What does the Beijing based unnamed critic writing for The Economist expect—that China adopt America’s evangelical, neo-conservative/neo-liberal role to spread “democracy” and “Christianity” to the world through nation building?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the critic writing in The Economist suggest that he or she expects China to spread “democracy” to countries like Burma and North Korea, which are by definition dictatorships, which the U.S. has a long history of supporting. See Cold War Origins of the CIA Holocaust to learn more.
If you haven’t read this opinion piece in The Economist, I suggest you do before going on to Part 3. Did you know that at the same time that the United States sells or gives weapons to dictatorships and authoritarian governments, it also has programs through the U.S. State Department to support religious freedom in many of the same countries?
For instance, Saudi Arabia, a country that prohibits any religion other than Islam and has a long history of human rights violations (Human Rights Watch World Report 2013) . On October 20, 2010, the US State Department notified Congress of its intention to make the biggest arms sale in American history—an estimated $60.5 billion purchase by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The IAGS says this about Saudi Arabia: “Much has been reported about the complex system of terrorist financing and the money trail facilitating the September 11 terror attacks. Individuals and charities from the Persian Gulf—mainly from Saudi Arabia—appear to be the most important source of funding for terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda.”
Continued on November 13, 2014 in Part 3 or return to Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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We don’t give money to the good guys. We give money to those who support us. Some of them ARE good guys. Many are not. Has it ever been different … I mean, since we started having money to give away?
But what are they supporting the U.S. for? Freedom? What’s that? But we know what corporate profits are. The only reason we fought a war in Vietnam is because the 1% were afraid if Communism/Socialism swept the world and the resources were shared equally, the 15% Would lose all their money, toys and power.
It’s all about money and the power money buys. It has always been about that as long as there has been money and power … I think that’s as long as there have been governments and people. Only, I think the stakes have gone up as the millennium have marched on.
As more wealth ends up in fewer hands, those hands have too much power, and that power will corrupt them—if not this generation, a future generation of the 1%.
In earlier history, there was a limit to the reach of power, limited by natural barriers like oceans and mountains. Now, though, there are no limits. So yeah, there’s nowhere to run, no way to hide. But I think our despoiled environment kills us before corporations and fascism has a chance to firmly take route. We’ll start running out of clean water. Or the genetic tampering with our food supply will come back to kill us.
In other words the widespread poverty and the ignorance that usually comes with it in addition to the 1% who are wealthy/famous and morally/power corrupt will make sure that they take the human race down with them.
Barbara Tuchman’s “March of Folly” helps explain what power corrupts and subverts the thinking of the rich/powerful. She defines folly as “Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest.” The New York Times Book Reivew said, “a moral [book] on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffer in consequence.”
http://www.amazon.com/The-March-Folly-From-Vietnam/dp/0345308239
She wasn’t the only one who saw what wealth/power does to those individuals.
Abraham Lincoln explains how the 1% pulls it off: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
And Lord Acton (1834 – 1902) explains why they do it: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
I am a great fan of Barbara Tuchmann. March of Folly was either her last book, or next to last (don’t remember), but like most historians, she had grown pretty jaded by then. The more you know, the more it grinds you down, turns you cynical, excises your optimism. You look at humanity and wonder how we have come so far and learned so little. Individuals evolve, but the people at the top, the Important and the Powerful — they are the same as ever. Maybe with better manners and a slicker smile.
I like that: The people at the top are all the same. Maybe they are clones of the last crop of one per-centers.
If you want to get karmic about it, maybe they are the same souls, replaying the same lives, locked into a cycle of evil from which they can’t break free.
Now, that would explain it in a “NUT” shell. :o)