[lit-ideas] Re: Max Boot

  • From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 14:20:12 -0500

Joerg: I did say your language resounded exactly the worst Nazi jargon, and I hoped to get an explanation or even some sign of uneasiness from you - is it really ok for you to sound like a Nazi?



Eric: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a German of your generation, aggressive national self-defense may always smell like the Brown Shirts.

Do CIA "crimes" bother me? Not as much as CIA ineptitude. The old joke during the 1990s was that you could tell a CIA assassination bombing because everyone except the intended target was killed. Syrian and Iranian intelligence forces are much more competent at bombing and assassination, for example.

But let's talk about culture and humanity. Essential to any cultured mind, it seems, is a grasp of history, of how humans really behave, of the unchanging nature of statecraft as nations and groups vie for control and power, and of how they enlist moral naifs in what are essentially amoral attempts to gain and maintain power.

Take the Hague Peace Conference of 1899. The Russian Czar proposed it and did a lot to promote it, primarily because Russia lacked the means of developing and fielding a good army. It seemed like a great moral advance at the time, but was really just a way for Russia to try to minimize its risks in conflicts. The moral naifs were singing the Czar's praises.

The Conference managed to ban dum-dum bullets. All the other restrictions the Conference imposed, such as on poison gas and aerial bombardment, were ignored the moment hostilities began in WW I.

Understanding that most of the positive achievements of "culture" -- such as the Hague Conference laying the groundwork for the Geneva Convention -- are realized against a backdrop of ceaseless amoral struggles for advantage ... this would seem to be essential to any cultured person's understanding of geopolitics.

The "culture and humanity" you propose strikes me as a form of denial or wishful thinking, not true culture. Or maybe you are a Platonist and I am Aristotelean.

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