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)Last edited Sat May 18, 2013, 08:14 PM - Edit history (1)
Do you really believe that a person has to dismiss the Arab Spring as a dead loss to prove that she or he isn't "religious"? What GOOD does it do to dismiss it? It's not as if dismissing it and insisting that all hope of it leading to something better is now lost? What was the alternative to seeing the Spring as at least a time of possibility?
Would anything be better in your region if the West had said, at the start, that the Spring was going to be a failure? What alternatives were there to seeing it as at least a chance for things to improve?
And how, might I ask, is it going to make it more likely that you'd end up with a humanistic, secular, democratic future by insisting that such a future is something that can ONLY be achieved if "the West" imposes it on everyone through some type of coercion? You appear to think that, yet you've never said how that would be.
Remember, also, that Naziism and Stalinism were also products of "European civilization" and, by extension, so was Maoism, since Maoism was just Stalinism with a drearier wardrobe).
Would you have preferred the West to back Mubarak and the rest to the end? To actually try to keep them in power? Do you actually believe THAT would have created a better chance for democracy? How is that belief NOT religious? How is it not "religious" to believe, as you appear to, that Arabs and Muslims will prefer dictatorship UNLESS FORCED TO MAKE SOMETHING ELSE BY SOMEONE ELSE?
How is embracing Dick Cheney's whole "PNAC" agenda, as you appear to, not religious? How can you call me naive and not see the naivete in believing, unquestioningly, in the whole "civilizing mission" canard? That isn't "realism", it's Kipling on bath salts.