[Aside] Tuli Kupferberg of the aforementioned Fugs had an entry for the shortest sci-fi short story ever…
A stockpile of hydrogen bombs noticed that one of their number was feeling down.
“What have you got to be depressed about?” they asked.
“I want to be a bullet.” he replied
“You’re a thirty-megaton hydrogen bomb, you could take out a whole city, kill a million people at one blast, whatzamatta you, you wanna be a puny little bullet?”
“I miss the personal touch.”
[/aside]
The people in Iraq, Afghanistan, NK, and all those other people are or were willingly living under dictators? Did they vote in their dictators somehow when we weren’t watching?
You’re knowledge of history is flawed. Large changes have been brought about by force of arms. Did all those people who were Christians when the Muslims invaded them fawning over themselves to convert and welcoming the invaders with open arms? The same when the Christians invaded the new world? Old cultures and religions died out as the invaders religions and cultures overcame the existing ones.
There is no reason to think that setting up secular schools in places like Afghanistan and ‘forcing’ the children to go to them won’t work given enough troops on the ground ensuring the Taliban are held at bay. Once secure, rebuilding of the infrastructure can begin. Once rebuilt, the economy can start functioning properly and give people a reason not to continue blowing shit up.
The US doesn’t have slavery anymore because of force of arms. Your response would have been to let the slaves remain slaves because that is what they wished.
You abdicate your responsibility to other human beings because of arbitrary lines drawn on a map.
You impose social contracts based upon force of arms on some of your citizens who don’t wish them to be imposed. A simple example is speeding laws. You set an arbitrary limit and then enforce that limit. You probably say it is for people’s own good that some limits are in place, but you’re willing for the police to use force to stop speeders. Yet on the other side of another arbitrary line people can cut off a women’s clitoris. You won’t do anything about that because you think it is ‘impossible’. That’s the difference here. I don’t think it is impossible. I think it is just hard and would require more force than a simple policeman can provide.
A political opponent of Kim Jung sitting in a prison camp is there because he wants to be. Got it.
No, I’d be surprised if you’ve ever been out of your basement, actually.
No one welcomes an invader with open arms. But what we could bring, if we acted together, is hope for the future of these people. They might not like giving up their deep held prejudices and faulty beliefs, but their descendants will look back at those practices as barbaric as we know they are.
I wonder what it would look like if an invading force were to take you in hand and compel you to give up your faulty beliefs.
ETA: The above is to be construed as nothing more than pointing out that there is a mighty big question you’re begging.
How are my beliefs faulty? That we should help people who need help? That peace isn’t really peace as long as people are left to suffer? That the causes of the suffering - the cultural or religious aspects that don’t fit into a modern world - should be dealt with? That dictators should be removed if it is possible to do so? What exactly do you disagree with here?
You mean like benign, kindhearted socialists might liberate us from our capitalist system, sacrificing a few of us for the greater good of all?
Gee, that would be swell, huh?
“Badgers!”
“Uh, no, its ‘Wolverines!’”
"You sure? I thought it was ‘Badgers!’ "
“Badgers? Badgers? We don’t need no steeenking badgers!”
To the extent such massive change was accomplished, it was by equally massive slaughter and destruction. Death and destruction on such a scale that the old cultures were annihilated or reduced to impotence because there weren’t enough people left to practice them. How many hundreds of millions of people are you willing to kill for their own good?
WE are not going to “bring hope” to them; our goal is to crush and control and exploit, not to help. And as for the few surviving descendents of your crusade for a better world, they will likely regard your works like most of the world regards the extermination of the American Indians or the Mongol conquests.
"They make a desert, and they call it peace”. The only peace you are after is the kind of peace that comes about because the cities on the other side are filled with nothing but corpses. And the few survivors are living in camps under guard. That is the inevitable result of your plan to reshape the world in your image by war.
And yet we were able to do it after WW2 with Japan and Germany. Or, are you suggesting that we should have stopped invading Germany at its borders so as not to inflict Germany with our ‘image’ nor affect regime change?
Btw, my image of the world doesn’t include allowing people to perform stonings and genital mutilations. Nor allow dictators. Yours does. Yet mine is somehow worse than yours. Interesting. How many will die at the hands to these people and continue to die because we do nothing?
A historical aberration ( which is why people like you keep bringing them up ), in large part because they brought it all on themselves and knew it. Merely losing was enough to discredit dogmas based on triumphalism. And even then, we didn’t rewrite their culture like you are insisting we should.
Because in your world, they’re all dead and WE are the dictators.
It’s not that Obama doesn’t deserve the Peace Prize because he hasn’t done anything. That would be one thing. He doesn’t deserve it because his hands are drenched in blood.
Okay, we need you to do that line again… we didn’t have the scare chord ready.
Indeed, history is rife with enormous changes brought about by force of arms. And, as has been pointed out, it’s that whole “cultures and religions died out” thing we object to. Killing them all, or killing so many that the remaining few can no longer continue their practices, is called genocide. You might want to look it up. It was and is a popular pastime among those who are so convinced of their own righteousness that they will forcibly inflict it upon all others. Kinda like you.
Emphasis mine
No, no reason at all. Let us set about forcibly indoctrinating those tender young minds. Who among the indigenous populace could object? And if they are so foolish, well, given enough troops, we can certainly quash all resistance. The only scenario whereby a superior military force can be overcome by guerilla tactics is when we have not the will to commit sufficient forces, right? We saw this demonstrated in Viet Nam, as the Russians saw it demonstrated in Afghanistan. Problem is, it seems that “sufficient forces” actually means one occupier’s boot to stand on the neck of each and every person in the subjugated area.
This (aside from its other asininities) begs the question of where you are going to get all these troops. Even if every “western democracy” agreed with you (and let me just say that I suspect their mileage will vary greatly) and contributed personnel, there aren’t nearly enough to subjugate the entire Muslim world, let alone the entirety of those peoples whose religious beliefs and/or cultural practices offend you.
You really do not understand the idea of a “social contract” as the basis for a society, do you? The fact that there may be some scofflaws (read: speeders) does not negate the fact that as a society we believe that some control over motor vehicle use is necessary, and so we form a government to codify that control and employ officials (cops and courts) to enforce it. Similarly, we as a society decided to end slavery (in the USA). Some force of arms were employed and there was an unfortunately high body count. However, what we did NOT do was to slaughter everyone who believed that slaveholding was right or necessary. Nor did we forcibly brainwash surviving adherents. Eventually we settled the matter amongst ourselves, because in the end we all shared the same social contract.
You are correct that
In perhaps our only area of agreement, you and I both find that abhorrent. However, it does not change the reality that this practice forms a part of a social contract and a system of belief practiced by some arguably large subset of humanity. To change that belief structure is indeed going to take much more “than a simple policeman can provide.”
Personal insults are neither proper nor necessary in this forum. Besides, we don’t have basements here in south Florida.
Prize to you for Understatement of the Decade!! TM
No, their descendents, if you allow any to survive, will look back on US as barbarians. If you don’t want to read actual history books to absorb this lesson, haven’t you at least seen enough classic “Aliens take over” movies by now, with our heroes hiding in the mountains and coming down to strike at the hated enemy, to understand the point? People will not give up their closely held beliefs, no matter what those beliefs may be, when subjugated by an outside force. Instead they will cling to them even more tightly. You do not win “hearts and minds” by invading, killing those who resist your invasion (along with the inevitable by-kill, of course) and forcibly brainwashing the survivors.
Where did I advocate killing them all? No, I advocated putting enough force on the ground so that they can’t fight anymore. I advocate a combined force of the majority of the worlds nations so that the people who continue to fight will be fighting the world, not just the US.
Yes, people will be killed as they are currently being killed to no effect in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Your solution is to run away and let them continue on their own in the vain hope that they’ll sort out their own problems. So, we leave Afghanistan and the Taliban comes back and so does Al-Queda only this time they manage to get their hands on a nuke and blow up all of New York, not just a few buildings. What do you think will happen then in this worst case? Do you think cool minds will rule the day? So, we’re their now. Why not fix it while we can?
I’ll let you in on a little bit of information here that you may have missed. You have already invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s already been done. ‘Now what?’ is the question to be answered. Cut and run is your solution. It is no good to cry over whether is was justified in the first place.
I suggested we send the kids to secular schools like we in the west send our kids to so that they can learn to think objectively. It has been suggested that this is brainwashing. I don’t know where you get this from. Certainly not from what I said because I didn’t say that. I said that the kids must go to school and we must force them to exactly like we require parents in our countries to send their kids to school. It’s the law that you must send your kid to school. When the kids are at home the parents can teach them whatever they want. Exactly like we do it in the west.
One more reply, and I’ll remove myself from this hijack.
And some of us have said that the lessons of history indicate that people will not be separated from their closely held beliefs by force of outside arms, short of extermination or perpetual occupation. The forces necessary to accomplish this end are literally astronomical. And the more people you subjugate, the more other people, including people not yet invaded, will resist you. Our stupid invasion of Iraq was the greatest recruiting tool Al Queda ever saw. And the resistance, the pushback against us, extends well beyond extremist Muslims. Indeed, the pushback extends even to our western allies. That’s how well favored your approach is in the world as a whole.
And to the OP, reversal of this path by the USA, as epitomized by our selection of a President, seems to be the reason the Nobel committee made their selection for the Peace Prize. So maybe this isn’t a hijack after all.
Strawman. Or strawmen. I never once mentioned what my solution, or my approach, would be. I only derided yours. Again, the lessons of history state rather emphatically that the only permanent “fix” through force of arms will be extermination or perpetual occupation.
Since your whole argument for reforming the world makes it clear that when you say “learn to think objectively” you actually mean “under force of arms and with unstated penalties for non-compliance, through repetitive forced indoctrination that we will call ‘school’, learn to think like us, including absorbing Western mores and abandoning our former beliefs, beliefs that are still important, even vital, to my parents, their parents, and the entirety of my society outside of my prison, er, school” I think it is pretty clear why I call it brainwashing.
So no, I cannot by any stretch of my imagination see this as “exactly like we do it in the west”.
Well, there was this:
Elementary Kids Sing Obama Indoctrination Song
Pretty weak tea, I know, but maybe we could set up some reeducation camps here in America too?
I hope you meant that in jest. On the off chance that you did not, I’ll offer in response my postfrom that very same thread.
And anotherthat follows.
CannyDan does indeed come in a can! 
There are about 65 dictatorship/ strong arm leaders in the world. Have you made a list showing what order we should go to war ? Do we go after the ones with oil first? Perhaps size is our mitigating factor?
Apparently you have no respect for national sovereignty. We can decide who has a good government and walk right in and change it. We sure are a moral and military powerhouse.
When you advocated a course of action that can only be accomplished that way. When you brought up examples of genocidal conquests as proof that your ideas can work.
You are talking about conquering billions of people and destroying their cultures, where are all these soldiers to come from? What makes you think this is even possible?
Considering that WE did just that I fail to see why that’s unreasonable. And you are pretending that there’s no options between “run away” and “kill, burn, destroy”.
Because we can’t short of genocide, and because we have no desire to do so.
Ah, the classic “lost generation” tactic. Kidnap the children, kill the parents who resist ( and probably the older children as well ), teach them that their parents are evil and to be good little English speaking Christian fundamentalists.
Well gonzo, give him his due, anyway. He seems to have indicated above that ***he ***isn’t ***us *** (“You have already invaded Afghanistan and Iraq”).
So I’m thinking that he wants to wave the baton and make those decisions as you identify, but actually expects somebody else, apparently the USA leading every other nation ***not ***on his list, to do the actual genocidal work.
Let’s all join in and sing together now—
He’s makin’ a list, and checkin’ it twice,
Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice…
ETA- sorry Der Trihs, you snuck in while I was typing!