2008-01-26

 

Martin Luther King

Time to break down yet another American fantasy (along with their glorious revolution that never was, etc etc). The Americans actually have a public holiday for Martin Luther King. Not Wolfowitz. Not Bush. Who literally freed millions of people. Instead, they chose King. Let's have a quick look at some of these icons.

First of all, the struggle for racial equality is something I totally support. If I had been around at that time, I would have been equally outraged at any laws or social bigotry against blacks (or any other race). However, if I were a black myself, and had a personal benefit in getting those changes, then it's not really noble. It's just getting something for yourself. When I rail against the anti-white racism prevalent in the world, or just general human rights that I have been denied (e.g. there was/is some restrictions on porn in Australia), there's nothing particular noble about it. I'm a beneficiary. When the so called "Aboriginal activists" in Australia try yet another scam, there's nothing noble about it, despite even people like Howard "honouring" them in parliament.

What's noble is when you stand up for the rights of others when you don't personally stand to benefit from it. When America gives aid to Indonesia, this is an example of doing something noble. When America liberates Afghanistan and Iraq and gives them aid instead of nuking them off the planet and taking the latter's oil, that is noble. When the whites of America stood up for black rights in America, that is noble. When the white Christians of the UK stopped the slave trade (of non-white non-Christians), that was noble. When Wolfowitz wanted to liberate Arabs, that was noble. These are the people who should be honoured. However, there's one big problem. Almost all of these noble people are white. And we can't go around honouring white people. So let's try to find a decent black to honour.

Certainly not a racist Marxist terrorist like Mandela. Nor Oprah who decided out of all the needy people in the world, she'd fund her own race rather than say Afghans. Let's try Condaleeza Rice. Here we have an undisputably intelligent woman who was involved in the liberations of millions of people! Unfortunately not. She supports racial discrimination (quaintly called "affirmative action"). Sorry, you'll never catch me honouring a racist. The most I'll ever do is temporarily ally with such a person.

There is one big problem in that the decent people don't necessarily get media air time. E.g. we saw a lot of decent people in the Iraqi blogs, but you won't find any of them on TV. It's not really possible to say, honour "thinker" now, is it? Even though she was an integral part of the struggle to protect the innocent people of Iraq by providing some of the required theory/solution. She's probably not black anyway, so let's try again. There is only one black person who got media coverage who comes close. And that's Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She had the courage to face the extremely loud left-wing propaganda machine who accused her of being a race traitor and slave/pawn/etc (as Michelle Malkin also complains of) and actually stand up for white males. Like I say, I'm sure there's others, we just don't get to hear about them (although they were seemingly absent from the Iraqi blogs which was the place for decent people to congregate). However, she's still not perfect. I heard her rail against colonialism to an American audience as if these poor white Americans were somehow responsible for it. And then there's the fact that colonialism, at least British colonialism, was the best thing that ever happened to Africa. However, no-one's perfect. Actually the fact that no-one's perfect is a reason why it is not individuals but institutions that are best honoured. Such as the American government which liberated millions upon millions of people, and protected millions of others (regardless of the failings of individual soldiers).

Anyway, I had a brief look at King on Vietnam and found this. I only read part of it, people like this have nothing to teach me (people like "thinker" do, but not blow-hards like this), and I didn't notice him standing up for the rights of the brown Vietnamese to not have to live under communist slavery, and to insist that the Vietnamese people have as much right to freedom as blacks in America. Instead I saw him whinging that his standard of living was more important than millions of yellow scum in Asia.

There's no-one to hero-worship here. Move along folks. Have a day for that US president who said "we will pay any price, bear any burden, for human freedom". That was a great guy (at least when he was saying and doing that). Share the day with Ms Ali perhaps. And thrown in Churchill too. And Wolfowitz. And "thinker". That would be nice. Oh, and throw in the Iraqi bloggers too. Replace Racist Scumbag Day with World Freedom Day.

Oh yeah, and while I haven't investigated, did I hear right that Mr King copyrighted his speeches so that he could actually run a money-making business? Man, this is your hero?! And did you see in any of his speeches a caution that anti-black racism shouldn't be replaced with anti-white racism, which includes quotas, affirmative action etc? This is the same problem with the bible. What it REALLY needed was an explicit instruction "do not treat this as a dogma, and treating non-Christians as inferior will see the Christian, not the non-Christian, go to Hell".

By the way, this is all documented as part of message 666 already. The particular bit required is this:

I RESPECT INDIVIDUALS who VOLUNTARILY donate to COMPLETE STRANGERS (ie different race, different sex, different religion, different nationality) using their OWN HARD-EARNED MONEY.

Ok, it's not exactly those words. But fighting for the rights of Iraqis is a different race/religion/nationality. It's THAT that is noble. One way is to provide money, but another option is to support military action. Things like that. Do things for complete strangers rather than provide evidence that you are a racist (e.g. Arab supremacist) or a religious bigot (e.g. Muslim supremacist). A good example would be an Afghan Muslim complaining about the "Islamic" bit in their country's name, or an Arab complaining about the reference to "Arab" in their constitution. These people exist, but they are rebels. As "The Big Pharaoh" said, "every society has its rebels". In the Arab-majority countries, it's those rebels who are the good people. In a place like America, it's the institutions and the people who support those institutions (especially soldiers).

|



2008-01-19

 

Protect Yourself

Sorry for the very long delay between posts. I did engage in the comments section a bit though. I'll tell you what I've been up to in another post.

The day of reckoning with American religious bigots who do things like persecute atheists will come another day. And of American right-wing scum who go on protests against abortion instead of going on 5 million protests about real live Iranian girls being raped by their own government before even CONSIDERING "rights" for single-celled organisms. And for so-called "Christians" who objected to Clinton liberating Kosovo because it wasn't in the "national interest" (I'd like to see the bit in the bible that says to not help those beyond the artificial borders of your nation-state - I know the bit that says "love your enemy" though - and the Kosovars weren't even enemies).

However, technically the above people aren't really violating anyone else's human rights, at least not directly, or at least, they have been prevented from violating a woman's right to choose so far.

Let's concentrate on protecting innocent Americans. While I'm not sure the above Americans are innocent, they're not the ones I really want to protect. The Americans I want to protect are the same as the Iraqis I want to protect. People who aren't trying to violate other's rights. People who just want to work hard to make a living. People who support the protection of other's human rights. E.g. people like Batman trying to spread democracy even to arseholes like the Pakistanis. Or people like Ali Fidhal who was overjoyed about having been freed from state-slavery. Prior to actually having Ali's name, I would just have an idealized picture of a freedom-loving person in each country in the world, and work towards protecting him. Actually, I think it's better to work with the abstract person. Better yet, an abstract woman. Women fit in better with our culture as I've heard too many American men say that Iraqi etc men need to overthrow their government themselves (albeit technically impossible) instead of being cowards. However if I say "let's accept that the Iraqi men are cowards, what about the women?" they are more likely to relent. It's for reasons like that that I prefer to concentrate on the rape of Iraqi women rather than the far more numerous, and worse, mass graves.

So anyway, for now, just concentrate on the enemy at hand. Yes, in your friggin "national interest". It should be obvious to all except America's enemies (hell, it's even obvious to them, they just pretend it isn't), that a dictatorship with a nuclear program and an of official policy of "Death to USA" is perhaps an enemy and that it is in America's national interest to eliminate its enemies. There are many other strategic benefits to get Iran next. But let's concentrate on an openly hostile government.

I can remember watching a documentary on Turkey during WWII. They were very careful to make it clear they were neutral to avoid giving Hitler an excuse to attack. Didn't help the other neutrals, but Turkey got away with it. We've now gone from that to the Iranian military actively trying to provoke America. It's amazing that people would harass someone far stronger than them an expect to get away with it. This would seem so absurd to our forefathers.

However, it has given a great excuse. We can cite military provocation, we can cite the hostile act of capturing British soldiers, we can cite violating the Geneva Convention by parading those soldiers on TV. We can cite the "Death to USA" slogan. These things combined should be enough to keep other dictators like the Saudis on-side. They can say "well we're not doing those things, so we should be safe".

Let me now address things from the comments, from both the left and right, and actually, from my own history. There was a time, for probably 2 decades, that I supported democracy as the ultimate goal. I didn't care if the people wanted communism or anything else. If the majority wanted it, it was legitimate, and we should leave it as that. It was only after literally decades of thought, and observations of places like "Palestine" and Saudi Arabia and reflection on places like Nazi Germany, that I realised there was something more that I was holding dear. It was whatever we had in Australia, but I had no label for it. It took the Iraq war and the Iraqi blogs before I could bounce things off all sides and get a reaction to enable me to isolate what we had in Australia, and what the Iraqis had the moment Saddam's statue fell (long before they got to vote). What was it? Rational, humanist, non-subjugating government.

So whether the Germans democratically choose to gas Jews, or whether the Pakistanis democratically choose to fund Al Qaeda - too damn bad. These people are enemies of freedom and regardless of whether they are a majority in some geographical region (they wouldn't actually be a majority if you took non-Americans as a whole), they need to be dealt with (you can actually arbitarily merge any of these ratbag countries with India if you want to cite "majority" - "majority" is completely meaningless), they need to be dealt with.

Dealt with how? Kill them if necessary. Certainly don't allow them to influence government policy (via voting or allowing one of the scumbags to be a dictator).

This is not a war of the majority vs the minority. This is a war between good and bad. So yes, if they democratically choose to be bad, and support evil, it doesn't mean anything. We will jail them. Either physically in jail, or via dictatorship in an open-air prison, or by killing them as they resist that, or any other means.

Don't get swayed by democracy. I used to do it myself, so I know exactly where you're coming from. But very few would allow the Germans to democratically gas Jews. So you need to look deeper for your TRUE philosophy. Your true philosophy is probably message 666, documented on Sept 11, 2004. Or pretty damn close. It's been sliced and diced for 3 years now, and people still don't understand the significance of it. Turns out it's more complicated that the Theory of Relativity which at least had 3 people who understood it (although some disputed the number at the time).

I had hoped that my wonderful atheist brothers would have followed hard science and seen the significance of it, but it turns out that most atheists are as dogmatic as religious nutcases. I had always believed what both they and I had always said which was, "when you present me with evidence of the supernatural, I'll change my opinion". When it came to the crunch, they did no such thing.

And Batman, as for allowing the Pakistanis to elect an Osama supporter, and then invading, that's just silly. You're replacing a minimal ally with an enemy and forcing us to go to war before we're ready. At the moment we have arranged for Pakistani forces to spend some minor effort killing Osama supporters. You're proposing having us suddenly faced with a crisis and having to fight both of those parties, when we had lots of work to do elsewhere before rounding on minimal allies.

Anyway, in summary, don't worry about human rights abuses in other countries. Just concentrate on eliminating enemy governments (which as a by-product eliminates human rights abuses in those countries), and we'll shame Americans into caring about human rights in neutrals and allies and goad them into action at that appropriate time.

And to you anti-war people - if you don't want this problem solved by war, then solve it yourself via other means very very quickly. You've had 29 years to solve Iran, with zero success, so I'm not expecting you to pull a rabbit out of the hat any time soon. We both know you're just bluffing to try to prevent America from protecting itself, because you want to bring harm to it. I know your game. America, protect yourself!!! By the way, there is a rabbit to be pulled. Spread message 666 to these people and change their culture and you'll solve the problem. Given the complexity of the message, that seems unlikely. War is required. So let's have war. And again, I stress, I want to see what happens if a minor amount of force is used on Iran, as we really need that experimental data for future military planning. Can we jump-start the equivalent of a military coup or not? Can every country be done ala Afghanistan from the air or not?

|



This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?