Admission of Omissions Past
George Will made a comment in his Sunday column in Newsweek that bears repeating here:
With that paradigm, wars - as many people who identify as neoconservative think – can be thought of as a tool to be used in the name of progress. Since America has the biggest hammer, then it is apropos it uses it as often as it does.
Note here, I have yet to say whether I think America has a right to act as it does and has. I’ll get to that in a second. The premise alone, where George Will admits that essentially the world is a hard and warring prefecture of the universe, shows the dishonesty of political discourse. To wit, America has to do all the things that it has (Vietnam, Iraq, or conversely the allowance of other despotic regimes) for the good of most people.
There are two questions, which I think are prescient in this. (1) Who made America the cop? (2) If we stop one regime because we say it’s “bad,” then why are we not going to countries in Africa or other continents to do the same thing?
Well, firstly, the U.S. is the cop because, as I mentioned before it, has the most guns. Second, the U.S. doesn’t go to other despotic countries because there is nothing there, except for the people who live there who are either in a war, or suffering at the hands of their leader. The point is, you can be a jerk of a leader, but as long as you’re not hurting anyone outside of your country and keeping the political killings to a sensible number, the U.S. won’t bother you.
So, there’s another problem: America’s hypocrisy. Even in admitting that America has to be the cop of the world, we’re still left with the question of why we treat one country different than another. Not only that, but on another hypocritical note, who makes these “rules” of how the world works, and how can the United States subscribe to them one minute, and ignore them the next, still while telling others to follow?
To believe that is to believe, as liberals do, that harmony is humanity's natural condition, so discord is a remediable defect in arrangements.George Will, in that sentence, is stating what most pundits and politicians never do out of fear for political correctness. Will’s statement is an admission that “social order” is a human invention. Therefore, since wars are a natural human endeavor then one would have to simply admit that such is the way things are, and prepare a military or society to deal with the world accordingly.
With that paradigm, wars - as many people who identify as neoconservative think – can be thought of as a tool to be used in the name of progress. Since America has the biggest hammer, then it is apropos it uses it as often as it does.
Note here, I have yet to say whether I think America has a right to act as it does and has. I’ll get to that in a second. The premise alone, where George Will admits that essentially the world is a hard and warring prefecture of the universe, shows the dishonesty of political discourse. To wit, America has to do all the things that it has (Vietnam, Iraq, or conversely the allowance of other despotic regimes) for the good of most people.
There are two questions, which I think are prescient in this. (1) Who made America the cop? (2) If we stop one regime because we say it’s “bad,” then why are we not going to countries in Africa or other continents to do the same thing?
Well, firstly, the U.S. is the cop because, as I mentioned before it, has the most guns. Second, the U.S. doesn’t go to other despotic countries because there is nothing there, except for the people who live there who are either in a war, or suffering at the hands of their leader. The point is, you can be a jerk of a leader, but as long as you’re not hurting anyone outside of your country and keeping the political killings to a sensible number, the U.S. won’t bother you.
So, there’s another problem: America’s hypocrisy. Even in admitting that America has to be the cop of the world, we’re still left with the question of why we treat one country different than another. Not only that, but on another hypocritical note, who makes these “rules” of how the world works, and how can the United States subscribe to them one minute, and ignore them the next, still while telling others to follow?
Comments