Peter wrote on 22^nd Jun, 2014 at 6:49am:


The warmongering nature of the United States is the reason it has so much power. A private weapons industry sprung up during WWII to meet the demands of the US military. After the war, lobbyists on behalf of the weapons industry argued to congress to maintain the high military budget, citing the Soviet Union as a genuine threat to the free world. The US has been involved in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, central America and south America. Lao people to this day are killed every year by unexploded bomb ordinance from the war. Areas of Vietnam remain contaminated by Agent Orange.

As for the Iraq War, the country was stable under the Sunni tyrant Saddam. Now the country is worse off than before the US came. Afghanistan is also in a state of turmoil and disrepair and the current regime has even been overheard negotiating a contingency plan with the Taliban.

In the final analysis, the United States is a country founded on its practice of slavery and genocide. The land was taken from the natives and worked by slaves from Africa.

Okay ... easiest part first ...:

TexasCowboy wrote on 22^nd Jun, 2014 at 1:39pm:


Yes.  I agree.  For the most part, you are just filling in a few of the details of what I already said.

Note: You are conversing with a person who had his conscientious objector status approved while the U.S. military was still in Vietnam. 

I have very mixed feelings about that conflict in particular.  Much of what the U.S. did there was wrong.  But only some of the motivation for doing it was perhaps wrong.  And to claim that the U.S. acted as a sole aggressor would be just plain silly, as well as blatantly disingenuous to the people of the local region.  A number of my current friends are Vietnamese.  Others are Lao.  All are grateful for what the U.S. attempted to do in Southeast Asia and many of their families participated.  To point to the conflict in Vietnam and say, "Look! It's obvious that the U.S. is just plain evil to the core!" as many people do is to be inexcusably ignorant of the complexity of the situation. 


And now for parts that are oversimplified to the point of being horribly misleading:

TexasCowboy wrote on 22^nd Jun, 2014 at 1:39pm:
 

Oh, really?  That's "the" reason?  There aren't other reasons?  How about the previous century's worth of economic and industrial development?  How about a century worth of influx of vast numbers of ambitious people who wanted to leave the oppression of their homelands and do something different with their lives?  (Yes, it may surprise some people to learn that America did not invent oppression.)

If a "warmongering nature" is "the" reason for power, what about the "power" of other warmongering nations like, say, Iraq, where, as I pointed out, people are STILL being killed every single day, sometimes in massive numbers? ... and not just by unexploded ordinance. They're being hunted down and killed by their neighbors.

Yes.  As I already said, the U.S. royally messed up the situation in the Middle East.  But "warmongering" alone as "the" source for "power"??  No.  That just plain doesn't make any sense.


TexasCowboy wrote on 22^nd Jun, 2014 at 1:39pm:


Yes.  And the Soviet Union was a "genuine threat to the free world."  Ask my Polish friends if you don't think so. 

The "domino theory" was not just a fabricated and imaginary excuse for U.S. militarism.  It was an accurate description of active and ongoing Soviet aggression for quite a few decades.

The U.S. presence in Europe is not entirely unwanted and is certainly not just "U.S. imperialism," although one could say it is that to some extent also.  But things are not that simplistic.  In fact, some people in Poland think that the U.S. presence should expand and that the U.S. should have bases in Poland.  Especially now.


TexasCowboy wrote on 22^nd Jun, 2014 at 1:39pm:
 

"Founded" on "slavery"?  Really?  I guess that's why the U.S. economy completely collapsed 150 years ago when the U.S. decided to end slavery and has never recovered since. 

Are you actually serious about this statement?  Do you not know anything about the rest of U.S. history? Motivations for people coming here? The rest of the economic and social development of the country?  The wide variety of people who did so many different kinds of things to build the country?   

And as for the slavery that did exist:  At least the British and Spanish purchased their slaves (for the most part) from black Africans who rounded them up and owned them.  Many of the other countries in which slavery has been prevalent in one form or another (which includes, by the way, perhaps the majority of the countries on Earth) have had to go and conquer them and haul them off their land all by themselves. 

And note: Although it took the "civil war" era to outlaw slavery itself, the slave trade with Africa was abolished by the U.S. a number of decades previously.  Most of the slaves were brought to those states where it was legal before the U.S. declared independence from Britain.  And slavery was never legal in all of the states; it was only legal in the southern states.

And those lands where the English and Spanish purchased their slaves?  Yes ... slavery is still rampant in many of those places.


TexasCowboy wrote on 22^nd Jun, 2014 at 1:39pm:
 
Name a land anywhere in the world which has not been "taken" by one set of people from another set of people. 

I dare you. 

You will fail. 

Even if you go back as far as Europe being "taken" from Neanderthal tribes 20,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Quote:


Most of your Vietnamese and Lao friends probably immigrated to the United States to escape persecution. The United States only began to take a serious interest in Indochina because they sought to contain the spread of Marxism and the influence of the Soviet Union and the PRC. Resources like tungsten which were readily available in the region were also a consideration.

Many Vietnamese Americans argue that the American entry into the war is defensible because the southern regime invited them. But the southern republic was created as a French dependency. The French military, with moral and material encouragement from the United States, would continue to occupy Vietnam until 1956. At this point, with their empire already overstretched and after enduring a number of defeats at the hands of the Viet Cong, the French government chose to remove their forces and relocate them to Algeria, where another struggle for independence was being waged against the imperialist running dogs of the West. The United States took reign at this point and recognized the Republic of Vietnam under the leadership of Ngo Din Diem, a known Catholic and anti-Buddhist. Most historians agree that Diem implemented policies to benefit his fellow Catholics while intentionally trying to antagonize the traditional Buddhist community. His policies led to widespread discontent among the people. Eventually the CIA and the ARVN carried out a coup d'etat. A military dictatorship was established as a replacement and political power was concentrated in the hands of a junta of generals.

Most Vietnamese Americans were opportunists who collaborated with their government and American forces for power and wealth. Few of them were concerned about the well-being of their countrymen, otherwise they would've struggled against the occupation of their country. Of course, China and the Soviet Union played a hand in the north. But the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was a Vietnamese initiative, not a foreign backed creation like the southern regime.

Quote:


The narrative of most immigrants arriving on the shores of the United States to escape oppression is simplistic and incorrect. Most immigrants to the United States in the 19th and 20th century came to the country to escape starvation or to find opportunities as much of the land had yet to be developed. A fair argument exists suggesting that the Irish immigrated to escape English oppression but ultimately it was a matter of economics and food scarcity in Ireland that prompted so many to leave. The Germans and Scandinavians came to the country seeking farmland. It was not our government or our Constitution that mostly attracted people. It was, rather, the potential and possibility that a sparsely populated land had to offer.

The industrial revolution first occurred in England where many men, women, and children were uprooted from their land and forced to work long hours in factories for meager pay. The industrial revolution also spread to the United States and this is when society experienced a major upheaval. Before the industrial revolution, the majority of people were farmers or craftsman or managed small, household businesses. After the industrial revolution, more and more people flocked to cities where they worked for corporations. Craftsmen and household businesses could not compete with the efficiency of factories, where men, women, and children, many of them helpless immigrants, worked in dehumanizing conditions to produce manufactured goods.

Towards the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, labor unions organized to provide members with more dignified working conditions, shorter hours, and higher compensation. Although there were many problems, the union system worked quite well until the 1980s, when multinational corporations found that it would be more profitable to outsource the labor to developing countries where there are no labor regulations.

The enormous industrial buildup from the 1820s onward allowed the United States to build the most powerful military in the world. But why should the United States, a republic in the western hemisphere, build and maintain the most powerful military? It was because politicians wanted to extend the political and cultural power of the United States overseas. It was this warmongering nature that motivated the United States to invest so many resources and human lives into the creation of the modern American warmachine that we have today. The United States is directly responsible for the deaths of millions globally and indirectly responsible for any number of civil wars being fought around the world to this day.

Warmongering is obviously not the source of power. A tribe can be warmongering and territorial yet the power structure will fall apart when it encounters and contends with a more technologically advanced society. The Zulus encountering English colonizers is an example.

I was interrupted while writing this post so my train of thought is lost. I will hopefully respond to the rest of your post tomorrow.

TexasCowboy wrote on 23^rd Jun, 2014 at 4:27pm:


When you return, you may wish to revisit your thoughts about the conflict in Vietnam and the Soviet influence on the North, because you skipped over it with only the briefest acknowledgement.  Vietnam is in a highly strategic location with regard to resources as well as shipping and the Soviet Union, with its fully acknowledged and often self-proclaimed worldwide imperialist domination desires had a very strong motivation to control the region. 

The North was not just set of poor, beleaguered locals wringing their hands over what to do about those "evil imperialists."  It was a fully Soviet-backed Marxist state.

And yes, all of my Southeast Asian friends came to the United States in order to escape persecution. 

Soviet style Marxism is dangerous. 

Especially to free-thinking and creative people.  In many countries over the past 70 years, you could get your head blown off for whispering criticisms of the government that, in the United States, you could stand on the street corner and shout all day long and that people all over the country will pay money to read and see in the media.

As for the rest ... to a large extent, you are agreeing with me.  People came to America for opportunity.  But Germans coming here just for farm land?  No.  Some did.  Many did not. 

It is just one example, of course, but in my family history none of my German or Polish ancestors were farmers.  Vast numbers of Germans and Poles came directly to American cities.  The farmers in my ancestry were English (not Irish).  (Oh ... and, by the way, none of them ever owned any slaves.)


I already mentioned the benefits of the worker unionization that is an integral feature of a free capitalistic system.  Thank you for bringing that up again and reiterating several of my points, including (tacitly) referring to the so-far unrealized potential for that free-market process to be a similar benefit to countries to which some of our production has been off-loaded.

Too bad the process is not available in many countries with the comprehensive top-down command and control hierarchy that is necessary for a fully planned society.  Unfortunately (and ironically) the lack of worker unionization in Marxist countries may inhibit the raising of the standard of living for workers in those countries.  Hopefully not.  But it certainly did in the Soviet Union for many decades, to the point that, for people who did manage to come to America from Russia during the Soviet era, the main thing many of them were absolutely astonished by was the availability of goods and necessities, including food, to average working class people. 


I am curious:  When you return, are you going to acknowledge the imperialism of Soviet Russia? 

That is one item that you have skipped right over, I assume inadvertently, in your fervor to point out the U.S. as "imperialist."

Having military tanks rolling across the streets of most of one's nearest and dearest neighbors, as well as their neighbors also, and then shouting to the rest of the world the desire to do the same to them also, just might give rational-thinking people cause to think about ways of countering the process.

And some people might see the need for building a barbed wire fence around one's land and guarding it with machine guns to keep one's workers in place as perhaps just a hint that one's totalitarian style of planning and control has not exactly resulted in the workers paradise that one keeps claiming it has.

Unless, of course, one wishes to live in a country where independent worker unionization and advocacy is forbidden and people regularly get thrown in jail for merely saying the "wrong" things.

Another example of lowlife traitors are Thai dogs. Whenever one of those animals learns to speak English they go flaunt it in their rural village and act as if they are superior because they let corporate America toss their salad. Most urban Thais will speak Thai mixed with English. The japanese should've wipes them out during the WWII occupation

I didn't say anything is wrong with them learning English, but they dont use English, ever. They all speak that Creole Thai, even with their parents who dont understand it, all to show off.

The Thais that come to America even use this Creole Thai when talking amongst themselves. Each year it seems they add more and more english words and drop more and more Thai words. It's their way of showing they're developed.

How about someone just line them up against a wall and pop them full of lead one by one?

Lol, if they virtually eliminated the tourist industry then who would all the whores in Pattaya and Phuket serve? Thailand would collapse without the tourist industry.

I just use violence as a figure of speech, I don't really condone it.

Not all Thais are this way actually. A lot of people from the countryside in Isan and Northern Thailand are quite nice, but that's because they are actually ethnic Laos. The real disgraceful Thais mostly come from Central and Southern Thailand, the ethnic Siamese.

Mak Nad; I personally think it would be more multiculturally tolerant if you would change your signiture.

If one takes another ones life, who gives it back?

No offense.