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Azerbaijan...,
2005-05-22 20:23:23
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"Everything begins when you are certain you know who the evil people are and what you should do with them."...,
2005-05-23 09:47:04
maybe galloway is an asshole:
In 1929, I believed that the way to bring in a new world was basically - virtually exclusive - a matter of "social engineering," changing "the system," economic, political, social. Today I recognize that we neglected too much the problem of what happens inside the human being. Whether there can be a democratic society, for example, depends in the final analysis upon what human beings are, whether they are capable of making moral decisions and therefore of building and maintaining a free society.
Still another clue to my changed outlook occurred to me. It has to do with the question of ends and means, whether or not evil can overcome evil. In those days our group of Christian pacifists was in all matters of economics, politics, international affairs unsophisticated and poorly informed. But, on all important issues - the real causes of the war, what led the United States into the war, the unreliabiliy of propaganda, the kind of peace which would follow the war - we sensed the correct positions! Nearly all informed people now accept as a matter of course the positions which, twenty years ago, informed people ridiculed our pathetically uninformed group for holding.
In 1929, I was much better informed than ten years earlier. But I was coming to believe that the way to true democracy and brotherhood and peace was that of dictatorship and hate and repression and violence. Presently I was brought up hard against the realization that by that very pragmatic test which I had chosen, the method did not produce the desired results and that, furthermore, I was undergoing an inner detioration and was reduced to judging events and making decisions by purely ad hoc, opportunistic standards.
--A.J. Muste, The True International. 1939
"The war" is the first World War. He's otherwise discussing his passing from Christian to Trotskyist to Christian again, the first and latter of which he
rightly identifies throughout his autobiography as Pacifist by any interpretation. Just to put that in context.
I was reading that just now and I'd noticed today some traffic coming in from Mideast Newswire's "Useful Idiots for Terrorism", and I read the first link there, from some two years ago about how "unsophisticated and poorly informed" peace groups had been about Iraq, and about how all their ghastly, uncited predictions were so entirely wrong and how war supporters ought to go "nya nya nya!". Except that all in all, two years on, those uncited nutters so far have sensed the correct positions. If there's a lesson it might be that you never earn bragging points for being defeated first and proven right later.
But you could always take out a loan.
:: posted by buermann @ 2005-05-23 01:12:26 CST |
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