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rfmcdonaldElsewhere in this livejournal, there has been some discussion as to whether or not the United States is an evil country.
I don't buy that. Quite apart from the fact that it's only possible to identity an entire state as evil when it's possessed by an ideological particularly inimical to what most people would call a minimally decent life (Soviet Union, Nazi Greater Germany, China at the height of the Cultural Revolution), spectacular moral pitfalls beset you when you define the entire subject population of any one of those regimes as evil. You can, for example, decide that the mass rapes of eastern German women by Soviet troops in 1944 and 1945 were justifiable punishment; or, that residents of the Soviet successor states deserve their current immiseration; or, that Afghanistan should be left to rot.
The whole question becomes ridiculous when you're referring to large societies with populations in the hundreds of millions which have already demontrated their independence of opinion and are still visibly divided among themselves; they might be acting on the basis of incorrect information, but that just means that they're mistaken. Even when a particular regime makes a horrible mistake (like the Dubya regime in Iraq and God knows where else), that doesn't imply that the people bears any responsibility, or that the entire state--that which endures, the underlying structure of the regime that develops and persists independently of whoever's in power--is illegitimate, much less immoral and evil. Saying that the United States is evil simply because Dubya wants a little war to cap off (or begin?) his War against Terror is entirely wrong-headed. (That, or you've judged the vast majority of states in the world to be evil. We've all got our secret shames.)
There is one instance of an evil United States that i'm familiar with. It's the United States from an alternate history I wrote and hope to finish this year, Tripartite Alliance Earth.
Briefly put, the United States is put on decidedly the wrong track when it gets dragged into the Napoleonic Wars in 1805 instead of 1812. This precipitates xenophobia, which precipitates extreme isolationism, which allows racism to survive at a relatively high level, which ensures the toleration of a certain degree of political violence, which ensures that foreign affairs are seen through the prism of military affairs never mind domestic affairs, which ensures that the United States isn't socialized at all in the norms of an integrating rest of the world. This United States is not able to handle the matter of civil rights for its African-American community, never mind a growing Hispanic minority. One thing leads to another, and the United States becomes an equivalent to Argentina with nuclear bombs and its own miniature version of SKYNET. One thing leads to another, and the rather unstable American government tries to distract its population with a semi-popular war against China. In the subsequent Third World War, an ill-thought plan to blackmail the world's neutral powers for resources to interacted with the failure of American global communications (surprise, the Siberians weren't that far behind) and pervasive racism culminates in a series of attempted genocides. Fortunately, not that many of them are completely successful; the famine provoked by the war's consequent nuclear winter kills more people.
(Yes, I was in a bit of an apocalyptic mood when I composed the alternate history in question. Can you tell?)
My point, briefly put, is this: Granted that the Dubya regime has more than its fair share of faults, and granted that it has a tendency to launch ill-thought military adventures and God only knows if it will stop before it does something really stupid like attack Iran or North Korea. The fact remains that the United States shares very few if any characteristics in common with the above dystopia. Leaders of ethnoracial minorities and members of the political opposition are not being disappeared; the United States isn't invading or otherwise threatening its leaders at random; the American military, all things considered, is taking great care (in the early stage of the war, granted) to avoid civilian casualties and would likely disobey an order to nuke Baghdad; the United States remains a vibrant and openly conflicted democracy with only a few things on the not-so-near horizon (the Patriot Acts, for instance) to even begin to suggest that the time will come when people will fear the knock on their doors.
The United States isn't evil. I don't even think that Dubya et al are evil, just tragically misled and confused. The whole thing would resemble a Greek tragedy if only it was less stupid.
If you want to oppose the war in Iraq, fine; that probably will be a good thing to do. If you do so, use the appropriate language, please, since accuracy--and honesty--is always important.
I don't buy that. Quite apart from the fact that it's only possible to identity an entire state as evil when it's possessed by an ideological particularly inimical to what most people would call a minimally decent life (Soviet Union, Nazi Greater Germany, China at the height of the Cultural Revolution), spectacular moral pitfalls beset you when you define the entire subject population of any one of those regimes as evil. You can, for example, decide that the mass rapes of eastern German women by Soviet troops in 1944 and 1945 were justifiable punishment; or, that residents of the Soviet successor states deserve their current immiseration; or, that Afghanistan should be left to rot.
The whole question becomes ridiculous when you're referring to large societies with populations in the hundreds of millions which have already demontrated their independence of opinion and are still visibly divided among themselves; they might be acting on the basis of incorrect information, but that just means that they're mistaken. Even when a particular regime makes a horrible mistake (like the Dubya regime in Iraq and God knows where else), that doesn't imply that the people bears any responsibility, or that the entire state--that which endures, the underlying structure of the regime that develops and persists independently of whoever's in power--is illegitimate, much less immoral and evil. Saying that the United States is evil simply because Dubya wants a little war to cap off (or begin?) his War against Terror is entirely wrong-headed. (That, or you've judged the vast majority of states in the world to be evil. We've all got our secret shames.)
There is one instance of an evil United States that i'm familiar with. It's the United States from an alternate history I wrote and hope to finish this year, Tripartite Alliance Earth.
Briefly put, the United States is put on decidedly the wrong track when it gets dragged into the Napoleonic Wars in 1805 instead of 1812. This precipitates xenophobia, which precipitates extreme isolationism, which allows racism to survive at a relatively high level, which ensures the toleration of a certain degree of political violence, which ensures that foreign affairs are seen through the prism of military affairs never mind domestic affairs, which ensures that the United States isn't socialized at all in the norms of an integrating rest of the world. This United States is not able to handle the matter of civil rights for its African-American community, never mind a growing Hispanic minority. One thing leads to another, and the United States becomes an equivalent to Argentina with nuclear bombs and its own miniature version of SKYNET. One thing leads to another, and the rather unstable American government tries to distract its population with a semi-popular war against China. In the subsequent Third World War, an ill-thought plan to blackmail the world's neutral powers for resources to interacted with the failure of American global communications (surprise, the Siberians weren't that far behind) and pervasive racism culminates in a series of attempted genocides. Fortunately, not that many of them are completely successful; the famine provoked by the war's consequent nuclear winter kills more people.
(Yes, I was in a bit of an apocalyptic mood when I composed the alternate history in question. Can you tell?)
My point, briefly put, is this: Granted that the Dubya regime has more than its fair share of faults, and granted that it has a tendency to launch ill-thought military adventures and God only knows if it will stop before it does something really stupid like attack Iran or North Korea. The fact remains that the United States shares very few if any characteristics in common with the above dystopia. Leaders of ethnoracial minorities and members of the political opposition are not being disappeared; the United States isn't invading or otherwise threatening its leaders at random; the American military, all things considered, is taking great care (in the early stage of the war, granted) to avoid civilian casualties and would likely disobey an order to nuke Baghdad; the United States remains a vibrant and openly conflicted democracy with only a few things on the not-so-near horizon (the Patriot Acts, for instance) to even begin to suggest that the time will come when people will fear the knock on their doors.
The United States isn't evil. I don't even think that Dubya et al are evil, just tragically misled and confused. The whole thing would resemble a Greek tragedy if only it was less stupid.
If you want to oppose the war in Iraq, fine; that probably will be a good thing to do. If you do so, use the appropriate language, please, since accuracy--and honesty--is always important.
