|
Most everyone would agree that killing innocents is immoral whether they are targeted or not (though not morally equivalent). What I have a hard time understanding is how people like Zinn can ignore a greater good or lesser evil. For example, he stated, "Stalinism was really replaced, in time, by the Russian people themselves." But he is ignoring the tens of millions that were systematically killed in that process. Same idea for North Korea...how many millions have died under that regime? Is standing by and watching people be killed always more moral than acting in their defense? |
| |
Written By:
JWG
URL:
http://
|
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Friday, January 20, 1961
I’m sure this would be considered foolhardy. |
| |
Written By:
Neo
URL:
http://
|
|
Once again, the professoriate is diminished. Zinn is clear proof that the ability to think clearly and with rigor is not a requirement of academia. |
| |
Written By:
Unknown
URL:
http://
|
I’d love to read the rest of that interview but it seemed like it was cut off. I find Zinn to be a fascinating figure even if I don’t agree with much of what he says. His central point seems to be that if you view American history from the bottom up - that is, from the perspective of Native Americans, African Americans, the poor, etc. - the great American ideals of freedom, democracy and equality look, well, a little stale or even hypocritical. Zinn transfers that penchant for glossing over the "costs" of American greatness to American foreign policy, revealing the US to be no better than 19th century British imperialism.
I tend to agree with Zinn that slavery and freedom were inextricably mixed in Thomas Jefferson’s colonial Virginia; that westward migration of Anglo culture was only possible with the forcible removal or annihilation of Native Americans (the disease did, indeed, kill most Indians; but the Indians were violently removed from their lands from Massachusetts to Georgia for no other reason than that white people wanted it); and that American foreign policy has been driven at least as much by business interests as it has been by evangelization of democracy. That said, I think the ideals of America are real, and are largely universal. It is because of the efforts of "bottom-rung" people - like black soldiers in the Civil War, labor unions demanding the 8-hour day, women marching for suffrage, gays rising at Stonewall, blacks marching for civil rights, etc. - that the ideals spelled out in the Declaration of Independence have become more of a reality. The struggles of "marginalized" peoples to achieve these goals against widespread resistance does not make America bad or hopelessly hypocritcal. In fact, it makes America great. |
| |
Written By:
Elrod
URL:
http://
|
"...the great American ideals of freedom, democracy and equality look, well, a little stale or even hypocritical"
Compared to what? Ideals are goals, and I think that we have largely met them. It doesn’t happen overnight, and the process is imperfect.
" but the Indians were violently removed from their lands from Massachusetts to Georgia for no other reason than that white people wanted it"
Just as they did to other Indians. The Indians were not morally superior, they were technologically and organizationally inferior. |
| |
Written By:
timactual
URL:
http://
|
|
He holds very high moral standards, with which he seems to measure all glasses to be less than half full. |
| |
Written By:
unaha-closp
URL:
http://warisforwinning.blogspot.com/
|
Praeger should have engaged Zinn on Vietnam.
While the US military was involved in Vietnam, the nations of China, Laos and Cambodia were, more or less, peaceful and indepedent. Once the US lost heart and interest and withdrew, Vietnamese "ethnic cleansing" of ethnically-Chinese citizens drove over a million refugees into China. A war broke out between China and Vietnam as China moved to secure its border. More refugees, ethnic-Chinese and otherwise, fled as "boat people" to Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma and other regions — nearly 6 million in all. A Holocaust of displaced persons forced by violence and bloodshed to flee. The North Vietnamese Army’s guerrilla allies in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge were emboldened by events in Vietnam and seized power in Cambodia, leading to other genocide and mass dispersion. Similarly the Pathet Lao deposed their Laotian monarchy — a government backed by "International Law" as signed in Geneva, by UN resolution and the full faith and credit of the United States — and once again genocide against ethnic minority "Hmong" peoples bled the region.
60,000 American soldiers and support perople; and 200,000 South Vietnamese died in the war against communist totalitarians between 1963 and 1973. And yes, similar numbers died in the North, and again as many, or perhaps three times as many, innocent civilians on either side of the Vietnamese civil war also died during this decade of US "occupation." A million deaths perhaps, all told? You may quibble among yourselves.
In TWO years, between mid-1973 and mid-1976, another million innocent civilians died — not by being in the wrong place at the wrong time but being hunted down and deliberately murdered for the crime of being the wrong race.
The War between Vietnam and Cambodia lasted another ten years — 1975 thru 1985. More soldiers AND civilians died in the intramural fighting between klepto-commies than died in the US war against communism.
And let’s not even talk about the mass starvation arising from collectivized agriculture.
THIS is the history of a boomer’s lifetime, and THIS is the glory of the left. "We got the US out of Vietnam," they brag. "We ended the war," they lie.
They didn’t end a war — they chickened out. They left bigots, theives, rapists and thugs in charge and spat on the decent peacekeepers who’d tried to keep a lid on the problem.
And THIS is the same solution they offer to Iraq. |
| |
Written By:
pouncer
URL:
http://
|
