From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jul 15 2002 - 03:19:33 MDT
Damien writes
> I urge people to consider the following citation from that story, which
> I think most intelligent observers outside the USA would take for granted
which includes
> Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with
> the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia.
> Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and
> some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence
> agents in the black arts of terrorism.
Your claim is that most intelligent observers outside the
U.S. would take this for granted? Does a majority of such
observers believe that Fort Benning is a university of
terrorism? That's awfully strong. But it's plain wrong
without a clear and agreed-upon meaning for the term
"terrorism"; I would expect critics of U.S. influence
in Latin America to constrain themselves to phrases such
as "right wing dictatorships received much help and training
in America in their policies of repression and political
control". By the same token, I would not call it accurate
to describe Fidel Castro as a terrorist. Would you?
Even for me, not usually a critic of much U.S. foreign policy,
it's a tough call because the choices in Latin America thirty
years ago often came down to a brutal, repressive right-wing
pro-American regime, or a brutal, repressive and totalitarian
left-wing pro-Soviet regime. In such cases, the Americans
would make their predictable choices, and the Soviets theirs.
So characterizing the American implementation of their choice
as "terrorism" is a bit much.
> What interests me in terms of this list is that *presumably*
> most extropes rather *dislike* the sorts of nasty things that
> governments and their owners get up to, and hence should have
> little time for the following evil but characteristics stunts.
> I suspect, however, that patriotism or some form of devil-we-know
> *realpolitik* might kick in cruelly to overwhelm such judgments...
Well it's certainly not easy to know whether one's judgments
have been so influenced, any more than it would be to be sure
that one's judgment were, for example, not influenced unconsciously
by the natural resentment some people in small nations feel against
large nations.
Your tendency to read admiringly and uncritically of descriptions
of those "evil but characteristic stunts" exactly mirrors, in my
opinion, the tendency of others to wrestle with the same facts,
but from the opposite political polarity.
Lee
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