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When exactly did America lose its innocence?
Posts
Oops. I knew it was one or the other. I think I said 1607 the first time. Because I checked WIkipedia. Damn my short term memory!
Also, how is wikipedia not in Firefox's dictionary?
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
It makes sense once you realize that all the comparably developed countries were still committing genocide in Africa through the first half of the twentieth century.
Don't forget central america!
Stop bad-mouthing this great nation or else we're gonna "bring democracy" to your country. PREP THE MOAB!
Was that in the twentieth century?
If you're brown, century doesn't really matter when it comes to America bending you over the bench.
TR fucked up Colombia to make Panama independent so he could build a canal. So yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
We have been fucking up Mexico since forever.
While they may be more aware, there still is a lot of this shit going on.
So ignorance...maybe. Self righteousness and chest thumping...not so much.
I never finish anyth
During the first half of the 20th century America was already trying to edge itself in Iran and the Middle East where it could find spots that weren't taken over by the Europeans. I also find it amusing that Americans had any innocence at all.
It was setting up oil companies in Saudi Arabia and making deals with the Persian government to get the lease on areas the British wanted with much more favorable conditions than the British were willing to give. If memory serves, the British retaliated by withholding its obligations, which the Persian government was dependent on. This is in comparison to the concentration camps Britain set up in South Africa and Britain's manipulating the United States into sponsoring a violent coup detat just to win some oil negotiations, to say nothing of how far both Britain and France went in supporting Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia.
Innocence, maybe, in that we hadn't had a major surprise attack on American soil before 9/11. Joe American thought the world loved him and his blue jeans and rock n' roll music.
Or, at the very least, was loved by everyone who could actually do anything about it.
You picture that nine year old watching the planes hit the towers, the parades, the speeches about the homeland.
I think America losing its innocence is just a really inapt way of describing what happened there.
I mean did America somehow become innocent after all that genocide, broken treaties, and bigotry?
Edit: I see Starcross already sort of beat me to it.
Seriously though, anyone who thinks the U.S. ever had a true sense of national innocence really has to blot out pretty bad events stretching back before the Articles of Confederation.
I guess it's like how people lose their innocence after pounding through vags and shitting themselves despite having don all that right at birth.
I'd rather deal with the Russkies.
Why?
Because we actually dealt with them. As in, we talked with them - and more importantly, we listened to them. We tried to understand why they did what they did, why they didn't like us, and occasionally even took steps that weren't 100% antagonistic towards them. We didn't immediately write off the Soviets as a pack of wholly malevolent, wholly irrational Sith Lords bent on destroying freedom throughout the galaxy.
Al Qaeda is not the Joker. They use tactics many don't approve of, but their goal isn't just to watch the world burn for its own sake. As long as we continue to pretend they are the Joker, and beyond reason and dialogue, our innocence/naivete continues. We're Homer Simpson insisting that the reason Frank Grimes hates us isn't because of anything rational, but because Frank Grimes is just "a crazy nut."
I mean shit, even Israel talks with Hamas. Even though Hamas is right on their doorstep, and they hate Hamas. They still listen to what Hamas has to say, and maybe there'll be a workable compromise in there somewhere. Just like JFK found a workable compromise to the Cuban Crisis, by talking with the Soviets rather than writing them off as malevolent chaos incarnate.
You don't get to say your shit don't stink just cuz you do it in the neighbors lawn
The reason we could deal with the Soviets is because, despite our mutual enmity, both were fairly standard nation-states with no real desire to murder each other. A non-state actor like Al Qaeda isn't really amenable to the same sort of dialogue.
Rigorous Scholarship
Yep!
Oh cut out the Noble Savage crap. That human was a dick during the entire crossing.
Some of them are ascetics, and so want to destroy our prosperity.
And that's why the Amish must be destroyed.
The actual tactics would obviously have to be drastically different for the reasons pointed out.
But the main good point he makes is you can't fight terrorism if you continue to deliberately not understand it.
Terrorists have specific political goals. They are not crazy people.
He wasn't in America yet though so it doesn't count.
Try telling that to the average American. The problem is that any attempt to understand through education is going to be vilified as liberal brain washing or political leaders acquiescing to the demands of terrorists.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but rather, you're asking Democrats and other non-right wing politicians to sacrifice poll numbers for this, which they won't do. They are the populist party, and anything unpopular or that can be easily spun is bad for them.
Rigorous Scholarship
DOnt worry, they're fake ergo completely work safe.
Well, the Soviets were ruled by a self interested ruling class, in the grand scale of people who are easy to work with, they're pretty high up on the list. You can start with the assumption, for example, that they realize that their own deaths would be a bad thing and that things that increase their own personal power or influence are good.
This is not the case universally among terror groups. On the one hand, you have quasi-political groups like Hamas, who probably run pretty close the the same lines as the Soviets. On the other hand you have a fair number of groups like al-queda who are perfectly willing to go to any lengths, including their own destruction (and not just on a low level, you have to assume after the al-queda leadership started dropping like flies that they were doomed men) to achieve those goals, which include things like overthrowing the government of Saudi Arabia, returning social and political practices to the Middle Ages, and converting the entire world to Islam.
The problem with the war on terror is that we've decided to declare war on a fundamental part of human nature. You fight wars against people, not against ideas. The Taliban was involved in an attack on US soil, we declared war, invaded, defeated them. Job done. Saddam Hussain was a dick for a number of reasons, we declared war for better or worse, went in, and killed him. We even hunted down and killed Osama Bin Laden. Great, we're done, lets leave. But that's not enough, people want the guarantee that nothing like that will ever happen again. People see that hey, even without the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden not a hell of a lot has changed, and that ideas that led to Sept 11 are still alive and well. So like Caligula who upon hearing that his army could not cross the English Channel declared war on the English Channel itself, we've decided that we're going to declare war on an idea.
Caligula in his wisdom eventually declared victory, ordered his soldiers to collect seashells, and went home.
The WTC was already bombed in 1993. Surely Joe American knew about that.
Also, Oklahoma City in 1995. Although that wasn't the work of Al Qaeda, it had to have opened Joe American's eyes to the reality that large-scale, high-casualty terrorist attacks weren't just an "over there" phenomena anymore.
I'd say "Amerindian genocide". You know, a whole continent of people (North America in this case), which have largely vanished, and the surviving communities basically live in poverty and despair.
But that's not a uniquely United States-thing either. Then again, neither was Africa--the Belgian Congo was Belgium, sure, but there was a lot of stuff before it and after.
Correct--though there's more to it than that. The Soviets (and this is an example that can be applied, with modification, to the Germans, the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Guatamalans and other national adversaries) were also fairly mild, in the long term, in their dealings with America, even when they'd been slighted in some way (in the case of the Vietnamese, for example, totally bombed back to the stone age).
Red Dawn never happened but, surprise surprise, America did invade Soviet Russia*, along with pretty much the rest of the industrialized world, including Japan and Poland (good thing too, because it would have sucked have been the last guys there when the party was over), with actual thousands of soldiers running around, burning things, shooting people, marching, and generally doing what soldiers do in wartime. And yet, the Soviets pretty much let the whole thing slide, even though it was an unprovoked, douchebag thing to do. Circumstances themselves have something to do with it, but the point still stands.
Obviously, Americans wouldn't have responded too positively if Red Dawn happened, or for that matter, the British landing a couple divisions in Pennslyvania during the Civil War, along with a naval blockade, because, well, they could. More pressingly, organizations like Al Qaeda have taken perceived American interference in their domestic politics--for example, American soldiers in Saudi Arabia preventing Iraqi aggression up to the Gulf War--and haven't let it slide.
*The English language wiki article, surprise, sucks--good luck finding this in a history textbook in the western hemisphere. Going by translations and what little I can read, the Russian language wiki article is better, though not great.
Well yeah, obviously you'd need a different approach.
You can't perhaps deal directly with terrorists but you can deal with the political situations that create and nurture them.