More unmitigated crap from the hate America first crowd.
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| Fred has a donor link called "Feed Fred" - Don't! |
My good buddy, the Ron Paul Libertarian keeps sending me links to articles he thinks will convince me to support legalizing marijuana, bringing all the troops home and admitting that I should have supported Ron Paul after all. This time it was an article by Fred Reed on the ever-doofy Lew Rockwell website. I should have known better.
Fred Reed comes off arrogant and elitist, looking down his sunburned nose at the rest of us from his hideout in Mexico. I've read his stuff before and it's nothing but isolationist drive. I have zero respect for him. I won't include a link to his stuff. You can find it easily enough, but I'd hate to be responsible for wasting your time that way. Fred moved out of the United States and now lives in that bastion of freedom - Mexico, a fact that reveals a lot about how much common sense his writing is likely to contain. His articles have this sneering tone of moral superiority common to Ron Paul libertarians. The article this time was about how the United States is responsible for all its troubles with the "rest of the world". Fred's position is like Ron Paul's (and Barak Obama's for that matter) is that it is bad that the world hates us so much. We should, he opines, withdraw our troops from everywhere and squat behind our borders being nice to everyone since it's arrogant of us to suppose that we're the best place in the world to live.
Meanwhile Fred sits on his veranda in Mexico, living off money he makes here in the States writing anti-American drivel and calling those who pay for his cheap vino names.
I could care less what the rest of the world thinks about us here in the United States. If we're so bad, one wonders why the actual citizens of the "rest of the world" want to get here so badly they are willing to smuggle themselves across the border to do it.
There's a reason why America has done so well. It's because we're NOT like the rest of the world. We've looted the best and the brightest from all those so-called civilized countries in the "rest of the world" because they were pretty much crappy countries. They were dictatorships, monarchies and repressive societies. Britain had a worldwide empire and still hangs on to a large chunk of their old empire, but if you weren't part of the gentry, you had little opportunity to rise in the world. The Brits exploited everybody they conquered and felt they were perfectly justified, as did France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and God help us, even Belgium, which took a crack at empire-building. Even Argentina tried to pick a fight over land with Britain because they looked at them with that Latin macho eye and though that with that Thatcher woman in charge, Britain looked soft.
The Muslems have repeatedly tried to conquer Europe. Turkey sided with Germany in World War I and the Muslims were great admirers of Hitler back in the day. India tried her hand at conquest as did China, The Soviet (We will bury you!) Union and even several African nations tried their hands at it. Syria, Jordan and Egypt tried to overrun Israel several times in the past 60 years and got their fuzzy butts kicked for it. They blame us for providing Israel with weapons. Sure they are mad at us. Fred's right about that.
Despite the mess the rest of the world keeps trying to make of things, the United States has kept its hand remarkably out of the nation-conquering business. We've protected our business interests as in "to the shores of Tripoli" where we cleaned out some pirates with the old "big stick" - in the early 1800s and again under Teddy Roosevelt when they decided to start up their nonsense again.
Yeah, they hate us. We took their best people and created the richest, most powerful nation on the planet. We don't understand what the REAL world is like, Fred says. True. We've never had extermination camps, gulags and musical governments. Why would we even WANT to understand that. We make all those movies and the "world" thinks they know us and so they hate us. And Fred thinks we ought to study the rest of the world so we understand them.
Why should we work so hard to understand the rest of the world when they exert so little effort to understand us? We're wealthy and in "the rest of the world" you get wealthy because you cheated or stole or exploited someone. So they assume we must have gotten wealthy the same way and so they can safely hate us. Besides it helps distract the attention of the masses from the fact that they are being exploited by their own governments and elite classes.
We have big guns and big ships and nobody gets to mess with us. If most of them had big guns and big ships, they'd be off on wars of conquest, but they can't because we keep getting in the way with our bigger guns and planes and ships. Now we've even taken to stopping nations from running over each other and supporting folk who are attacked. I think that's a GREAT thing. If we aren't the world's cops, who will be. Russia? China? Hell, I wouldn't trust Britain or France with the job (the foreign legion ain't what it used to be).
When somebody gets big and bad and starts threatening or actually attacks their neighbor, who do they call? When Cuba decided to take over Granada, who did the Carribean nations call to liberate Granada? It sure as hell wasn't Brazil or Venezuela or France. We get called on to play cop because we have a nice, rich stable country (and it's rich because it IS stable) and we can afford to play cop.
But nobody likes cops unless they are in trouble. And cops don't like to go back to the station house and let the bad guys run amuck until things get so bad we have to go clean it up. We've taken to pre-emptive patrolling and intervening earlier and harder than we used to. People in the rest of the world don't like that because in their own countries, powerful nations always want to take over less powerful nations. They are suspicious of our motives so they hate us.
But every time someone else actually does attack them, who does the "rest of the world" call? When Iraq and Afghanistan began threatening their neighbors, nobody liked that. Saudi Arabia about crapped its pants when Saddam overran Kuwait. And who did they call.
Ruyard Kipling wrote a poem about soldiers. The chorus went something like this....
O, it's Tommy this and Tommy that
And chuck him out the brute.
But it's "Saviour of his country"
When the guns begin to shoot.
They all hate us the way people hate cops, occupying soldiers and big brothers. They hate people who are stronger than they are. They see us through their own filters, their own paradigm. They assume that we are like them, despite evidence to the contrary.
Well, I don't give a damned what the rest of the world thinks. I don't care if they like us. We can take our toys and go home like the Ron Paul people believe we ought to, but that will not relieve the hatred. Nobody's going to love us for that. When it all goes to hell, they are probably going to hate us even more for abandoning them.
If we retire from being the world's cop, the world will just find a new cop, and pay that cop whatever it's asking price is. And we probably one we won't like the new cop because whoever it is probably hates us if you believe the Paulestinians.
What the folks that run the "rest of the world" really want is to have what Pope Benedict called "a world government with teeth" that can chain up the big dog (us) and make him obey. The Old World wants to call the shots once again. They have not forgotten that they once had empires and they are jealous and suspicious of any nation with as much power as we have who doesn't go out conquering.
Europe hasn't had a nice all out war since 1945. These are people that once had a war that lasted 100 years. Thirty years was a piddling little spat. The reason the Europeans haven't had a major squabble since is because American soldiers are sitting in the middle of Germany with nukes and the American guard dog kept the Soviet Union at bay for the better part of 4 decades. The Europeans really don't want us to go because then they'd have to pay for their own defense and they aren't sure Russia is really tamed and the Muslims are making jihad noises these days. The Japanese and Koreans enjoy a busy world trade and even China has been pretty peaceful and content to let the US patrol the waves and protect trade.
When the Somali pirates started raiding, everyone expected the US to go in and fix the problem but with our hands tied behind our backs. Even the Russians have been enjoying not having to have all that massive military - spending their money on MacDonald's franchises instead of leaky submarines.
You want to see it get violent in short order out there in the "rest of the world", go ahead and turn the cop duties over to people for whom war is a blood sport. Without America the teacher in place, the nukes would eventually fly and fallout doesn't discriminate - it goes wherever the wind blows and the currents flow.
America was settled by intelligent, hard-working peace-loving people looking for a chance to live in peace and prosperity. We did it too - made a prosperous home for ourselves and went a long way toward creating a classless society. Now we've got Americans longing for European style everything - military, government, economic system. Well let 'em go live out there in the real world. And when all hell breaks loose and you call for help, never fear.....America is here, ready, willing and able to cover your lily white arrogant, elitist, racist, egalitarian, socialist butts.
And yes, the United States picked a war with Mexico. Fred Reed is right about that. A century and a half ago we fought a war that we shouldn't have. It was unjust. When it was over, we took some of their land which had been ruled by the Dons and upon which the peons were worked brutally by the rich nobles.
And we PAID FOR the land they ceded us and turned them into states and made free American citizens of the peons. I know we still hadn't quite beating up on the Indians, but then, they weren't always very reasonable either. The English may have invented scalping, but the Indians made it an art form. And we feel terribly guilty about beating up on native Americans - so much so that hardly a spending bill gets passed these days without substantial earmarks for the tribes in it.
Also, when we bought New Mexico, Arizona and California, the Mexican government at the time really needed the money. Also we drove the final nail in Santa Anna's career and by all accounts, he wasn't through beating up on Texas yet despite having signed a treaty to save his worthless life..
And Texas had every right to rebel. The idea that Texas is stolen property is balderdash. The colonists began by demanding only that Mexico abide by its own 1824 constitution that the colonies had been established under instead of under the repressive new government that Santa Anna established to tax the crap out of Texas for his planned wars of Central American conquest.
Running that evil little man out of office was NOT a bad thing in the same way that running Saddam Hussein out of office wasn't a bad thing. Probably the only way to settle the issue was to win a war with him decisively. Santa Anna had no intentions of ever giving up his dreams of conquest until he was thoroughly beaten. And beaten he was and by an army less than a third the size of his own. Scared the hell out of him and he was peaceful ever after.
I'm glad Fred Reed likes Mexico, though. So long as he doesn't piss off any drug cartels by telling them he wants to kill their business by legalizing drugs in the US, he should be okay. Mexico is the perfect place for someone like Fred. Servants are cheap, prostitutes almost free and eventually your immune system gets strong enough to handle the dysentery.
And they've done it to me again. Pissed me off and got me to waste an hour writing all this stuff in answer to someone who thinks I'm an idiot and is so firmly wedded to his ideology as to be hen-pecked by it.
God save us from the intellectuals......
Tom
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