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And in England, a response:
(interesting last line, no?)

quote:Sunday Times (London)
September 23, 2001, Sunday
SECTION: Features

LENGTH: 3472 words

HEADLINE: Why do they hate America?

BYLINE: Bryan Appleyard

BODY:

The USA saved Europe from the Nazis, defeated communism and keeps the West rich. Bryan Appleyard analyses why it has become the land of the loathed

We have seen Pakistanis waving pictures of Osama Bin Laden and wearing T shirts celebrating the death of 6,000 Americans. We have seen Palestinians dancing in the streets and firing their Kalashnikovs in glee. We have heard Harold Pinter and friends pleading with the West to stop a war we didn't start. A few of us have read a New Statesman editorial coming perilously close to suggesting that bond dealers in the World Trade Center had it coming.

Or consider what Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, reported for The Wall Street Journal from Beirut. She saw suited, coiffed professionals cheering in the streets. Then she went into a fashionable cafe. "The cafe's sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody looked shocked or moved. They were excited, very excited," she writes. "Ninety per cent of the Arab world believes that America got what it deserved," she is told. "An exaggeration?" she comments. "Rather an understatement."

It is horrifying but not entirely surprising; we have seen it before. I, certainly, have always lived in a world suffused with savage anti-Americanism. In my childhood the grown-ups were all convinced that the apparently inevitable nuclear holocaust would be the fault of the Americans. In my student years I saw the Vietnam war used as an excuse for violence and intimidation that would have made Mao Tse-tung proud -indeed, my contemporaries were waving his Little Red Book, his guide to mass murder, as they attempted to storm the American embassy. I saw many of those who now weep like crocodiles burning the Stars and Stripes.

How strange, I thought, even then. They wore Levi jeans, drank Coke, watched American television and listened to American music. Something inside them loved America, even as something outside them hated her. They were like fish that hated the very sea in which they swam -the whisky, in Samuel Beckett's words, that bore a grudge against the decanter. Like the Beirut elite, they wanted to have their hamburgers and eat them, to bite the Yankee hand that fed them.

But there is something more terrible, more gravely unjust here than 1960s student stupidity, more even than the dancing of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th. They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling -we hope -of Chinese communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered.

Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are. America is free, very democratic and hugely successful. Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us. Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours. Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world.

"People should think," David Halberstam, the writer, says from the blasted city of New York, "what the world would be like without the backdrop of American leadership with all its flaws over the past 60 years." Probably, I think, a bit like hell.

There is a lot wrong with America and terrible things have been done in her name. But when the chips are down all the most important things are right. On September 11 the chips went down.

The Yankophobes were too villanously stupid to get the message. Barely 48 hours after thousands of Americans are murdered, we see the BBC's Question Time with its hand-picked morons in the audience telling Philip Lader, the former US ambassador, that "the world despises America". The studio seethes with ignorance and loathing. Lader looks broken.

Or we have the metropolitan elite on Newsnight Review sneering at Dubya Bush. "So out of touch," Rosie Boycott, the journalist, hisses, "there was no sense of his feeling for people." Alkarim Jivani, the writer, wades in by trashing Bush's response when asked how he was feeling: "Well, I'm a loving guy; also I've got a job to do." Jivani thinks this isn't good enough, no emotion.

Hang on; I thought the bien-pensant left wanted restraint from Bush. And that "loving guy" quote was the most beautiful thing said since September 11. Poetically compressed, rooted in his native dialect, it evoked duty and stoicism. But these are not big values in Islington.

Or here's George Monbiot in The Guardian: "When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities." I see; so the United States, the victim of this attack, is to be condemned for somehow deviously making money out of it. I'll run it up the flagpole, George, but I suspect only the Question Time audience will salute.

Or here's Suzanne Moore in The Mail on Sunday: "In this darkest hour my heart goes out to America. But my head knows that I have not supported much of what has been done in its name in the past. As hard as it is, there are many who feel like this. Now is not the time to pretend otherwise." So, Suzanne, how many corpses does it take for it to be a good time to pretend otherwise? Do you laugh at the funerals of people with whom you disagreed?

Or here are two more venomous voices, both quoted in The Guardian. Patricia Tricker from Bedale: "Now they know how the Iraqis feel." And Andrew Pritchard from Amsterdam: "If the US's great peacetime defeat results in defeating America's overweening ego as the world's sole remaining superpower, it will be a highly productive achievement." Would that achievement be the dead children, Andrew, or the crushed firemen?

Anti-Americanism has long been the vicious, irrational, global ideology of our time. "It combines," says Sir Michael Howard, the historian, "the nastiest elements of the right and left." It is dangerous and stupid and, in the days after September 11, shockingly distasteful.

In the name of God, more than 6,000 noncombatants are dead, more than 6,000 families bereaved. From what dark wells of malevolence springs this dreadful reflex desire to dance on their graves?

From history, says Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington: "There's an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and ultimately anti-modern theme that always emerges to criticise the dominant power of the day. It was directed at the cities of northern Italy, then in the 17th century at the Netherlands, then at Britain when she picked up the torch of capitalism, and now it's the US."

So at the most basic level America is loathed simply because she's on top. The world leader is always trashed simply for being the leader. The terms of the trashing are remarkably consistent. Nineteenth-century Germans, Lind points out, responded to Britain's dominance by saying, in effect, "they may be rich but we have soul". That is exactly what many Europeans and all anti-Americans are now saying: we're for God or culture or whatever against mammon. This is inaccurate -America has more soul, culture and a lot more God than any of her critics -but it is the predictably banal rhetoric of envy.

This form of "spiritual" anti-Americanism has close links with anti-semitism. "Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism are closely interwoven historically," says Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University. "Not because there are so many Jews here -there weren't always -but because both are in part about fear of openness, rootlessness, change, the modern anomic world: Jews as a placeless people, America as a history-less land."

As Jon Ronson recently demonstrated in his book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, almost every crazed cult in the world believes there is a global Jewish conspiracy run from Hollywood and Wall Street. Those bien-pensant chatterers are, I'm sure, anti-racists all, but they are swimming in deeper, darker, crazier waters than they imagine.

Judt's word "openness" is important. The fanatic -in Islington or Kabul - hates openness because he finds himself relativised and turns on the very society which permits his freedom of expression.

George Orwell noted in 1941: "In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi." Elsewhere he wrote of the "unadmitted motive" of pacifism as being "hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism".

So bog-standard anti-Americanism in the developed world is a dark, irrational combination of hate-the-father/leader and infantile fantasies of rebellion and control. It is a reflex hatred of home -the place that provides succour or, in this case, Levi's. But of course there are local nuances. The French have, in contrast to the British, been consistently anti-American at governmental and diplomatic levels.

"It is a long-standing resentment born of 1940," says Judt. "A sense that France was once the universal, modern reference or model and is now just a second-class power with a declining international language to match. There is a loose analogy with British complexes about the US -us in decline, them over-mighty -but in France it is complicated by a layer of hyper-revolutionism among the intelligentsia in the years between 1947 and 1973, precisely the time when the US rise to world domination was becoming uncomfortably obvious."

In Britain we did not have the Sartres and the Derridas leading us to political and philosophical extremes. But members of the British left had something simpler: a burning hatred for America for disproving almost everything they ever believed. They so wanted rampantly capitalist America to be wrong that even Stalin hadn't quite turned them off Russia.

There was, admittedly, a pause in this crude British form of anti-Americanism. When Bill Clinton was elected president, the British left suddenly constructed a fantasy America as co-pioneer of the Third Way. The new mandarins -Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie -said that America was where it was all happening. It was a fantasy because Clinton, even to himself, was window-dressing. Capitalist, religious America had merely put on this smiling mask. When Bush was elected the left felt betrayed.

Much of the present wave of anti-Americanism, and especially the awful contempt for Bush, springs from this sense of betrayal. It also springs from an inability to escape from post-cold war attitudes. "The anxiety about American behaviour now," says Hugh Brogan, research professor of history at Essex University, "is a hangover from cold war anxiety about nuclear war."

Fear of the bomb was such that it provoked in some an abiding belief that at any moment we would be fried or irradiated because of the miscalculation of some mad American in a cowboy hat -an image burnt into many brains by Stanley Kubrick's apocalyptic film Dr Strangelove.

Somehow the Soviet Union, probably because of ignorance, escaped our disapproval. It was all wrong, if just about understandable, then. Now it has become a pernicious and destructive failure to know a friend when we see one.

With the cold war confrontations gone, the anti-capitalism, anti-globalisation movements abandoned potentially rational, cultural and environmental anxieties in favour of a monstrous random bag of anti-American loathing. And, of course, the Middle East seemed to provide a clear case of the arrogant, bullying superpower persecuting the poor.

The idea of the bully fits neatly with one of the most grotesquely enduring of all anti-American beliefs: that Americans are all dumb Yanks. This is a delusion of the right as much as the left and it began with Harold Macmillan's absurd aspiration, later taken up by Harold Wilson, that somehow Britain should play Athens to America's Rome.

The idea was that America was this big, blundering lummox and we were these terribly refined deep thinkers. Precisely the same attitude inspires the raised eyebrows and condescending tut-tutting of leftish dinner party opinion. They're so naive, say the chatterers, so innocent -and this, sadly, leads them to do such terrible things.

Well, I've spent some time among the American intelligentsia and I have been awestruck and humbled. They are, without doubt, the best educated, most cultivated and cleverest people in the world. They are also the most humane. There are 30 or more American universities where our best and brightest would be struggling to keep up. Apart from that, how could we be so dumb as to accuse the nation of Updike, Bellow, Roth, DeLillo, Ashbery, Dylan, of Terence Malick, The Simpsons, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of stupidity, let alone innocence?

The roots of this are obvious. We want the bully to be thick for the same reason as we want the beautiful model to be thick. We can't bear the possibility of somebody having strength or beauty as well as brains.

In fairness, the stupidity charge is partly fuelled by one of the odder forms of anti-Americanism: American anti-Americanism. There has always been, within the US, cultivated East and West Coast elites who take the charge of stupidity seriously and feel they have to apologise for the embarrassment of the unsophisticated masses of the Midwest or deep South.

At its best this produces the brilliant satire of Randy Newman, at its worst the mandarin, Europhile posing of Gore Vidal. The masses bite back with their own form of anti-Americanism -a hatred of the elites. The Rev Jerry Falwell has already made common cause with the terrorists by blaming the attack on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians". To Falwell modern America really is the Great Satan.

However, it is Middle Eastern anti-Americanism that is the burning issue of the moment. Again this is deeply misunderstood by the chatterers of the West. For them it is simply a matter of Israel, apparently a clear case of a surrogate bullying on America's behalf, and of oil, a clear case of American greed swamping all other human considerations.

In fact, America has always had more allies in the region than it has had enemies -although, this being the Middle East, allies become enemies and vice versa with bewildering rapidity. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and her allies worked to subvert the secular Arab nationalist power of President Nasser of Egypt by backing Islamicist groups. Good idea, bad tactics. These groups started out pro-American and became anti. The unwelcome result was the more or less total destruction of nationalism and the creation of the powerful religious movement that now haunts Arab politics.

Israel forms a part but not the whole of this picture. Islamicism makes it a larger part because of an ancient enmity that goes back to the story of the prophet's betrayal by Jewish tribes and, more recently, to the defeat and expulsion of the Moors from Christian Europe.

In this context, Arab hardliners see Israel as a further Christian-backed offensive against the Islamic world. Even without Israel, the idea of such an offensive would still be a powerful imaginative force.

People who suggest September 11 would never have happened if America had pulled back from her support for Israel are almost certainly wrong. Israel is not even in the foreground of Bin Laden's murderous imagination. The Palestinians have actually complained that he cares nothing for them. For Bin Laden and for many more moderate Muslims, the turning point was the Gulf war in 1990-91.

"Contrary to popular belief that was the first real build-up of American military force in the region," says Dr Clive Jones at Leeds University. "This was in Saudi Arabia, a country with the holiest sites in Islam at Mecca and Medina. This created a new form of anti-Americanism that cannot in any way be related to Israel."

To these newest and most savage anti-Americans, Israel is secondary. The primary crime is blasphemy against the holiest Islamic soil. One widely circulated picture of two women GIs in a Jeep, their shirts unbuttoned to their waists, driving across the Arabian desert, was enough to inflame the sensibilities of thousands of devout Muslims and to fling the most unstable of them into the arms of the extremists. They had a point but not one that justifies murder. Islam, at heart, is as peaceful a creed as Christianity.

The truth about the Gulf war was that the Americans saved an Arab state, Kuwait, from Saddam Hussein, the most savage oppressor in the region. They would have been as surely damned for not doing this as much as they are now damned for doing it. Now they are also damned by the chatterers for keeping the pressure on Saddam. Do the chatterers know what Saddam is still doing? I do and I'm with the Americans.

Of course America has made terrible mistakes in the Middle East. Much resentment would have been and may still be prevented by a humane settlement with the Palestinians. But America was usually trying to do the right thing, always with the collusion of large sections, if not the majority, of the Arab population. As Winston Churchill said, the Americans usually do the right thing once they have tried all the alternatives.

Yet anti-Americanism has become the savage reflex of the entire region. It is the result of cynical manipulation by, mostly, appalling Arab governments and by extremists who wish to relaunch a medieval war of civilisations between Christianity and Islam.

This is the anti-Americanism that informs the ignorant dinner party guests of the West who, in their comfortable stupidity, pretend to have more in common with fanatical theocrats than they do with the land of The Simpsons and John Updike.

worst of all is the deep vacuity of this reflex malevolence. In truth there is little that can be said about the attack on America. Our "thinkers" are trapped in a history they do not understand. They can grasp global conflict only as a series of confrontations between competing humanist ideologies -most obviously capitalism and communism. But this is something different. It is a confrontation between civilisation and an atavistic savagery that has no time for the delicate ways of life we have, at such terrible cost, constructed. Unable to see this, the chatterers must search for something to say.

"It's not for nothing they're called the chattering classes," observes Brogan.

So they blame the victim. It is a heartbreaking spectacle of delusion turned to savagery. What has America done wrong? In the days since September 11, its president and people have done nothing but demonstrate dignity and restraint. Bush will lash out, the chatterers said. But he hasn't yet. Bush is a bumbling hick, they sneered. But he isn't. Even CNN, that usually incomprehensible tumult of undigested events, has been steady and calm, devoid of all trace of prejudice, xenophobia or empty emotion.

Civilisation? It lies exactly 3,000 miles to the west of where I write and some of it is in ruins. I just wish it was closer.

I am sick of my generation's whining ingratitude, its wilful, infantile loathing of the great, tumultuous, witty and infinitely clever nation that has so often saved us from ourselves. But I am heartened by something my 19- year-old daughter said: "America has always been magic to us, we don't understand why you lot hate it so much."

Anti-Americanism has never been right and I hope it never will be. Of course there are times for criticism, lampoons, even abuse. But this is not one of them. This is a time when we are being asked a question so simple that it is almost embarrassing -a question that should silence the Question Time morons, the sneering chatterers and the cold warriors, a question so elemental, so fundamental, so pristine that, luxuriating in our salons, we had forgotten it could even be asked. So face it, answer it, stand up and be counted.

Whose side are you really on?

quote:
I'm not showing concern that you may be oversimplifying your argument - I am showing concern that you are oversimplifying your argument.

The thing is, I could go really deep into this matter.
First I would have to let you know my reasons for assuming such a cynical standpoint, and then I would talk a bit about what I believe - the advantages of having an anarchic, self-regulating society (the anarchist governs himself) free of perverse governmental influence, so you would have my background and understand why I say some of the things I say.

Then we would be talking about mercantilism, and the great imperialist powers from the past, from Alexander to England and then America, and about the historical mindset which generated Roosevelt's "Big Stick" policy; the discussion would ramificate to ethics, history of international relationships and -I'm sure - to wild speculations about the possibility of a near utopian society where the main rule would be the laissez vivre, in contrast to Hobbe's views of the man as man's principal enemy. It is a rich subject which would demand a lot of effort to be covered and I don't think neither of us has the free time or the disposition to do that.

What you consider manicheism from my part (I'll talk about it again later), it's just me being practical and focused.
What you consider to be oversimplicity is just me getting rid of all rethorical argumentation and presenting things as they are reflected in smaller correlated substructures - analogy is possible because the very State was created to be a "virtual man", an eidolon - its hands were the Trade, its chest was the Army, its head was the Government etc (and this is not just me talking).
If I seem to give human characteristics to America's actions (even if it's you who often talk about an "angelic" or "demonic" America), I do so not because I believe that there is an innate human attribute such as "consciousness" to a country, I'm using it as a tool to make it easier for me to manipulate intricate concepts that escape my grasp in a foreign language. (Portuguese is my primary language), and backed up by the Generic State Theory that I mentioned previously.

quote:
Your argument appears to be in alignment with the logical fallacy known as the "Either/Or Fallacy". You insist that if the U.S. has been greedy, irresponsible, or inconsiderate, it logically follows that the U.S. has not been generous, responsible, considerate.

I'm not implying this. I never even mentioned something like this or intended to make my statements sound like this. You are jumping to assumptions.
quote:
You make it sound as if one President with one staff and one citizenry has been guiding the U.S. for the last hundred years with a unilateral approach to every single issue. Again, I repeat : It is not that simple.

It is. One never makes it to presidency if he's not the right kind of person. You might as well have one President and one staff or thousands of Presidents with thousands of differents staffs. As long as the dominant classe's interest is profit, all the puppet's - I mean, President's - agendas will be alarmingly similar.

quote:
Rather, your argument implicitly assumes that the U.S. is purely anomalous. Your supposition that altering the behaviour of the corrupted U.S. will give the rest of the uncorrupted world the ability to return to it's original uncorrupted state is inherently flawed.

"Implicitly", huh? Newsflash: I never said it. If it's not in the text, I didn't mean it.

quote:
Your logical fallacies...

My logical fallacies will cease to exist when you stop discovering stuff that I never said or intended to. Work with what's in the text, not with its possible hidden meanings.

quote:
you've clearly fallen into the pit of Manichean diachotomy.

Nothing farther from the truth. The reason why I'm focusing on the United States should be obvious. First, it's one of the parts involved in the conflict. Second, it is the strongest global influence and its sanctions and embargos dictate - not through force, but through economic blackmailing, such as the lowest tax rates for importing oranges from Brazil - much of the behaviours in its "little regions" all over the world.
You don't stop a flood with buckets, you go to the dam and fix the hole. As you say further in your answer, America has this huge economic gravitational field, which would cause other nations under it's tutoring to follow lead in case a dramatic change in foreign policies was taken.

An inner diplomatic joke tells that American diplomacy uses the "goat in the room" routine. They put a goat in the room and start arguing with you. Then they agree to get the goat out of the room and make you think you made some progress. They follow the strict rule set ever since the "Big Stick" era - "What's in it for us?".

Again, I don't think USA is the only pirate ship etc, and I know that there is a lot of conivence from the rich classes in impoverished nations.
But since we are dealing with the issue of a terrorist attack which allegedly has its roots in hatred towards America, I think it's for the sake of practicity (practicality (????) (sp?).

quote:
You clearly fail to differentiate between the inconsiderate behaviour of multinational corporate bodies and the international and national policies that make their behaviours possible.

That statement alone should have been enough to make you see that I'm aware of other problems plaguing the world. That was its intention, not imply some correlation - even if the correlation exists, because it does - between corporate abuse and governmental complacency. That statement should have been enough for you to notice that I don't believe USA is the root of all evil, and that there is all sorts of things that demand our attention. Strangely, it failed.

quote:
Now I find mention of some sort of injustice perpetrated by someone other than the U.S., but your bias is still clear.

Not too fast. I only mentioned the MIddle East because it is the other side involved in this conflict. Not because I'm manicheist but because I am focused in the bilateral conflict that is taking place.

quote:
On one side of your argument, you petition for an emotional reaction to this concept that the rest of the world is somehow right-thinking, while the U.S. is ostensibly wrong-thinking

The US government is majoritarily wrong-acting. As for the rest of the world, I didn't say a word about it.

quote:
Here's another false premise : "From the brutal CIA opertions to undermine free press in the EUA and in the world,". We can all acknowledge that the CIA does fucked up things from time to time. I'm taking for granted that the "EUA" example you give is a documented instance of aforementioned fucked-up'edness. However, you go on to ominously intone, "...and in the world,". The problem, here, is that the continuation of your argument takes for granted unvalidated data. Even if the first example is true, the second does not necessarily follow suit - and does not logically in fact follow suit, as it's not a specific example.

I could give you specific examples, but then you would say that I wouldn't be making any points, only quoting and contextually removing them from another's writing for the sake of backing a primarily emotional standpoint. In fact, you already said this.

quote:
Your primary opinion appears to be : "Good. Now that the U.S. got what it deserved, maybe they'll stop fucking up the rest of the completely innocent population of Mother Earth,".

"appears to be", huh?

quote:
The problem here isn't that some of what you say isn't true - you have reasonable examples of 'wrong-doings' on the part of the U.S. The problem here is, you continue to draw conclusions and make assumptions that do not logically follow, and clearly discount any facts to the contrary.

I don't. Thee are stuff that I think is great about America, the sense of enterprise, the logical approach to problem-solving, the most balanced sense of self-criticism, humor etc.
It is a great country with a great people. What bothers me it this huge pile of bodies in the middle of your living rooms that you choose not to notice.

(the following is just a quick comment about something that I just thought. It is slightly related to the main body of the discussion but is not a logical consequence of it. You can skip you non-sequitur scan routine in this paragraph)

Progress must be made, a cynical person would say. We would be worse without the USA. To an extent I can see and agree with some of the this. The West has benefitted - from a technological point of view - from the Big Brother's presence.
But these benefits do not occur as a natural consequence of America's actions. They only happen when America think its fit for them to happen, or when the world's eye for some reason starts paying attention (as in East Timor). There is no free lunch. It's all a big market.
And in the end, internet connections and cheper automobiles don't pay the pain. Ask one of the mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

(back to the business)

And I would take care when citing USA's humanitarian aides through the world. At their best they're good PR jobs. At their worst they are adding insult to injury, as in South Africa, or when in the 70's it was offered to Nicaragua's government a monetary aid, as long as Nicaragua could prove that they had sanitized their economy and could present a good looking fiscal book to IMF investors - only that the USA was the primary responsible for the whole collapse of Nicaragua's economy, and everybody knew that.

quote:
the U.S. is out here in this massive gray morass with the rest of the world.

You say "the U.S. is out there"... I would say "the U.S government is out there"...
I didn't make the mistake of mixing up America's small scattered and all-powerful oligarchies with its people. It was the people who went to the streets to fight for the women's rights, black people's rights, or against Vietnam. It was the government who hit them in the face with big sticks.

quote:
To listen to your argument, though, I would've thought you were sure the world was black and white, with the U.S. as the only party in the black. And maybe those nasty Middle-Eastern oligarchs.

And, with the words you choose, you certainly implicate that us stupid-ass U.S. citizens need to wake the hell up and deal with this shit. What about those oppressed Middle-Eastern guys? Shouldn't they be overthrowing their horribly oppresive oligarchies and changing the world with every move they make?

As I said before, they're blinded by an interpretation of the Kuran that says basically that suffering in life grants paradise in the afterlife. And if you die in battle it's even better because virgins will be waiting for you to be deflowered. You get the point.
History does not exist for those people. It is a never-happening. They've reached ultimate peace in their poverty, and have no idea that things could be different, and that the life of a faithful doesn't have to be a never-ending struggle.

At least they are blinded by a theological/philosophical/religious constructo, which is perverse but says a LOT about those people's spiritual fortitude. Others are blinded by Buffy or the Superbowl.

quote:
If you pointed out that the point just made was a logical fallacy, you'd be correct.

I would never say that. I would rather try to understand what you meant and try to answer that.

quote:
I also know that the root of injustice is in the minds and hearts of people like you and me, not in "The System(tm)".

Just for the records, I dont believe in an organized "System". It's more like scattered tribal organizations each one ripping off what they can, I think.

quote:
The root of injustice begins with faulty arguments demonizing opponents who aren't present to speak for themselves.

That would be a feat, since we are not talking about someone who could actually come in and talk, but which is an intrincated machinery of exploration which assumes different forms through history and can afford the best PR in the world.