Our moral Waterloo

[mom cat]

An excellent piece from The Guardian analyzing western moral failures and how the recent scandal in Iraq is not an aberration of western culture but just an extension of it. A must read. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story0,2763,1217382,00html

[boobooday]

1. oh no, the link didn't work

But just from what you've said, I completely agree. Slavery, imperialism, etc. I read Howard Zinn last summer, and I would say what we've seen is consistent with history, sadly enough.

Sometimes we look like we're moving toward something better . . . in some ways . . .

I was thinking about it, and about the cameras, and how Rummy hates them, and how they are actually maybe the best thing ever. Brutality and inhumanity cannot run and hide from digital cameras, and cell phone cameras, and the internet. It's like Rodney King. Surely he wasn't anything new, but facing the ugliness of the behavior can have an impact.

I'm hoping so much for a better tomorrow!

http://www.wgoeshome.com

[Political_Junkie]

2. Link doesn't work n/t

[lectrobyte]

3. Try this http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1217365,00.html

an excellent article. Excerpting a paragraph:

After the collapse of communism, the victorious US increasingly came to see itself as the saviour of the world, and the arbiter - in extremis - of each and every nation's future. If this proposition was less explicit during the Clinton era, it became the organising principle of the Bush regime. Where nations were not prepared to bend to the American will, they were classified as "rogue states" and threatened with force. Barely had the world entered the 21st century when it found itself returning to a century earlier and the exercise of naked imperialism - all in the name, as a century earlier, of western moral virtue.

[RC]

4. Try this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1217365,00.html

[Gman]

5. This sums it all up:

"President Bush claimed last week: "People seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America." On the contrary, they are an integral part of its "true nature and heart": a society that was built on the destruction of the indigenous peoples; that practised racial segregation until 40 years ago; that still incarcerates many of its young black people; that killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese; that has a messianic belief in the applicability of its own values to the rest of the world; that is willing to impose its model by force; that believes itself to be above international law. These too are American values. In this light, the behaviour of the US forces, nurturing a deep sense of racial superiority combined with a disdain for international law, is entirely predictable."