Reflections from Hacienda Pensaqui, where Simon Bolivar was a guest several times… El Libertador described democracy as “a government so sublime that it might more nearly benefit a republic of saints.” He simultaneously wrote to a friend that “our [Latin] America can only be ruled through a well-managed shrewed despotism.” Bolivar addded “Do not adopt the best system of government but the one that is most likely to succeed.”
Charles Darwin was in some measure of agreement with Bolivar. In 1833 while in Argentina he wrote “[Paraguay] will have to learn, like every other South American state, that a republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honor.”
One wonders what Bolivar and Darwin would have done in Iraq.
I just watched the movie Goodbye LeninGoodbye Lenin, about the fall of the Berlin Wall and just finished the book The Swallows of Kabul, about the Taliban in Kabul. The impression these books and today’s news gives me is that we must watch what we have closely in terms of working government and make sure it doesn’t go the way that other strong, seemingly everlasting governments have.
What I wonder is what you are doing wondering what any foreigner would be doing reshaping another country’s future, and why you might think that any democracy can be successfully imposed from outside, by a foreign force except in it’s most infantile, narrow, puppet form.
When, as has happened, an American military officer in the Iraq instructs their subordinate Marine Corpsmen to throw candy into schoolyards and shoot children who run out to get it is never going to come close to imposing democracy.
http://www.pulsetc.com/article.php?sid=1040
It’s happened before, in Vietnam.
(http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_13_3Marine.html)
The very phrase “imposing democracy” is oxymoronic. It cannot be done. And post war Japan and Germany are not even close comparisons: democracy was not imposed on those people.
Interesting quotes. However unethical it may be, my view is that countries and regions have to grow up, and sort out their differences in their own time. To make an incredibly geeky analogy, like the Vulcans in “Enterprise” advising humans, but not simply giving them advanced technolgy as they believed they weren’t ready for it.
Unfortunately, our not so wise forefathers had a lust for products not existing in their own region. While they brought (and sometimes imposed) justice, infrastructure and knowledge to these regions, they made them have to grow up too fast and in some cases, go wrong.
In that respect Iraq isn’t all that much unlike Michael Jackson.
“When, as has happened, an American military officer in the Iraq instructs their subordinate Marine Corpsmen to throw candy into schoolyards and shoot children who run out to get it is never going to come close to imposing democracy.”
Those damned baby-killers in the Marine Corps.
Reading this absurd claim, I decided to follow the link provided, and discovered to my amusement that the “news story” quoted was originally published in L’Humanite, the militant daily newspaper affiliated with the French Communist Party, and then translated and republished by islamonline.net.
Oh, yeah. *Those* are gonna be reliable sources, for sure.
I have grave reservations about the war in Iraq. But slandering our servicemen and women in order to achieve propaganda aims is wrong any way you look at it.
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Barry Campbell,
I did some searching on my own and I don’t see how you could know where that quote “originated” by the article in question. Can you explain? I could do the same: here goes.
“Your claiming of my slandering our serviceman is a recaptulation of the same verbiage found in the lunatic Lyndon Larouche’s radical right wing newpaper ‘The World’ quoted last march. Oh, yeah. *That’s* gonna be a reliable source, for sure.”.
I mean it sounds convincing, but I provide no evidence because I just made it up on the spot.
However, war does horrible things to people. I could follow that a USMC commander making such an order in the heat of a firefight if s/he believed that the enemy had taken up in a school containing many children. By shooting the children, the enemy could be drawn out. It’s not so hard to fathom, as atrocious as it may be from the vantage point of your livingroom, this is what a war is all about. It’s about being as ruthless and heartless as possible, more ruthless and heartless than your enemies. That’s what “wins” wars. That’s why vets come back so messed up.
Furthermore, I do not see the value of the French Communist Party in slandering the US military, what’s in it for them? Unless you swallow the recent media switchover of “communists” == “terrorists” == “communists” == “terrorists”, which is like saying “Oceania is at war with Eastasia, it has always been at war with Eastasia. It is allied with Eurasia”.
Nick –
How about reading the byline of the article. It specifically says where it came from.
“This article first appeared in L’Humanite and was reprinted in English on Islamonline.net”
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