Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: WATCH: IDF Soldier Screams At Israeli Activists: 'You Are Worse Than The Arabs' [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)It's simply not true to say that your side is totally right and the Palestinians are totally wrong, or that keeping the IDF in Gaza would have stopped Hamas. Hamas wasn' GOING to be stopped militarily....it could only be dealt with, through the imperfect process of negotiations.
And it's simply not true that Gaza would be freer if the IDF were still occupying it. The IDF(and you aren't reflective of most IDF people)just wanted to "preserve order". That's all any occupying army ever wants to do. Occupation doesn't produce liberal results(and if you're talking about Japan, the U.S. actually REVERSED all the MacArthur liberalization when it reinstated the old warlords in power as corporate leaders and invented the "Liberal Democratic Party", and most of it war reversed in Germany when the U.S. put defense of the "free market" above all else by having the CIA invent the Christian Democratic Union(the party with more former Nazis than any other party in German history) and by letting most of the business types that had profited off of the Holocaust keep every pfennig they made.
What I wrote about the U.S. in its early years was true. There was no freedom in the U.S. in 1789 for anyone but a handful of white males who happened to own property and believe in the most accepted form of the dominant religion. Everyone else was just as persecuted as gays and secularists are in Gaza today. Freedom ONLY came to the U.S. because activists, decades after U.S. independence, fought for it from below. It was never inevitable and most of the Founders(including all of the slaveowning ones)didn't want it for anyone but themselves. That's reality, buddy.
You confuse support of freedom and human liberation with support for the notion that the West has a right to claim inherent moral superiority over everybody else. That's not liberalism...it's "American Exceptionalism" on bath salts.
People who want a free world must work for it from below, and without deluding themselves about any region, any culture, any religion or any nation being entitled to lecture everybody else. Only those detached from the fight for geopolitical advantage, only those unconcerned about which nation "wins" winning being useless in this day and age)can work for any form of human liberation...it can never be achieved by any nation saying to any OTHER nation "obey your 'betters'". There's no such thing as being an Imperial Democrat.
I'm for everybody having the life they want, for all being free, for all living as equals and having easy access to the building blocks of life-to all having dignity and respect. None of those things can be achieved through one country keeping another under military occupation.
Your, not me, are invested in a "religious" belief...you are certain that keeping the bad pre-Oslo status quo was the only realistic choice. You have the right to believe whatever you believe. What you don't have the right to do is to demand that people choose either between that belief and another belief that anyone would find reprehensible. You don't the right to demand that people choose only between evils, because accepting evils as the only choice in the short term means accepting evils as the only possibilities for the futures. Good is never born from the choice of a lesser evil. It is only born of the will to reject evils entirely.