Saturday, September 12, 2009
Superb Informative Writing
This is most assuredly long reading but it offers some incredible insight into our current circumstance and the historical background that has brought us to where we are.
The People's Cube is primarily satire on par with the popular "Onion" newspaper and on-line site but occasionally the guy who runs it addresses things from a more serious angle. I'll include a few sections of the essay here to let you in on what I'm writing in this regard:
"...It would be absurd to presume that people of the world go to bed every night loving dictators and hating the United States. Obviously, the first conscious thing on the mind of a European, an African, or an Asian as they wake up in the morning is not how to survive another day of "America's economic and cultural imperialism." And since anti-Americanism is incompatible with common sense that guides our daily lives, people must be reminded of it every day to keep it alive. That is the burden that radical intellectuals have taken upon themselves, dispensing daily quotas of leftist clichés to the "unwashed masses" down below..."
Any society, even the freest democracy, has likely autocrats willing to take advantage of others, latent victims willing to give up freedom in exchange for entitlements, and budding free people willing to resist tyranny and defend their liberties. The ratio of these groups in each country may be different, but no nation is ever unanimous - despite all assurances to the contrary by dictators who claim to speak for all people..."
"...Statist regimes need unanimity to justify their existence. If a government's survival depends on unanimity, it will inevitably end up repressing free speech. That alone makes statism an unacceptable form of government. Any government's claim to speak for all people automatically makes it a suspect, just as unanimous voting is a symptom of tyranny..."
"...'I hope the Russians love their children too,' crooned Sting, as if there was any connection between what the Russians loved and what the Soviet government did. Further showing a lack of any sense, Sting claimed in the same song that he didn't believe Reagan, that 'there is no monopoly in common sense,' that 'we share the same biology regardless of ideology,' and "there's no such thing as a winnable war." In other words, all things being relative and all people being mindless biological units anyway, the free world might as well give in to the tyrants ruling over a gigantic gulag, whose voiceless inmates, Sting hoped, loved their children..."
[Quoting a Latin American expert, J. Michael Waller] "...interestingly, the CIA covertly funded the center-left, including socialists, to keep them from falling into the Soviet camp. The CIA almost never covertly supported right-wing forces; those forces were perfectly capable of operating on their own, and many were clumsy and even unnecessarily brutal in crushing the extreme left.
When the Marxists took power in Nicaragua in 1979, with the help of Jimmy Carter, it was the poor rural peasants who led the counter-revolutionary revolt. Campesinos from the countryside took up arms to fight the socialist revolution, because the Sandinistas began taking away their land, forcing them to work on collective farms, and conscripted them into a gigantic revolutionary army with Soviet weapons and Soviet-bloc trainers. The peasant resistance was supported by elements of the old Somoza regime who were the only ones at the time with military leadership experience, but the rank-and-file combatants were overwhelmingly poor peasants. Many of the fighters were former Sandinistas who had grown disillusioned with the socialist ideal...[end quote]..."
"...Today the CIA operates more tightly than ever under strict laws and bureaucratic guidelines, and the oversight committees in Congress are informed of every significant covert operation. Every such operation requires a presidential "finding." The CIA cannot operate on its own. So if the CIA was involved in ousting former Honduran President Zelaya, as Hugo Chavez is claiming, then it was with the personal authorization of President Barack Obama and with the knowledge of the Democrat leadership in both houses of Congress..."
