The Stupidity Of The Pro-War Movement

This one's for Squirl: Look at the face of war and tell me which is more stupid: being pro- or anti-war.







Squirl, you should be ashamed of yourself. I am ashamed of belonging to the same species as you.....

 

Is a bad part of our nature ( human beings only ) wish the war, need the war ...

I hope that in the future, with all this genetics things and resarches, or just getting into a superior level of thinking, we get rid of all of this homocidal nature that we have ...

Some day I was watching a movie called Farenheit 11/10 ... I feel sick when I saw an old woman crying into bagdad because her entire family got killed with missiles ...

I don't think that those poor people are murderers, they just got pushed for too long and pushed back, for me that George W. Bush is a damn murderer, an mercenary, in fact ... selling himself and his "firepower" to his own ego, to search resources for his "beloved america" keep being his "beloved america" ...

Ps.: If I see the half part of one american, japanese, german, marcian, jupterian or something like it with hostile intentions on my country ( take the amazonia from us, for example ). I'll gonna kill him with every single aspect of this word ...

Like the most of human beings, I just push back when I'm pushed ...

 

I think the terms "pro-war" and "anti-war" are quite the misnomers. Of course there are those who categorically reject any semblance of violence, but on the other hand, no one in his right mind can seriously be "pro-war" as in wanting war to ensue, people to suffer, etc.
The sides are more usually divived along the line of what political objectives they pursue and whether they see war as a necessary evil to achieve those objectives. And yes, depending on the circumstances, some people do feel that sometimes even war is an acceptable means to an end. Now whether Vietnam was one of those cases I'm not sure. I do think that the entire war was completely mishandled in many ways, and sometimes I doubt anyone really had a clear set of objectives other than "containing the spread of communism". Well, I suppose if you're not even quite sure WHY you're really going to war then you shouldn't be fighting in the first place.

But I think you're really getting at Iraq, right? My thoughts on Iraq:

I argued against the invasion from the onset, but I also made it clear that I would support the troops once it became clear that they'd go in anyway. I still feel the invasion was not a particularly bright move, and I still wonder what the Bush admin was exactly hoping to achieve. The more time passes, the more I'm inclined to believe that they don't really have a clue themselves.
Ift this war had been started with the HONEST intent to oust Saddam and THEN GET SERIOUS about giving Iraq the means to become a healthy, free, modern country, then I would have had no moral reservations about it whatsoever. The price would definitely have been worth it. Just as the hundreds of thousands of lives spent to liberate Europe fom the Nazi menace were, in the end, also well worth it.
Alas I feel that many things were screwed up royally and lots of opportunities missed. I don't know how all this will end, but I still have hopes that not all is lost yet in Iraq. Anyway, I'm getting carried away. If you class me as pro-war because I want the troops to stay AS LONG AS IT TAKES then yes, I guess I am. Maybe it was a mistake to invade Iraq, but it's a mistake that has already been made. Pulling out now and leaving the country in turmoil isn't going to help anyone. On the contrary, it would mean that all those people who've died so far gave their lives in vain.

 

[deleted...fuck]
So angry. We gonna get blowed up over semantics and refusal to see that OTHERS have a legitimate point of view?

 

Jesus fucking Christ, this friggin [delete] disease has to stop!

 

Yeah, stop the WAR

 

I have no photographs to illustrate the stupidity of the anti-war movement. This lack of proof is the best kind of credibility for my argument against them. Why?

Due to Hitler's authoritarian regime, the outside world did not see images of the concentration and death camps until millions had already been murdered.

Due to Stalin's authoritarian regime, the outside world did not know of the 'purges' until millions had already been murdered.

Due to the authoritarian regime in post-war Vietnam, the outside world knew very little of the horrors faced by residents of the "reeducation camps."

Due to Saddam Hussein's authoritarian regime, the outside world knew very little of the extent to which he was oppressing his own people.

Due to China's authoritarian regime, there are no photographs of the dead protesters of Tiananmen Square.

Due to Kim Jong Il's authoritarian regime, the outside world sees only a few glimpses of the deaths happening within the country.

Due to China's authoritarian regime, there are no photographs of the dead protesters at Shanwei City.

The average anti-war activist interprets this lack of information as a sign that military action against one of these countries is unwarranted.
The lack of photographs from oppressive governments condemns the anti-war movement more than the abundance of photographs condemns the pro-war movement. Anti-war activists are fascinated with the images of war-induced suffering - as though a lack of war denotes a lack of suffering.

I would much rather live in a world where the images of suffering are plain and easy to see than live in a world where the images of suffering are hidden and glossed over by propaganda.

 

The scale of your lack of knowledge does only have an equal counterpart in your wellbeing and self-assurance Squirl.
Stalin's and Hitler's authoritarian regimes came to power only because the people in USSR and Germany wanted them to do so... and the world was satisfied with them, especially the U.S.
Saddam was widely supported by the U.S. till 1988 (he commited his most grievous crimes in mid 80's, having full-U.S. support for that case, the CIA did know all the details of those crimes, some chemical compunds for producing chemical weapons being delivered by U.S.-Universities).
The reeducation camps and death fields were part of Cambodia under Khmer-Rouge regime... and it was the Vietnamese army (yes, commies!) which liberated Cambodia from Pol Pot's regime.
I will finish this discourse some other time, cause the choires are calling me back to kitchen.

 

Go and google a bit on Vietnamese reeducation camps, Frog, and you'll find that they both existed and were no cakewalk to be a prisoner in.
The part about America supporting Iraq as a counterweight to the Iranians is acknowledged. Another piece of shortsighted "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" oriented foreign policy.

 

@redant

Thus if so many survived up to 19 years in such a prison it's quite obvious they weren't death camps, but quite well operated prisons... I think that mortality rates were higher among Japanese "preventively isolated" in the U.S. (1941 to 1945) than in those camps.

 

Cambodia

 

@Biles

Cambodia was liberated by the People's Republic of Vietnam (I already pointed that out earlier on)... so what's your point?

 

Do you actually believe what you just said?? Are you seriously taking the fact that large numbers of inmates survived in prison for 19 years as evidence that no injustice was done in these camps? By the same token you could say that since some people somehow managed to get out of Stalin's gulags after 10 or more years, those gulags can't really have been all that bad. Hell, even the article YOU linked to referred to the camps as reeducation camps. So even if we assume for a minute that no one has ever died in a Vietnamese reeducation camp (which is universally acknowledged to be complete and utter bullshit), you'd think 19 years is a tad long to "re-edcuate" someone, yeah? If you really think reeducation is what those camps are about, you must either not have not read a lot about the subject or you are very selective about what fits into your own personal view of the world and what doesn't. You may or may not take THIS ARTICLE for gosple, but I suggest you at least skim of over it for a minute.
"Quite well operated prisons", you couldn't have used a more cynical term if you tried.

What a ridiculous statement. I do not really have any clear notion of the number of people that died in Vietnam's reeducation camps. Nor do I have the exact figures on many people died in the Japanese-American internment camps, but I do know that the number was comparedly small, maybe less than 100, which spread out over 120,000 internees, translates to a mortality rate of less than one tenth of a percent. *By our standards, the conditions in the Japanese internment camps were poor. But at the end of the day, those camps were not even in the same ballpark as the Nazi concentration camps or Stalin's gulags. Yes, some internees died of disease ... there are even known cases where internees where shot or beaten to death by guardsmen, but shocking as they were, such excesses were the exception, not the norm. What really is so appalling about the internment of the Japanese-Americans is that what is allegedly a free, democratic society can stoop to such a level and deprive 120,000 people of their freedom WITHOUT any good reason whatsoever. **


* It is extremely hard to find any information on the exact number of victims. The only thing you get is references like:

but the fact that none of the dozens of sites I visited on the net mentioned any substantial number of deaths, is pretty certain indicator that is simply did not happen on the scale you're insinuating.


**Lest anyone accuse me of being an apologist, there is no justification for the injustice that was done to these people, who were after all nothing more and nothing less than law-abiding American citizens.

 

Let's look at what I have said:

My premise is that a government's refusal to release images of an event is far more incriminating than an abundance of grisly war images is. A government's censorship of an event implies that a hideous act was committed, that there was something shameful which needed to be 'covered up.' Yet, while it is a crime to commit a hideous act in plain sight, government censorship of a hideous act is a crime two times over: once in the act and once in the government's denial.

It is therefore extremely unintelligent to assume that a lack of images denotes a lack of suffering. Yet, as I pointed out earlier, anti-war groups are prone to such unintelligent assumptions:

The Vietnamese government said, "there is nothing to see here," ... and frog believed them.

 

Bear in mind that you wrote this in a thread which was begun under the premise that war is an unacceptable tool for political change.

Even if the Vietnamese government's invasion of Cambodia was a 'liberation,' what were you trying to prove when you wrote that? That war is an unacceptable practice?

By the way, Vietnam's reeducation camps were in Vietnam.

 

I am awesome.

 

The region has seen education camps.

 

education is good

 

Good is bad.

 

IMHO unless you go in and totally destroy a country (i.e Germany in WW2) wipe out everything including the people (physically & morally) then there is no way you can "introduce" democracy to any country.

All you do is create suffering because a large percentage of the country are so against you that they also end up fighting against the "ideal" that you represent.

As I've said before the only way I believe a country can reach democracy is by it's own path however torturous and painful that is.

Anyway, as we don't live in a "Democracy" ourselves how the hell are we going to install one in Iraq????

Remember USA: Capitalist/Conservative. Europe: Capitalist/Socialist.

Mal