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OT: Can We Surrender?

Started by Stratrider · · Last activity · 142 posts · 8,088 views

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Recumbent bicycles
Published
21 November 2003
Last activity
11 December 2003
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Stratrider
Posts
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  1. "Rocketman" <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<wQABb.352838$275.1158426@attbi_s53>...

    Quoted message said:

    "martynspeck" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
    "]news:[email hidden]...


    [...]

    Quoted message said:
    Quoted message said:

    Your equivocations notwithstanding the point still holds. Anybody who believes the Viet Cong
    weren't Communists is living in fantasy land and certainly not Planet Earth.

    Most of the Viet Cong were penniless peasants, whose affiliations had everything to do with
    defending their villages from the foreign invaders, and far less to do with any overarching
    economic ideology. The US and China chose to cast the war as an ideological one, because that
    suited their national aims. But to automatically assume that all combatants held strong Communist
    economic philosophies (or, indeed, even understood the subtleties of such an ideology) is folly.
    They were largely uneducated jungle dwellers, not wealthy college graduates, for whom such
    arguments make enjoyable academic debate.

    Most people in most societies at all times are ignorant and not part of the society that counts when
    it comes to what the nation does or does not do. Your point is pointless. All nations are governed
    by intellectual elites and it is what they do that counts. Maybe if you had not kill filed me you
    would know this by now as I have previously stated it in another post in this very thread. Ignorance
    is not bliss!

    Quoted message said:
    Quoted message said:

    You seem to hold to the Marxist view of war. That Capitalism causes war. The truth is that if
    all countries were fully Capitalist there would be no war.

    Capitalism is just an academic concept. There is no free trade internationally, only varying
    degrees of government control (via taxation, tariffs, subsidies, internal policies, investment
    regulation, etc). Thus, any significant differences between academic viewpoints become moot. Power
    imbalances and surpluses or deficits in resources (land, money, oil) cause war. Ideologies such as
    "communism" or "imperialism" are used as tokens to whip up popular support and create the concept
    of an "enemy," an inhuman monster to be feared and hated - and killed. It's hard to fear a bunch
    of subsistence rice farmers living in an Asian jungle; but it's easy to fear a hateful, secular
    Maoist regime marching to war because they hate Democracy. Even as ludicrous as it sounds, many
    Americans believed it.

    This is proof positive that Rocketman and his liberal cohorts are crazy as loons. Stop reading 1984
    and start paying attention to current events. Again, I have already answered this in a previous post
    but since you have kill filed me you are deaf, dumb and blind. Too bad for you, but I am not going
    to repeat myself for your benefit. Let me know when you decide to get up to speed.

    By the way, the causes of war are many and varied. Your simplifications are absurd. You need to read
    some actual histories of warfare and their causes instead of relying on your political ideology for
    the answers.

    Quoted message said:
    Quoted message said:

    If all property is owned and control by individuals and governments are committed to that truth
    then a government would not go to war to sieze land or property it being the rightful property
    of its current owner.

    This is an academic construct, as utopian and out of line with reality as the writings of Marx.
    The world you are describing simply doesn't exist. You're describing a libertarian utopia that has
    never existed as a major nation in the modern world (to my knowledge - please correct me if I'm
    wrong about this).

    Yes, yes, ideology doesn't count and it doesn't even exist according to this numskull
    notwithstanding that millions of people have died for ideologies in wars and revolutions. What
    was the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany all about if not for ideology. At least I am glad to hear
    that he thinks Karl Marx was not exactly right about everything. That is a start. He may not be
    totally hopeless.

    However, you are definitely right about one thing. No utopias have ever existed and none will ever
    exist, libertarian or any other kind. That is because of human nature, ever the stumbling block to
    everything that we can imagine. Better to face reality and forget about utopias.

    Ed Dolan - Minnesota

  2. Don't you all just have FUN with Ed Dolan??

    Just give him one little shred of rational thought (it does not have to be "liberal", just rational) and he will spew fountains of toxic saliva!

    Pawlow's dog had nothing on this guy!!

    And by the way: he repeatedly asserted that individuals don't count in the history of nations. How the hell does he think HE counts so much he can completely dominate this thread??

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