See other Dead Constitution Articles
Title: Iron Man and the Merchants of Death
Source:
Rockwell
URL Source: [None]
Published: May 7, 2008
Author: Jeffrey Tucker
Post Date: 2008-05-07 11:07:58 by ghostdogtxn
Keywords: None
Views: 312
Comments: 20
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: ghostdogtxn (#0)
Good article - thanks.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
There was no Cold War. The World Communists had us before WWII and probably long before we were sold as chattel to the Feral Reserve...
exactly. we must get it through our heads that WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE. that's the reason there are so many contrived wars. by that i am referring to the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on illiteracy, the war on crime, the war on terror. war, war, war=$$$$$$$$$.
My reaction is pretty much, WTF? Weren't these guys our pals just 20 years ago or so? Whose fault is it that they aren't anymore, and who is refusing to talk to whom and make nice? The communists were our "pals" during World War II, that doesn't mean that we didn't do the right thing by parting company after the common enemy was defeated. And the Islamists were never fighting for "freedom," they were fighting for Islamism. I don't think that we should be at war with these people, but I can't stomach the thought of religious nuts of any stripe as kindred spirits. The Ayatollahs are as poisonous to freedom as Karl Marx or John Hagee.
AMERICA ABROAD The human drama, whether played out in history books or headlines, is often not just a confusing spectacle but a spectacle about confusion. The big question these days is which political forces will prevail, those stitching nations together or those tearing them apart ? Here is one optimist's reason for believing unity will prevail over disunity, integration over disintegration. In fact, I'll bet that within the next hundred years (I'm giving the world time for setbacks and myself time to be out of the betting game, just in case I lose this one), nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century--"citizen of the world"--will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st century. All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary. Through the ages, there has been an overall trend toward larger units claiming sovereignty and paradoxically, a gradual diminution of how much true sovereignty any one country actually has. The forerunner of the nation was a prehistoric band clustered around a fire beside a river in a valley. It's members had a language, a set of supernatural beliefs and a repertoire of legends about their ancestors. Eventually they forged primitive weapons and set off over the mountain, mumbling phrases that could be loosely translated as having something to do with "vital national interests" and a "manifest destiny." When they reached the next valley, they massacred and enslaved some weaker band of people they found clustered around some smaller fire and thus became the world's first imperialists. Empires were a powerful force for obliterating natural and demographic barriers and forging connections among far-flung parts of the world. The British left their system of civil service in India, Kenya and Guyana, while the Spaniards, Portuguese and French spread Roman Catholicism to almost every continent. Empire eventually yielded to the nation-state, made up primarily of a single tribe. China, France, Germany and Japan are surviving examples. Yet each of them too is the consequence of a centuries-long process of accretion. It took the shedding of much blood in many valleys for Normandy, Brittany and Gascony to become part of France. Today fewer than 10% of the 186 countries on earth are ethnically homogeneous. The rest are multinational states. Most of them have pushed their boundaries outward, often until they reached the sea. That's how California became part of the U.S. and the Kamchatka Peninsula part of Russia. The main goal driving the process of political expansion and consolidation was conquest. The big absorbed the small, the strong the weak. National might made international right. Such a world was in a more or less constant state of war. From time to time the best minds wondered whether wasn't a hell of a way to run a planet; perhaps national sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all. Dante in the 14th century, Erasmus in the 16th and Grotius in the 17th all envisioned international law as a means of overcoming the natural tendancy of states to settle their differences by force. In the 18th century the Enlightenment--represented by Rousseau in France, Hume in Scotland, Kant in Germany, Paine and Jefferson in the U.S.--gave rise to the idea that all human beings are born equal and should, as citizens, enjoy certain basic liberties and rights, including that of choosing their leaders. Once there was a universal ideology to govern the conduct of nation toward one another. In 1795 Kant advocated a |"peaceful league of democracies". But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible to clinch the case for world government. With the advent of electricity, radio and air travel, the planet has become smaller than ever, its commercial life freer, its nations more inter-dependent and its conflicts bloodier. The price of settling international disputes by force was rapidly becoming too high for the victors, not to mention the vanquished. That conclusion should have been clear enough at the battle of the Somme in 1916; by the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945, it was unavoidable. Once again great minds thought alike: Einstein, Ghandi, Toynbee and Camus all favored giving primacy to interests higher than those of the nation. So, finally, did the statesmen. Each world war inspired the creation of an international organization, The League of Nations in the 1920's and the United Nations in the '40s. The plot thickened with the heavy breathing arrival on the scene of a new species of ideology--expansionist totalitarianism--as perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets. It threatened the very idea of democracy and divided the world. The advocacy of any kind of world government became highly suspect. By 1950 "one-worlder" was a term of derision for those suspected of being wooly-headed naïfs, if not crypto-communists. At the same time, however, Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe spurred the Western democracies to form NATO, history's most ambitious, enduring and successful exercise in collective security. The U.S. and the Soviet Union also scared each other into negotiating nuclear-arms-control treaties that set in place two vital principals: adversary states have a mutual interest in eliminating the danger of strategic surprise, and each legitimately has a say in the composition of the other's arsenal of last resort. The result was further dilution of national sovereignty and a useful precedent for the management of relations between nuclear-armed rivals in the future. The cold war also saw the European Community pioneer the kind of regional cohesion that may pave the way for globalism. Meanwhile, the free world formed multilateral financial institutions that depend on member states' willingness to give up a degree of sovereignty. The International Monetary Fund can virtually dictate fiscal policies, even including how much tax a government should levy on its citizens. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade regulates how much a nation can charge on imports. These organizations can be seen as the proto-ministries of trade, finance and development for a united world. The internal affairs of a nation used to be off limits to the world community. Now the principal of "humanitarian intervention" is gaining acceptance. A turning point came in April 1991, shortly after Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from Kuwait, when the U.N. Security Council authorized allied troops to assist starving Kurds in northern Iraq. Globalization has also contributed to the spread of terrorism, drug trafficking, AIDS and environmental degradation. But because those threats are more than any one nation can cope with on its own, they constitute an incentive for international cooperation. However limited its accomplishments, last month's Earth Summit in Rio signified the participants' acceptance of what Maurice Strong, the main impresario of the event, called "the transcending sovereignty of nature": since the by-products of industrial civilization cross boarders, so must the authority to deal with them. Collective action on a global scale will be easier to achieve in a world already knit together by cables and air waves. The fax machine had much to do with the downfall of tyrants in Eastern Europe. Two years ago I was assigned an interpreter in Estonia who spoke with a slight southern accent because she had learned English watching Dallas, courtesy of TV signals beamed over the border from neighboring Finland. The Cosby Show, aired on South African television, has no doubt helped erode apartheid. The ideological and cultural blending strikes some observers as too much of a good thing. Writing in the Atlantic, Rutgers political scientist Benjamin Barber laments what he calls "McWorld." He also identifies the countertrend, the re-emergence of nationalism in its ugliest, most divisive and violent form. Yet Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Czechoslovakia were part of the world's last, now deceased empire. Their breakup may turn out to be the old business of history, not the wave of the future. National self-assertiveness in the West can be mighty ugly, especially in its more extreme Irish and Basque versions. But when Scots, Quebecois, Catalans and Bretons talk separatism, they are, in the main, actually renegotiating their ties to London, Ottawa, Madrid and Paris. They are the disputatious representatives of a larger, basically positive phenomenon: a devolution of power not only upward toward supranational bodies and outward toward common-wealths and common markets, but also downward toward freer, more autonomous units of administration that permit distinct societies to preserve their cultural identities and govern themselves as much as possible. That American buzzward empowerment--and the European one, subsidiary--is being defined locally, regionally and globally all at the same time. Humanity has discovered, through much trial and horrendous error, that differences need not divide. Switzerland is made up of four nationalities crammed into an area considerably smaller than what used to be Yugoslavia. The air in the Alps is no more conducive to comity than the air in the Balkans. Switzerland has thrived, while Yugoslavia has failed because of what Kant realized 200 years ago: to be in peaceful league with one another, people--and peoples--must have the benefits of democracy. The best mechanism for democracy, whether at the level of the multinational state or that of the planet as a whole, is not an all-powerful Leviathan or centralized superstate, but a federation, a union of separate states that allocate certain powers to a central government while retaining many others for themselves. Federalism has already proved the most successful of all political experiments, and organizations like the World Federalist Association have for decades advocated it as the basis for global government. Federalism is largely an American invention. For all its troubles, including its own serious bout of secessionism 130 years ago and the persistence of various forms of tribalism today, the U.S. is still the best example of a multinational federal state. If that model does indeed work globally, it would be the logical extension of the Founding Fathers' wisdom, therefore a special source of pride for a world government's American constituents. As for humanity as a whole, if federally united, we won't really be so very far from those much earlier ancestors, the ones huddled around that primeval fire beside the river; it's just that by then the whole world will be our valley.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
I agree. I also think that if some Latin American countries elect Marxist dictators, that's their business too. I don't support "regime change," "nation building," or anything of the sort because in the end it harms us as much if not more than it harms the Communists or the Islamists.
The communists were our "pals" during World War II, that doesn't mean that we didn't do the right thing by parting company after the common enemy was defeated. I was as much a true believer in the Cold War while it was going on as anybody else. But, after the fact, viewing how quickly the USSR collapsed, and with the historical knowledge we now have of events in the late forties, it looks more and more as if that parting of company was a put-up job to keep the military-industrial complex thriving. I'm afraid we were suckers. Today, with "Islamism" a much less credible threat to this country than Communism ever was, the put-up job nature of the hostility and confrontation is a lot more obvious.
To reason, indeed, he was not in the habit of attending. His mode of arguing, if it is to be so called, was one not uncommon among dull and stubborn persons, who are accustomed to be surrounded by their inferiors. He asserted a proposition; and, as often as wiser people ventured respectfully to show that it was erroneous, he asserted it again, in exactly the same words, and conceived that, by doing so, he at once disposed of all objections. - Macaulay, "History of England," Vol. 1, Chapter 6, on James II.
Its incredible that the author doesn't know the Iron Man story well enough to write an intelligent article about it. Tony Stark ends up losing everything and landing in the gutter. Elect anyone but Obama, Clinton, or McCain.
Islamism is only a problem among expatriate Muslim communities in western countries. The way to solve this problem is not by going to war with Muslim countries but by putting an end to immigration from those countries. The fact that people like Bush, McCain, Hillary, etc. want more wars while supporting open borders with the third world proves that their real agenda has nothing to do with the "Islamic threat" at all. But it's a convenient cover for people who don't know any better.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
There are two more movies coming and if they stay true to the story line, it will be a "riches to rags to redemption" story line. That's why you have Obadiah Stane in the movie; Stane takes it all away from Stark and sends him into the gutter from where he has to work it all out and emerge. THAT would make a much better article - about how being a merchant of death sends you eventually into the gutter from where you must seek redemption.
Elect anyone but Obama, Clinton, or McCain.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
Part of the comic line is that Stark's own weapons are used against Iron Man consistently. Seems to me that the Government's own weapons (propaganda et al) are being used well against Bush just as they were against Nixon. I hope the next two movies stay true to the basics of the comic story line; Spider-Man seemed to hold pretty true to it so I am hopeful they run this one out properly as well. It'll be a real shock to a lot of people if they do it right and a good lesson in morality and "what goes around comes around" for the masses.
Elect anyone but Obama, Clinton, or McCain.
Wrangel Island?
The U.S. Constitution is no impediment to our form of government.--PJ O'Rourke
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
You say that now, but with global warming, it may become a great vacation paradise.
The U.S. Constitution is no impediment to our form of government.--PJ O'Rourke
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
#2. To: lodwick (#1)
#3. To: ghostdogtxn (#0)
It seems incredible until you realize the short-term memory loss that Americans have toward U.S. foreign policy. The 1980s are not exactly ancient history but in those days, the Reaganites had as a core doctrine of U.S. policy that Islam constituted a valiant ally in the struggle against communism. The Mujahideen in Afghanistan were leading the struggle against Soviet control, and the leaders of this army were courted and celebrated in Washington, particularly by conservatives. We were told that they shared our struggle because they believed in traditional values, freedom, and a strong defense. They were given vast weapons and the CIA assisted in their ultimately successful effort to oust the Soviets.
#4. To: ghostdogtxn (#2)
My conclusion is that the Islamists, by and large, still want to be our friends, but they want to rule their own countries. Our approach has been that we already have plenty of friends, what we need are convenient enemies,
#5. To: ghostdogtxn (#2)
was struck by this article's observation about the short term memories we have about our foreign policies. It is true that in the 80s Islam was our best friend, allies in a fight for freedom.
#6. To: christine (#4)
war, war, war=$$$$$$$$$
The Birth of the Global Nation
By: Strobe Talbot
-------------------
TIME MAGAZINE
July 20, 1992
page # 70
-------------------
UN (United Nations) blue and white helmet targeted by rifle scope crosshairs.
#7. To: Rupert_Pupkin (#5)
#8. To: Rupert_Pupkin (#5)
#9. To: ghostdogtxn (#7)
If Islamic tyranny works as a form of government in Aizerbaijan, good for them. It's NONE OF OUR BUSINESS.
#10. To: Rupert_Pupkin (#5)
#11. To: ghostdogtxn (#0)
#12. To: aristeides (#10)
#13. To: mirage (#11)
#14. To: ghostdogtxn (#13)
He's writing about the movie, not the comic series.
#15. To: mirage (#14)
#16. To: ghostdogtxn (#15)
Well, except that being merchants of death put two guys in the White House, not the gutter.
#17. To: ghostdogtxn (#8)
Russia NEVER had the capability to take a single piece of US territory
#18. To: DeaconBenjamin (#17)
#19. To: ghostdogtxn (#18)
They can have it.
#20. To: DeaconBenjamin (#19)
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest