I've had these thoughts before but with this past Columbus Day, I'm reminded of them. You'll tend to see in various posts people denouncing Columbus for raping and pillaging the Americas before additional Spaniards (and later the British) came along to finish the job. These posts also carry an air about them suggesting that had Columbus not made this voyage, that somehow no one would have found the Americas and everything would have remained hunky-dory with the natives. But that's a different idea for a different post (which will likely never come just to let those who wait in breathless anticipation for future posts of mine). What I'm talking about is, why should we care?
Isn't that what we've done and continue to do as a species? Weren't we always competitive for land, raw materials, food, water, trinkets, and power? Does the slaughter of native peoples, who by the way DID defend their lands...just unsuccessfully, really surprise anyone? Our history is rife with such examples as it also so in the animal kingdom. Limited whatever leads to competition and in that competition there will be winners and losers. Yes, the losers tend to die, but that's what happens.
I'm kinda new to this game and new in the sense that I am a nationalist. It wasn't that long ago that we groups according to communities or clans or simply families remaining suspicious of outsiders. Xenophobia is built in to practically all of life. Billions of years of evolution has tended to show species of all kinds that different is not likely to be good for you so sticking with your own kind was a safety net of sorts. As humans we have our own ways of determining sameness and differentness be it language, culture, religion, style, etc. It's modernized a bit from simple family units to include whole cities, states, and even countries.
I'm not saying we ought to be going out of our way to murder other humans simply for the fun of it. I'm generally a live-and-let-live kind of man: you leave me alone and I will leave you alone. But cross that line and there will be hell to pay.
The wars we fight today perplex me. It seems the last time we really fought was in Korea. Nowadays, politics gets in the way of winning a war. Wars, which by the way, I thought were about winning not these wishy-washy wars fought today where people still get horribly maimed or killed but don't get that sense of closure when it's all over. At least we defeated the Japanese, the Germans, the Triple Allies, the Spanish Empire, the Confederate States of America, Mexico, etc. (Korea remains a stand-off, the last war to be fought mightily but the first one to succumb to politcs) and those countries were defeated by killing as many of the enemy as possible until they surrendered (and in the case of World War II, surrendered unconditionally). That does not happen anymore. Wars are not fought with victory, total or otherwise, in mind and I don't get why. It only prolongs the conflict.
But think of Afghanistan shortly after the September 11th terrorist attack. It was very cut-and-dry. Al Qaeda carried out the attacks; Al Qaeda was under the protection of the Taliban government in Afghanistan; the Taliban were given an ultimatum to surrender Osama bin Laden and his associates to us or there'd be war; the Taliban refused; there was war...sort of.
See, this is where I'm decidedly "old school". We should've gone into Afghanistan with the idea of both destroying the country and its goverment and capturing Al Qaeda agents. Instead, it got political right from the start. First of all, there was no Declaration of War. Yes, it sounds quaint but it legitimizes the action and is the responsibility of Congress to do so in order to prevent the President from going off to war himself. Instead, President Bush got "permission" to attack from Congress. It's not as though we didn't have a target government which could surrender to us. I can understand not declaring war on the Somali pirates because they're not an organized nation-state but the Taliban was. Besides that douchey move, there was a rebel group called the "Northern Alliance" opposed to the Taliban which we gave entirely too much legitimacy to. I don't get why we didn't just invade and kill Afghanis until either we ran out of Afghanis to kill or they surrendered. It's not as though we wouldn't've been right to do so. Instead, we dropped humanitarian reliefs supplies on some parts of the country while dropping gravity bombs on the other. Instead of making a concentrated effort to take over the country by force and getting bin Laden, killing anyone who got in our way, we failed in that mission by December 2001 (and if you'll note, we're still there by the way rather than admitting failure and leaving).
What I don't get is, why were helping the people and killing them at the same time? I don't want to hear about innocent civilians and whatnot. I'm sure a lot of Germans and Japanese were not supporting what their respective governments were doing at the time but from our perspective, they were all Nazis and Imperialists until the war was over. We used to have a saying in this country: Enemies in war, Friends in peace. I'm perfectly fine with making nice and helping rebuild after the treaties are signed but not before. Either flee the country or rise up and overthrow the government insisting on a ruinous war against a power fully capable of taking them all out. Yet, if you talk like today, you're considered a monster. The wars in Europe would've continued much longer than they had if we made such distinctions. It sucks to be you, but we didn't start this war, remember?
Africa is the bleeding-heart capital of the world (in more ways than one) and again, why do we care what other sovereign nations are doing to other sovereign nations? Have any of them attacked us? Have any of them cut off trade with us (assuming we even need their trade)? I'm gonna venture no, so what business is it of ours to even butt in? A lot of countries have had their share of revolutions when the people could no longer accept the governments leading them. It's not our job to foment those revolutions or decide for these oppressed people that we'll revolt for them. If a million people die a year there, who cares? (and I'll remind you that that is below the replacement rate and that Earth's human population exceeds 6½ billion so we're not exactly wanting for souls here...)
Illegal immigration in the United States. Protesters try to make it seem wrong to ferret out these people by depicting them as human beings. Again, I have to ask, what does that have to do with anything? Yes they are, but so what? They're not us. Why do we even have a Mexico, Canada, and United States of America if we're all human beings? Why have borders at all? The simple reason why is because we are not human beings: we're Canadians, Mexicans, and Americans and we can subdivide that further by region, culture, language, and whatnot. Poverty flows into wealth. It is not the responsibility of the USA to help all-comers nor is it our responsibility to accept all-comers yet those who feel we as a country have the right to regulate who may or may not enter are treated like they're bigots. Is it really in the best interests of the USA to accept all-comers? Why is it not the responsibility of Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Brazil, etc. to fix their own problems either at the national level or at the grass-roots level? Being permissive of illegal immigration would seem to prolong the problem as it would seem to me that those who are fleeing to live here are exactly those who might actually stand up to/fix the problems at home if they had no place to run to. It seems to me that it is precisely inhumane to let in those who come from impoverished and war-torn countries rather than the other way around.
I am a nationalist and by that I mean I view the United States of America as a naturally superior nation and do believe it would behoove others to emulate our practices but I don't see it as our place to impose our values onto others. I believe that America is superior not by birthright but because it is about an idea rather than an ethnicity or place in time and is accepting of new ideas...(kinda like passive Borg). And as someone who views the USA as superior I do believe that we have both a right and a need to protect that at all costs. I don't see genocide as necessarily evil but more as a means to serve evolution: weaker groups die, stronger groups survive whether that strength is literal or cultural. A billion non-Americans could die tomorrow and it would not concern me in the slightest. Why? Because they're not us. That's what we are as a species. Pretending to be otherwise is simply self-delusion.
Okay, I'm done with this incoherent ramble now...
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