once the island's principal crop, had fallen to just 1 percent.
With little access to land, ordinary Puerto Ricans became steadily poorer. One study found that while 17 percent of them were unemployed at the time of the American invasion, 30 percent were unemployed a quarter century later... Malaria, intestinal diseases, and malnutrition were daily facts of life."
The book tells a story of the sort of 'stability' you say they should be grateful for. Meanwhile, Americans had cheap suga, didn't we?
And personally, I have these things called pride, self-preservation, and drive to excel. I would rather see the nation I live in be dominant, than some foreign power. Radical leftists may call that fascism, but what do they know. The grass is always greener somewhere else, and they are always ready to bow to someone else.
The problem is your willingness to shortchange others, as is needed in a system based on inequality, even while you refuse to face the facts and spout how nice we are.
Your argument is again exposed as junk the way you throw around false phrases like 'Radical leftists' that only sow how yoiu nned to lie to jstify your positioon.
Fascism is a problem, but you are just making a straw man argument to say that the only issue with the current system is exaggerated clsims of fascism.
Every tyrant can rationalize the tyrrany and you are doing nothing better.
You sound like Castro justifying his repression by talking about the bad things from the previous dictatorships he improved.
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