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[Daniel Nexon]

irtheory-owner at yahoogroups.com
Delivered-To: mailing list irtheory at yahoogroups.com
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:43:00 -0400
Subject: Re: [irtheory] War ain't beanbag. Irony is conserved.
Reply-To: irtheory at yahoogroups.com

>
> At 3:37 PM +0100 6/13/04, Lee James wrote:
>> I'd like to hear how children who werent old enough to pronounce the
>> colour were 'reds' who were rightly tortured (apparently) in your
>> view, as well as the many women raped and tortured at the hands of
>> SOA graduates.
>
> Funny how "liberals" always do the debits and not the credits in
> these grotesque calculations. Shall we count the
> several-orders-of-magnitude number of starved (*and* butchered)
> children in various Marxist "paradises" around the world, too? I
> thought not. It wouldn't be "fair".

The quotation marks here, I assume, are a disclaimer. Liberalism is not
Marxism. Nor, for that matter, is support for social democracy. I don't
see how antipathy towards the right-wing dictatorships that committed
gross violations of human rights against opponents seeking peaceful
change or political liberalization translates into having to champion
Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, or whomever.

>
>> I'd also be keen to see evidence of this free-market success of
>> which you talk, because it isn't in central america for the
>> countless millions in poverty.
>
> Freedom, market or otherwise, isn't about the fool's errand of forced
> income redistribution, which is, invariably, what actually causes
> famine and tragedy.

Why do so many on your side of this argument use definitional fiat to
wind up rationalizing Pinochet's reign of terror, Guatemala's genocide
against the Mayans, an so on? Indeed, freedom, on face, isn't about
arbitrary imprisonment or torture. Is taxation for social goods, which
often involves income redistribution, an equivalent violation of
freedom? I'm not so sure.

Income redistribution in the US did not cause famine and tragedy, nor
in the UK, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Denmark, etc. It
seems to me famine and/or tragedy were direct results, however, of the
policies put into place by many graduates of the SOA.
>
> I prefer to think about the McDonald's paradox: No country that has a
> McDonald's has attacked another. :-). We'll see how long *that*
> stands up.

Already happened. Kosovo campaign.


> As for "democracy" somehow being magical, remember that
> Athens brought on the Peloponnesian war, not Sparta.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the supposed democratic peace.
>
>> I'm not sure that it is defensive to defend a country against its
>> own people, when europe did so it was called colonisation.
>
> Yawn. When Europe did it it was called "economics". A word you seem
> to be unfamiliar with. When their economic interests were attacked
> (First the Portuguese, then the Spanish, then The Dutch, then the
> English), surprise, they won. See Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel",

A remarkably flawed book, deployed in an even more remarkably strange
way here. To wit:

> for details. Eventually, having won all these mostly defensive wars,
			^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

These would be?

The goal of the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch, for example,
was to secure monopolies through military coercion... often, in the
process, breaking apart other European powers' monopolies (e.g., the
Dutch struggle against Portugal and Spain).
---
Daniel Nexon
Assistant Professor of Government / School of Foreign Service
Georgetown University
Washington, DC
202-687-2273



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