(no subject)

[dlgood]

Comments re:Anti-American sentiment and US diplomacy by Stephen Holmes of NYU Law. Emphasis mine.

We should not assume, without looking into it, that anti-Americanism will necessarily affect our national interests. Indeed, hatred of the U.S. should concern our national-security community only if it galvanizes individuals and groups with the capacity to harm us, either positively, by inflicting grave injuries, or negatively, by withholding the cooperation on which we depend to solve our most urgent problems. The latter method of inflicting damage merits special emphasis. WMD proliferation and offshore plotting by terrorist cells may or may not require active sponsorship by rogue states. But they can both benefit decisively from slovenly oversight by disorganized, distracted and incompetent states. Public officials around the world can inflict the most serious imaginable damage on the U.S. by simply being negligent. And negligence, it so happens, comes effortlessly to most human beings.

Man. Is that last sentence, not the most beautiful line. Negligence comes effortlessly. Yeah. It sure does.

Comments

My viewpoint is colored by two things

[bhadrasvapna.livejournal.com]

1. I am a mother of two young daughters. 2. My formative years were under Reagan and Bush Sr just outside the Beltway.

First my background, which is surprisily similar to DL's. 5 years can make a lot of difference, I suppose. Not sure when DL came to the DC metro area, but I moved there in 1979 when I was 8. The next year (actually, we moved in Sept, so the next few months), Reagan was elected to the presidency in reaction to the Iran Hostage Crisis. In his journal, my husband stratnav71 describes his feelings about this, "The day he was inaugurated the Iranian Hostages were released. That seemed to be a sign that the right guy was in office. So with that I never questioned. I went through my childhood in the Reagan/Bush years assuming that the right people were in charge because that’s what I was taught." The Alex P Keaton Reaganites around me felt the same way. I did not.

I was fortunate enough to be educated in Montgomery Public Schools (just like DL) and had rather liberal teachers. Carter losing the election was a great blow to these people. His service record after he left the presidency is unlike any prior occupant of the White House and shows what a truly great man he is. I never really did accept Reagan as a good thing.

As I got older, since the Reagan-Bush years are so long we are looking at ages 8-20, I did not like things I heard coming from that administration. I can sum up my feelings about the Reagan administration in two words, "evil empire." Gone was any sort of identification with those oppressed by totalitarian regimes that Kennedy demonstrated with his famous jelly donut speech in Berlin. Gone was the mutual respect of Carter that allowed him to negotiate peace between Mohamed Anwar Al-Sadat or Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel.

Instead the enemy was demonized. They were evil. They were dehumanized. We are seeing the effects of this with our treatment of POWs. First on Gitmo where we are trying to torture other human beings because of a loop hole in The Geneva Conventions. Second when we ACTUALLY are in GROSS BREACH of Geneva. This isn't just the effects of war. These are the effects of administrations that didn't believe in the oppressed people, but in realpolitik where the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

When I see someone say that we should work with this attitude and try to use their tactics to get them to behave, I see someone enabling what I perceive to be one of the greatest threats to world peace. My country is the greatest threat to world peace. The world organizations that we set up, the international treaties that we wrote, we don't believe in. We use them according to "national interest." What is in my best interest is to see human beings treated as human beings. I don't care about the economic interests of a select few which really have nothing to with "national" anything.

The first thing I listed colors my impression of what we are naturally the most. My daughters didn't have to be taught to recognize people as people. They have a face. They are human. When one isn't feeling well, the other tries to comfort her. When they see someone crying, they try to help them. I didn't teach them this.

The thing with ego boundaries is we are born without them. We may be self centered, but everything is self. We have to learn that we are separate from others. When we start to learn this, we are still operating under the Golden Rule. We see others as separate in theory, but we don't know any other way to treat them except as we want to be. We want to be comforted and helped when we need it, so we do that. This stops when our own needs start to take precedence. This happens when those needs aren't met, scarcity.

We aren't naturally petty. We become petty when our needs aren't met. If our needs are met, naturally we aren't petty. When our needs are then met, we sometimes continue to be petty. We are taking a natural reaction and using it at a time when it isn't natural. That is a learned behavior.

Our needs are met. We are told by various organizations that they aren't. We are taught to try to keep up with the Jones or that we need more of X. We don't. We are operating under false assumptions and the only way to get out is to see this.