← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · JoseyWales
Thread ID: 19074 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2005-07-10
2005-07-10 04:14 | User Profile
Robert W. Merry I seen this author talking on cspan and some of the things he mentions seemed interesting enough (such as that the idea that empires rise and fall etc) for me to look up his book he was promoting.
I know absolutely nothing about this man, but the few arguments i heard him make were against the neocon idea of remaking the world in americas image, and didnt really seem from the lefty/liberal/michael moore standpoint.
[url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743266676/ref=pd_sxp_f/102-8233432-7921710?v=glance&s=books]link to book[/url]
Anyone familiar with this person ?
2005-07-24 23:33 | User Profile
Hey, I'm reading Sands of Empire right now. Not bad. Basically, the author takes a skeptical view of the idea that history is a record of the evolution of all the world's peoples toward democracy. He leans toward the cyclic view of history, the view of Spengler and, most recently, Huntington, and away from the view of Fukayama/Friedman and the Bushies, that we are "progressing"(or should even try to "progress," through the use of military force) to a unified, democratic world.
He critiques the neocons for their support of spreading democracy by invading countries we don't like, but avoids(so far, I'm not finished reading)commenting on the Israel-Likud-Zionist-neocon nexus.
Which is about like writing a history of the Civil War era and leaving out the role the connections between abolitionists and northern politicians played in making the war inevitable and prolonged.
Still, for a mainstream work, Sands of Empire is pretty good. The voices against our imperialist foreign policy in the name of democracy and multiculturalism seem to be growing.
But, as yet, they won't call a spade a spade, or a traitor a traitor.
2005-07-25 00:19 | User Profile
The only way to redirect a river is by force, by blowing up mountains and scarring the earth, people have to learn to live with that around them by making it work in their favor and not by changing it.
What the US is doing is a crime against man and the planet itself, and the benefit that anyone will receive by what is happening will be very small when you compared it to the damage being done.
Before we used to have Arabs who disagreed whith all the help that we are giving to the Zionist state of Israel because those weapons could be used against Arabs but now we have hundred of times enemys for invading their home land.....from "liberators" we are now encalcelators.
We are no longer fighting the "enemy" to control them but to defend ourselves, and the war is not even in American land as of yet.
Even the UK will pull out of Iraq one of this days and we will be alone, and the Jews? they are making provisions to attach themselves to a new country and that will problably be China, nothing like having a leech in your back sucking your blood out.