Off Topic Political Debate

Everyone scores own goals occasionally Normally I would not be generous in bandying this word around. Those regimes did have some similarities to Mussolini's Italy - just as there were differences. We can say that they were dictatorships which were established by military intervention which would have been more difficult without American support. The Americans were always ready to prop up any regime which could be a bulwark against Soviet style Communism, and were prepared to ignore the human rights violations committed by those regimes - the same applied to Saddam Hussein. There is no real generic fascism which describes a range of regimes - and the word has become little more than an insult, bandied around at those we do not like. Some have even used the word to describe Trump, which is ludicrous.

 

Cologne
I do know you are not German, you chose to live their because of your German wife, fair enough, no problem
It is just that in your debating you appear to ignore Germany's contributions to world peace between 1936 and 1945
Without Hitler Germany might have been a different country, but the German people bought into Hitler's dream of rewriting the end od WW1and creating a German World Empire, Russia committed as many atrocities as Germany before and during WW2, Russia was only our ally by default, via a common enemy
King Arthur
America's only claim to fame before WW1 was an act of treason against Britain and the genocide of the native American peoples
WW1 and WW2 were won because of America's manpower and manufacturing power, I believe America is the only country to have made a profit from being in a global war
America's involvement in Vietnam was a disaster for Vietnam Cambodia and Laos as well as America itself
In short every major Country has its dark and light side, I just happen to be proud to be British and believe our good outdid our bad overall

 

I don't agree with all of that Duggie but appreciate your post and it is nice to have others contributing. It is a shame that the politics on here is no longer popular. (I did smile at "an act of treason against Britain" though)

 

one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter
I do enjoy the fact that the "All American Boy" is technically an Englishman and the Americans who realise there is more than just one country in the world come to England to enjoy our shared heritage and culture

 

To be fair Duggie I was mostly concerned with the World after 1945. Before that time the USA was mostly an isolationist power. How far do we go back ? I am essentially concerned with the threat to World peace now. The World appears to have split up into 3 giant camps - The West is attempting and will continue to sustain its pre-eminent World position and defend those interests as the interests of the ''World Community'' - to give global legitimacy to actions which reflect the interests of the USA. and its Western allies. But what appears as Western Universalism to some, appears as imperialism to others. Namely when balanced against Chinese assertiveness, on the one hand, and Islam on the other. The other point which is so often made is that the apparent defence of Western values such as democracy, human rights etc. are applied with double standards - namely we preach human rights values to Iran and China, but not to Saudi Arabia. We also ignore the fact that the USA. has more of its population languishing behind bars than any other state in history - including over a million blacks. We preach non proliferation for Iran but not for Israel. For me the biggest danger is whether the USA. with its huge military can accept the rise of China to the pre-eminent position in World economics - a process which they cannot prevent.

 

fair point Cologne
the sad thing is it appears a pre disposition of the human race to embrace conflict rather than peace
Israel, Palestine and Syria are all descendants of the original 12 tribes of Israel after the exodus from Egypt and are separated by religious doctrine and intolerance
maybe we need a common threat to the entire world to unite us as the human race, and then we would actually need the stockpile of weapons to defend ourselves
wouldn't that be ironic

 

We need to stop thinking in terms of competing ideologies, religions and nations, and discard the idea that some on this Earth are 'better' than others. With regard to religion it should be self evident - if you believe in God and see the diversity which he created then you would be tempted to believe that he loves diversity, and so should we. If he/she had wanted to create us all speaking one language, or having one religion, or one culture then he/she could have done so. If you're not religious then half the conflict potential has disappeared anyway.
Apologies for my rather hasty reaction to one of your earlier posts Duggie.

 

My earlier post was a bit tongue in cheek to get a reaction, but also to show both extremes of the argument do have validity
I could easily argue with conviction for both views, sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse, but i usually hold the middle ground where possible
We are united on one front and that is Watford FC and its future

 

X-Factor?

 

Unfortunately a 'common threat' would be unlikely to be a green man getting out of a spaceship with a sign around his neck saying 'I am a common threat'. Maybe we have that common threat - called 'global warming', which not enough people have recognized as such, against which our stockpile of weapons is little help.

 

I know we disagree on this but in my view competition is the natural state of man. As we get civilised we try to moderate that - especially the aggressive part - and try to cooperate more - but that is veneer. We evolved from apes and as such are territorial and tribal. Religions are just a spiritual offshoot of tribal behaviour. Nations are just extensions of family and tribe. Religions have generally preached love for others and at the same time hatred of those with different beliefs. They are frankly no help in getting on with others.
Having no religion is no help regarding potential conflict because religion is just the spirtual arm of our tribal nature.
Civilisation, laws and education are the only way for mankind to overcome his base instincts.
As regards people believing they are "better" than others I do not think that is really the case. We only "support" our own - family, neighbourhood, county, country and so forth. When we support Watford we claim we are better than the rest but we do not actually believe we are really better - only that this club has our allegiance and we recognise that others claim they are "better" than us. The same goes with countries. I hazard a guess that 90+% of the world's population would "love" their country and not wish they were born elsewhere. When did a Frenchman ever wish he had been born English - but in his heart does he think he is better than us. No - of course not.

 

The military government of Brazil wasn't fascist, unless you apply a very broad brush to being anti-communist, nationalistic and authoritarian. The three main promoters of the coup were civilians and had been agitating against the government of Getúlio Vargas since the mid-1940s, finally managing to overthrow the then president João Goulart in 1964. Both before and after the coup the governments were pursuing highly nationalistic agendas. Goulart, himself, had engineered a position where, previously democratically elected president, Jânio Quadros was forced to resign so he could assume power. The military intervention was encouraged by the governors of three southern states as Goulart was pursuing a near-enough communist-agenda, completely at odds with Quadros' government. The military did try to find a suitable candidate to replace Goulart, which failed as the Goulart supporters refused any proposed candidate, so the military made Field Marshal Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco president.

Two positive things that did come out of the military rule were the reduction of corruption, both before and after the intervention of the military corruption was at levels that strangled the economy, and in the 1970s Brazil did go through a type of industrial renaissance. The negatives were, however, the imposition of law by the military with the repression that comes with dictatorial and paranoid regimes.

As an aside the US comes out of this particularly badly as they were financing the campaigns of anti-Goulart candidates in municipal elections, a bit like what the Russians do in eastern European and even the recent US presidential election.

I could delve deeper into this, but would need to talk with my brother-in-law for guidance; who luckily for this topic is a history professor, and a Brazilian.

 

We are never going to agree on the competition vs. cooperation thing Arturo. For me there is no such thing as a 'natural' state of man, people are shaped by their environment, and both the competitive and the cooperative gene can be dominant depending on circumstances.

I think that instinctively many people like to form things into hierarchies - be it of nations, races etc. I do not believe war would be possible without this element. Could I convince an army to kill by telling them that the opposite army is full of people who are no different to themselves ? Over the 28 years I have lived in Germany I have sometimes asked the question of how this country once produced so many monsters - what was going through the minds of those who served in concentration camps, or in the death squads of the Wehrmacht ? Do the Germans have more potential monsters than other countries ? I don't believe this to be true. Could normal, everyday, citizens - fathers, brothers etc. your next door neighbour, become these monsters under certain conditions ? My own father served on a firing squad a couple of times during the North African campaign - he does not know if the victims were Germans, or collaborating Arabs - they were behind a white sheet, so that the squad could not see them. We talked about things like this many times in those long visits to the Chelsea Hospital, and he just said 'those were his orders'. How many others just obeyed orders ? How many others were 'normal' people until they had actually killed once or twice, and then became immune to it all - became brutalized by the whole thing. Or were they all doped ? There is a lot of evidence for this last point - nearly all wars are followed by a detoxification programme. But would it be possible without propaganda ? Without the constant reinforcing of the idea that the lives of the enemy are of less worth than our own. I don't think so. I also think that if social conditioning can produce monsters, then it can also produce saints.

 

Interesting notion that the species that tend to survive are those that tend to cooperate... I think we have to learn that it is better to cooperate.. A hard lesson for homo sapiens

Sent from my G3121 using Tapatalk

 

We are born competitive. Watch the actions of babies. We inherit it from our ape ancestors.
We learn cooperation because we live in a civilised society.
Both are essential.
Conflict between tribes existed from time immemorial - it has simply been refined into nationhood - or given a religious gloss.
Everyone knows the man they are sent to kill is exactly the same as them - we are not stupid. Witness the First World War football match.
We all know war is wrong and evil and that is why we have things like Poppy Day to glorify war and pretend our men are heroes - which makes the other side villains of course. We used to kill our own men if they became ill on the front or refused to fight for moral reasons. We are by nature an aggressive beast and the veneer of civilisation is thin. I remember the vile headlines in papers like the Sun at the time of the Falklands War.
You quite correct - our veneer is laid on by our societal and cultural experiences - our environment.
Hierarchies are simply ways of organising to get things done - they are not important in themselves but try organising a thousand people without some form of structure.

 

The concept of civilisation is hard to pin down but fascinating nonetheless. I expect everyone has a different take on it. A few thoughts that occur to me:

Being competitive by nature inevitably leads to a desire for success. All of the people can't be successful all of the time and when we're not we might be observant enough to note how others are succeeding. We might then choose to adopt their methods but we might also have the wit to see that co-operation increases our chances of success. Even very early tribes may have understood they could offer protection to weaker ones who had fresh skills or food supplies. In other words how we compete is not inevitably through violence. The longer we live in an environment where co-operation is widely accepted, the more disturbing open acts of violence are to our psyche. It is a veneer perhaps, but a thicker one than it was in earlier times.

 

Good points Theo. I would agree that the idea that competition is somehow intrinsically wrong is not correct. Competition can be both good or bad - it depends whether it is "friendly and regulated" competition or aggressive. Civilisation is what promotes the good kind.
Life is not a zero sum game - so my win does not have to come as your loss or vice versa. We can both win even if we are in competition and cooperation facilitates that.
I also agree that the "veneer" may be slightly thicker than it was - but the Nazis, Middle East and even Falklands show us we must be careful not to remove it.

 

We learn cooperation because we have realized it is our best means of survival Arturo. I am not sure that a baby is really born competitive - is he born anything other than just smelly ? But he quickly learns that competition is only going to get him so far - for the rest of his life somebody else will be either feeding him, or growing his food etc. etc. There is no animal which is more 'dependent' than the human species. I take it for granted that if we ever find ourselves alone with one bottle of water in a desert, that we will fight each other for it - but it would be better to have pooled our resources to prevent such an occurance. Those species which have practiced individual competition (all against all) have generally not survived to recreate themselves. We have all seen it in the garden - we throw out food for the birds and see that some species waste their energies chasing each other away from it, whereas others just get on with eating it. I disagree with you on the subject of war - you presume that armies fight each other with mutual respect. If that were the case then there would never have been propaganda, as we know it. From the first Egyptian wars onwards we have depicted the enemy as evil, but beatable - look at some of the propaganda from the first World War, and I do not think there was much mutual respect at Stalingrad. The same is true of the guards at Guantanamo - do they really think of their prisoners as being of equal worth ? To a certain extent racism is a by product of all war.

 

You are saying the same as me. We learn cooperation. That is the veneer that comes with civilisation. As a father of five I observed that a baby starts with a "me first" and "me only" policy. They learn to share.
All societies learn cooperation. It does not eliminate competition though.
I do not presume armies fight each other with mutual respect. I stated that men know their opponents are also men. They may hate them. They are trained to hate them. You find it more difficult to stab a friend in the back (unless you are MIchael Gove). I said we have Poppy Day , Land fit for Heroes etc, Your Country needs You etc - propaganda is essential to warfare.

 

I am by no means sure about the veneer. What has happened as a result of technology is that we have become distanced from death - the people doing the killing are now further away from the results of their actions. On the battle fields of the middle ages they were close to the blood and the gore - but we just press buttons and war becomes a 'video' event. We are becoming more sensitive, but we are killing more at the same time. Somehow I think that the mind of the middle ages may have had a moral problem about the use of drones in warfare today - or the use of bombers which fly so high that they are out of range of all defences. Somehow the Knight of the middle ages may have felt his honour compromised by such things - so have we really moved forward ?