George Soros Goes Retarded
George Soros is clearly trying to give Dennis Kucinich a run for his money in the loony-toons department. Just take a look at
this article in the Atlantic.
It is generally agreed that September 11, 2001, changed the course of history. But we must ask ourselves why that should be so. How could a single event, even one involving 3,000 civilian casualties, have such a far-reaching effect?
Well, see nation-states exist to protect the lives of their citizens, which means when foreign-nationals commit mass-murder on those selfsame citizens, the state has an obligation to act, otherwise it's failed in its purpose.
The answer lies not so much in the event itself as in the way the United States, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, responded to it.
Because if terrorists had killed three-thousand people on Clinton's watch, we would've shrugged and gone on with our business. Jebus, Soros sounds like some sort of right wingnut.
Admittedly, the terrorist attack was historic in its own right. Hijacking fully fueled airliners and using them as suicide bombs was an audacious idea, and its execution could not have been more spectacular. The destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center made a symbolic statement that reverberated around the world, and the fact that people could watch the event on their television sets endowed it with an emotional impact that no terrorist act had ever achieved before.
No, the destruction of a couple ugly neo-Bauhaus skyscrapers didn't reverberate around the world. The toppling of the towers had no emotional impact.
The death of three thousand people, the shots of them leaping from windows rather than burn alive --
that's what shook the world. If the terrorists had killed three thousand people in a non-descript mid-western town, it would've had the same effect.
The aim of terrorism is to terrorize, and the attack of September 11 fully accomplished this objective.
No shit, Sherlock. Thanks for enlightening us.
Even so, September 11 could not have changed the course of history to the extent that it has if President Bush had not responded to it the way he did. He declared war on terrorism, and under that guise implemented a radical foreign-policy agenda whose underlying principles predated the tragedy. Those principles can be summed up as follows: International relations are relations of power, not law; power prevails and law legitimizes what prevails.
Welcome to the real world, Mr. Sorors, here are your copies of
The Prince,
The Art of War,
Leviathan, and
Essence of Decision.
The United States is unquestionably the dominant power in the post-Cold War world; it is therefore in a position to impose its views, interests, and values. The world would benefit from adopting those values, because the American model has demonstrated its superiority. The Clinton and first Bush Administrations failed to use the full potential of American power. This must be corrected; the United States must find a way to assert its supremacy in the world.
Well, Papa Bush certainly failed, but Clinton had no compunction about exercising American power when he saw fit, even without UN approval -- whether he yielded it to the best effect is another question entirely.
This foreign policy is part of a comprehensive ideology customarily referred to as neoconservatism, though I prefer to describe it as a crude form of social Darwinism. I call it crude because it ignores the role of cooperation in the survival of the fittest, and puts all the emphasis on competition. In economic matters the competition is between firms; in international relations it is between states. In economic matters social Darwinism takes the form of market fundamentalism; in international relations it is now leading to the pursuit of American supremacy.
Nice strawman, Soros, but does it sing and dance?
The reason neoconservatives are
neo is that
they're former liberals with a hard-core view of foreign policy, and don't fit the above description.
Not all the members of the Bush Administration subscribe to this ideology, but neoconservatives form an influential group within it. They publicly called for the invasion of Iraq as early as 1998.
This is rather disingenuous -- Soros makes it sound like they just spontaneously started advocating invasion for no reason.
1998 was the year
Hussein kicked UNSCOM inspectors out of the country; after some negotiations with Kofi Annan, Hussein let them return, but immediately began stonewalling. At the time, the so-called neoconservatives advocated ending the problem once and for all by invading, but the news media largely ignored them -- and the crisis in general -- because they were more interested in
Monica! Indeed, when Clinton finally told the inspectors to get out of Dodge and launched
a major air-campaign, many people, especially the numb-nuts Republicans pushing the Monica scandal,
accused him of wagging the dog; even if he'd agreed with the neoconservative plan, he was in no position to do anything about it.
The point here is that the neoconservatives developed their position on Iraq when it became obvious that the inspection regime was a game of silly-buggers. You might disagree with that conclusion, but saying "They've been advocating this since 1998" as though it's a bad thing is absolutely idiotic. If anyone should be criticized for advocating the invasion, it should be those Republicans who support it now, but criticized Clinton for doing anything at all.
Their ideas originated in the Cold War and were further elaborated in the post-Cold War era. Before September 11 the ideologues were hindered in implementing their strategy by two considerations: George W. Bush did not have a clear mandate (he became President by virtue of a single vote in the Supreme Court), and America did not have a clearly defined enemy that would have justified a dramatic increase in military spending.
Well, that and Bush ran on a platform that was, if not isolationist, then the equivalent of the shy girl in class who doesn't talk to anyone unless they initiate the conversation.
September 11 removed both obstacles. President Bush declared war on terrorism, and the nation lined up behind its President. Then the Bush Administration proceeded to exploit the terrorist attack for its own purposes. It fostered the fear that has gripped the country in order to keep the nation united behind the President, and it used the war on terrorism to execute an agenda of American supremacy. That is how September 11 changed the course of history.
I don't know why he's pussyfooting around instead of coming out and saying what he's clearly implying -- 11 September was the Reichstag fire, and the PATRIOT Act the
Ermachtigungsgesetz
Think I'm over-reaching? Read on:
The supremacist ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to the principles of an open society, which recognize that people have different views and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth.
"Supremacist ideology," "opposition to the principles of an open society," draw your own conclusions about what Soros is implying.
But no matter, what Soros says is a mischaracterization of American principles. The philosophy laid out by Hobbes and Locke holds that not only is the government responsible for the safety of the citizenry, but that we as citizens are responsible to our fellow man -- if the government infringes on the rights of someone else, we have an obligation to do everything in our power to stop the government, up to and including overthrowing it. Hobbes and Locke limited themselves to an individual's relation to his own government, but following their reasoning to its logical extreme, our obligation should be applied to all men, whether they're citizens of our nation or not, whether they're oppressed by our nation or not.
As a practical matter, we cannot end all injustices on Earth, and must pick our fights, but as a moral matter, we must work to end tyrrany wherever it lives, which is what the neoconservatives (the real ones, not Rumsfeld and Rice) want. Soros' morally relativist whining, this idea that we mustn't oppress the oppressors, is imbecilic, facile, and interminable (I've only managed to fisk a third of it), and I have to wonder why, other than his vast wealth, the
Atlantic would deem it worthy of print.
