Cain on Foreign Policy cont

[Plane]

  The USA is not perfect, if your standard is absolute perfection then I must admit to falling far short.

    If in comparison to other nations there is plenty of comparison to make.

    Why do your comparisons to the ideal ignore all the rest of the world?
     Where is the validity of consentrating your complaints on the best of a largly bad bunch?

      Belgum was better than the US ? Post 1970 or so I might see an argument, but for most of our History Belgum was the worst colonist.

[Michael Tee]

<<The USA is not perfect, if your standard is absolute perfection then I must admit to falling far short.>>

This is EXACTLY what I mean by your inability to face the issue squarely, your constant diversions.  WHEN was the the issue ever about "perfection?"  It's absurd to even suggest that my accusations against the USA were that it fell far short of perfection.

We are talking about the genocide of the Native Americans, the enslavement of the blacks, 100 years of segregation and lynch law, the overthrow of democratically elected governments, the support of Death Squads on Central America, the launching of wars of unprovoked aggression against Third World countries now to numerous to even count, the deaths of 2 million Vietnamese in a totally unjustifiable invasion, torture that goes unpunished . . .

Horrific abuses that you sweep away with snide comments like "nobody's perfect."  I suggest to you that very FEW countries have a record anywhere near as horrific.  Belgians over the span of your own history and despite what they did in the Congo, are SAINTS compared to Americans.

[BSB]

Back to the Native Americans are we? Should the world take a couple of years off to prosecute and punish America, Blowhard?

BSB 

[Xavier_Onassis]

Canadians handled the issues of slavery and Native Americans far more humanely. Of course, this might have been due to the fact that cotton, tobacco, indigo and hemp don't grow well in the Great White North, and there were insufficient numbers of Canadians to cause them to want to push the Indians aside.

I rented a film, "Gunless" recently that was a rather polite Canadian Western, a comedy. Not great, but funny.

[Plane]

Canadians handled the issues of slavery and Native Americans far more humanely. Of course, this might have been due to the fact that cotton, tobacco, indigo and hemp don't grow well in the Great White North, and there were insufficient numbers of Canadians to cause them to want to push the Indians aside.

I rented a film, "Gunless" recently that was a rather polite Canadian Western, a comedy. Not great, but funny.

    That is a good observation.

     Is geography destiny?

      Probly not , but geography is very influential on destiny.

       So does virtue you can't avoid count the same as virtue you have to struggle for?

[Michael Tee]

<<Back to the Native Americans are we? Should the world take a couple of years off to prosecute and punish America, Blowhard?>>

If you'd have followed this thread a little more attentively, BSB, you'd have known that it was plane and not I who raised the issue of America's status starting from the birth of the nation.  plane was the one who claimed that America had "started out pretty good" and further went on to state that it had been better than most other countries when it started.

The genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of the blacks were two of many topics that I raised to refute plane's point, and since he had ratcheted the time-frame back to the late 18th century, that's where my examples had to start from.

[Plane]

<<Back to the Native Americans are we? Should the world take a couple of years off to prosecute and punish America, Blowhard?>>

If you'd have followed this thread a little more attentively, BSB, you'd have known that it was plane and not I who raised the issue of America's status starting from the birth of the nation.  plane was the one who claimed that America had "started out pretty good" and further went on to state that it had been better than most other countries when it started.

The genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of the blacks were two of many topics that I raised to refute plane's point, and since he had ratcheted the time-frame back to the late 18th century, that's where my examples had to start from.

   The hard times for the American native populations did not start with the birth of the USA, they had some pretty tough wars with the Spanish , French and English, Wars that featured enslavement , germ warfare, occasional massicres and bounty payments for scalps.

     I don't think that the early USA was a great transition from the late colonial administration from this particular standpoint.