>>Would that be such a hot idea, really? We got (and
>>get) all the murderous wars when some regional warlord
>>decides to try it on because, who knows, he might win
>>and besides, it's other people doing the dying. With
>>a single hegemon around, he can't win (tho this still
>>isn't obvious to many) and possibly might have to do
>>some dying himself. That seems no bad thing to me,
>>even though it's not being applied very well because of
>>who's running the US.
>
>In Margaret's post there seems to ready an assumption that self-
>government is intrinsically untrustworthy, whereas American domination
>is generally benign.
It depends, i suppose, on how you define 'self-government'. In the US today there is a habit to refer to 'the government' as though it's entirely separate from us. This habit pervades _all_ discourse, and is pernicious because self-fulfilling. Chomsky remarks on this, obliquely, when he points out that, to the Establishment, our role should be limited to periodically ratifying, via the ballot, one of the Establishment choices for office. We shouldn't do anything more, politically, than that. And every time some news source refers to 'the government' as tho it were some entity beyond our ken or control, the Establishment's hold on power is reinforced.
So my question is: do we have 'self-government'? Did the Chileans under Pinochet have 'self-government'? Did the Cambodians under Pol Pot? The USSR under Stalin? Does any country in which the many are exploited for the benefit of the few?
I don't think there are many people who would freely choose to suffer deprivation, thuggery, or murder! People like that are diagnosable, and hardly ever form the majority of a population. :-)
So i would have to argue that 'self-government' is a myth and a fraud in most cases. Sometimes an egregious one, as when the very ballots are rigged, and sometimes a subtle one, when sources of information are rigged. But a fraud.
As to US domination being generally benign: 'benign' is probably the wrong term. I would probably say 'generally less directly murderous'. The US Establishment prefers that other countries do its killing, except in cases where the President needs a political distraction. :-(
'Benign' would be the right term only if the US were to intervene decisively in every case where one group exploits another by means of violence or systemic deprivation. And didn't intervene anywhere otherwise.
>Aren't you too quick to excuse Western violence as
>merely contingent fact (who's in charge) whilst assuming that self-
>government in the rest of the world is always tipping over into
>'warlordism'.
I don't quite see where saying 'all wars are due to warlordism' is the same as saying 'all governments degrade to warlordism'. Could you explain?
>Quite apart from any logical argument, the facts just don't support that
>view.
Agreed, but then that's not my view. :-)
>The most efficient butchers have been the very Western forces that
>you hope to make the solution to butchery. Tens of thousands killed in
>Somalia, hundreds in the Gulf war and subsequent sanctions, hundred
>killed and displaced by US trained Croatian troops in Krajina.
>
>The West is not the solution, it is the problem.
Are you in the West? Are you part of the problem? If you are, why don't you stop it? If you're not, then it can't be 'the West', because if it were, you would be.
Chomsky remarks on how clever the powerful are in privatising profit while socialising cost. And if we substitute 'power' for 'profit' and 'responsibility' for 'cost', we can see it works there too. The folk in power take all the decisions while exercising sleight-of-tongue to diffuse the responsibility. But they are the ones responsible. And they are in office because we let ourselves be deflected, hoodwinked, and flim-flammed instead of keeping our eyes on the prize and working together to make basic changes in the system.
le meas, Margaret