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swatter555 wrote:


I think we can meet halfway if you can accept the evidence to the contrary. I am not denying that there is truth in what you say, that would be overlooking evidence for your argument. At the same time, men have been killing each other long before the inventention of centralized govt or political idealogy. You would be suprised at the size of ancient battles, especially relative to population. Whether it is clubs or cruise missiles, men love to kill each other, so it would seem.

I absolutely agree with you on this until you get to your last sentence Squatter.

To prove that human beings are inherently violent to one another, you would have to have evidence that they behaved in this way under all circumstances and in all possible forms of social organisation. In fact, despite your comments about the ancient world, we do not have that evidence, so on that principle, at the very least, the jury is still out. However, we do have some evidence to work with.

The fundamental issue of private ownership of communal resources in the economies of the ancient world and the Middle Ages was not so different to ours today. The ancient world was largely based on slavery (the physical ownership of the slave by the slave owner) and the Middle Ages was based on land holding (a graduated pyramid of rights to land use by a variety of sectional groups). These societies had huge, divisive power structures just as our capitalistic society (based on the sectional owernship of capital) does today. As a consequence they fought in similarly violent ways over use and ownership of resources. But that is because similar sorts of institutional pressures prevailed upon them, not becaused they necessarily 'loved to kill each other'. I see no evidence for that.

Go back to earlier stages of human economic organisation to a time when private ownership of wealth production was absent or less organised and you find an interesting situation. You find much less evidence of organised violence within society and a variety of different situations on the boundaries between societies. Some of the tribal common-ownership societies had violent confrontations with their neighbours, some did not. Some where highly peaceable. Generally, when there were no internal property divisions, and their neighbours were equally peaceable there were no violent confrontations.

That is not universally the case but is a strong tendency. We have insufficient evidence from tribal survivals to investigate all the factors that might have been involved in what determined differences in behaviour, but the fact that some societies lived peaceably with their neighbours in these circumstances and were very peaceable in their own culture suggests that large scale violence is not innate to human beings.

That still leaves me with the view that it is institutional and economic forms that cause human beings to act violently in a collective manner - and within society as well. So, I think that promoting the view that humans are inerhently violent to one another merely adds to the likeliehood of such behaviour occurring.

I have a thought a lot about this conversation. Think of all the potentially advanced and intelligent civilizations in the world which were non-violent and were likely irradiated. We may have no history of them, because the "spoils" go to the victor. There is no obligation in ancient history for a victories people to record that information.

I don't think we (all us monkeys) are inherently violent, but there was a time when not having a strong defense meant your society was up for erasure. And if you were like Rome, you rode high on attacking the weaker. Now granted, Rome fell, but that was a device of them being too large for a time and lacking proper communications systems, and they felt they were too powerful to be defeated. This was wrong, and the loyalties had changed. Rome began allowing soldiers to have families and live far from bases. They were providing benefits not appropriate for a still unsettled area and time.

So anyway, are we inherently violent? I ask you to think of yourself first. Are you inherently violent? Would you move to strike someone before trying to work it out? How many people do you know personally that are violent in that way? Besides violence being frowned upon in general, I don’t think without laws everyone would just kill each other. I think no matter what, there are always violent people in society, and some of them are very clever concealing that fact, and some became leaders in our past.

Go back to my previous long post and you will see how I make the point about individuals being cool, but groups are sometimes not cool. That is what I think we are talking about here. The leaders of a given time and place were violent, as they saw required for their goals. They rounded up people, convinced them it was the only way to reach the goal, and then the individuals became violent. It was not inherent. That is the same as it ever was - some men are violent, and some men can be moved to violence to reach goals, and some men are willing to be pawns for that system. The end justified the means.

grymlocke wrote:need I point out that the US is the ONLY country to ever use nukes against a population (japan) and only as a last resort to force an end to WWII, the fire bombings of tokyo actually killed more people...but thats besides the point...

question is, iran with a nuke, run by fanatics...do you want bagdad to go away?

or
Tel Aviv?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and ... estruction

Isreal will retaliate...and NOTHING WE CAN DO WILL STOP THEM.....

tyhink about that....

Please consider...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... 42,00.html
Jonathan Steele
Friday June 2, 2006
The Guardian


It is 50 years since the greatest misquotation of the cold war. At a Kremlin reception for western ambassadors in 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced: "We will bury you." Those four words were seized on by American hawks as proof of aggressive Soviet intent.

Doves who pointed out that the full quotation gave a less threatening message were drowned out. Khrushchev had actually said: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." It was a harmless boast about socialism's eventual victory in the ideological competition with capitalism. He was not talking about war.

Now we face a similar propaganda distortion of remarks by Iran's president. Ask anyone in Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can cite any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chances are high they will say he wants Israel "wiped off the map".

Again it is four short words, though the distortion is worse than in the Khrushchev case. The remarks are not out of context. They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated. The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished.

He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The "page of time" phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.

But the propaganda damage was done, and western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews. At the recent annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobby group, huge screens switched between pictures of Ahmadinejad making the false "wiping off the map" statement and a ranting Hitler.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jon ... t_155.html

I would also add, consider the US history against American Indians, Canada, Southern States, Philippines, Vietnam, South America, ...
The oil embargo forcing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, gunboat diplomacy to Japan in the 1800's, the military taking of Hawaii ....

Wow, looks like I have new person to argue politics with Kali, lol. Nothing personal in these arguements, just for the fun of intellectual converstation.

I'm not really going to touch on the quoted article, because it is beside the point. Nobody, and I mean nobody, in history has every gone to war over a four word quote. No political leader, no matter how audacious, has every gone to war over a simple quote. If war were to come to Iran, it would not be based solely on a four word quote (even a misconstrued one). It would be because of many issues, possibly including the quote.

I am also not going to argue about the the US and the native americans, particulary the cherokees, because we all know that was an obvious fault of the US and there is no way to argue otherwise. I am also not going to argue the US and Canada, Phillipines, or South America, because those are subjects I know little about, therefore I am not qualified to be discussing them.

But I will say it's ridiculous to compare the US involvement in Vietnam to the current situation in Iran. The US was occupying Vietnam in order to provide support to the the South Vietnamese, in anticipation of the communist invasion of that area. Therefore it cannot be compared to the current situation in Iran, as that is a completely different set of circumstances.

As far as the comparison to Japan, that is easily disputed, because the original supporting arguement is flawed. Japan did not attack Pearl Harbor because of something as inconsequential as an oil embargo, when they had sources of oil, mainly from their other allies in the axis powers. And Japan certainly did not attack Pearl Harbor based on trespasses that had occured over a century earlier. That would be the equivelent of the US attacking english during that same time period, based on the war of 1812.

And before you accuse me of being insensitive the the Iranians, or muslims, or middle easterns in general, let me say that I have every reason to be sensitive them, as my fiance is Iranian, and I give them the benefit of the doubt, simply because of that. And before you go can call me and radical conservative, I'll let you know that I'm not conservative at all, I'm a libertarian.

Based on what I've read, I think an 8 year time frame untill the mullahs have a bomb is far too rosy a scenario. I think the outside is far closer to the 2 years then the 8.

The Israelis don't have near the capability to do an attack on Iran's nuclear sites. It's just a tad too far away and their delivery systems don't have the capacity.

The Russians could be deterred beacause they were basically rational: they wanted to be around to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

How do you deter a bunch of homiciadal maniacs who think that if they die killing a bunch of infidels they will go to a reward of 72 virgins in heaven?

The situation in the world today is a textbook example of why the US can't disarm: How long does anyone think the US would be able to ensure its freedom, let alone the life style we enjoy, with the likes of North Korea, Iran, the USSR(sorry freudian slip, Russia), and the terrorists looking for an opportunity to do us in.

The US has to decide to get serious about fighting the War on Terror the way WW ll was fought. Our adversaries do not respect restraint, they will resplect our power, if we us it.

This does not mean bombing everything in sight. Application of appropriate power would be different depending on the objective.

I've gone on too long already.

Sorry if I've bored anyone.

camthepyro wrote: I'm a libertarian.

Then you understand the banking scam pushed since Hamilton and perfected nationally under the federal reserve and internationally with the BIS. I would assume are familiar with US imperialism and the arguments against at
http://lewrockwell.com/
http://mises.org/

Libertarians understand there is no longer any substantive difference between democrats and republicans. Both groups are dominated by warmongering corporate statist neocons.

That said, I do not believe in libertarian idealisms complete and total privatization of natural resources.

You didn't say anything above that I don't agree with.

Why should'nt they have a nuclear bomb? We in the US act like we can tell other countries that they can't have nuclear weapons..... I hope they do not get the bomb, and if they do I hope they never use it. I doubt there is much we can do if a country is really determined to have it.

The above stated point of view is the very base idea behind that whole arguement.

Why is it our place (us as in the US) to govern the rest of the world. The answer is because no one else will do it, at least not to any consequential degree. As for the question of why they should not be allowed to have any, but we can: that's simply based on opinion. And that is that I believe that the US as the judgement and restraint (based on our government, and the three brances, checks and balances, etc.) to not use nuclear weapons unless absolutely neccesary. I do not have enought faith in the judgement of Iran's leaders to feel safe knowing they have weapons capable of, at least theoretically, destroying the world. The reason I do not have faith in Iran's governmental judgement is that much of it is made up of religious extremists.

camthepyro wrote:The above stated point of view is the very base idea behind that whole arguement.

Why is it our place (us as in the US) to govern the rest of the world. The answer is because no one else will do it, at least not to any consequential degree.

If you hurry, you can probably get a job with the Bush Administration. With all of the openings, and more on the way as the ship is deserted, there is bound to be a high level position for anyone who believes it is America's burden to rule the world, starting first with Iraq, then Iran and who knows where else. As we know from our experience in Iraq, the people will welcome us, the World's Police Force, with candy and flowers.