All Annotations of Scoop: Is Democracy Inimical To Empire Building?[Preview]

saved byArne Løining on 2008-07-18

• 
  • on 2008-07-18 Kropotkin
    SOTT: Although the author recognizes that these cases are pathological, he wrongly attributed them to the traumatic memories of holocaust. Rather, as pointed out by Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology, they are the results of either inherited genetic mutations, as in the case of psychopathy, or subtle brain damages acquired in the course of life.
• 
  • on 2008-07-18 Kropotkin
    SOTT: Again, the failure of these debates is due to the fact that the pathological elements in the society are seen as normal and their actions are judged on the basis of morality. Instead, they should be viewed as a separate subspecies and studied and dealt with on the basis of psychological science, i.e. ponerology.
• Then how
  comes Israel can persist in its illegal occupation and
  systematic genocide of their own Semitic brethren and
  cousins, the Palestinians, and the same war criminals get
  re-elected time and again?
• Then how do they still end up being led by known killers and
  war criminals?
• over there on Mars, they call it hypocrisy and
  thuggery. But here on Earth it is called Anti-Semitism and
  “war on terrorism”.
• He would learn that Israel is a
  fraudulent creation born of a fraudulent motto a land for
  a people, for a people without land, for a land without
  people (how do they keep that going?)
• The Israeli
  governments regardless of their stripes (Likud or Labor),
  usually dominated by Zionist ideologues, continue to oppress
  the remaining Palestinians now living in less than 22% of
  their original pre-1948 land, k
• The
  successive governments purposely force one crisis after
  another to make pretexts for building more settlements and
  partitioning the area into disjointed Bantustans. Their hope
  is that the Palestinians will finally give up and just leave
  out of desperation.
• Thus one sees the Zionist rulers of
  Israel delay making any reasonable peace because they know
  that time is in their favor, that making any kind of just
  peace in the future will have to take into account the facts
  on the ground that they are busy seeding! They also learn
  from the post apartheid South Africa that once the wealth
  and power is accumulated in the hands of the minority ruling
  class, its just and equitable redistribution later, when
  justice purportedly prevails and peace has been established
  between the warring factions, is next to
  impossible
• These words
  are not from a rational mind
• Hence those
  who criticize this prolific author and Holocaust survivor
  for his hypocrisy, must realize that he is not a rational
  person. For a rational mind, it would indeed be hypocrisy.
• By the same token, they are also unfit to hold
  important positions of influence where their inability to
  tell right from wrong due to their own loss of objectivity
  and rational thinking, can lead to another's suffering.
  • on 2008-07-18 Kropotkin
    SOTT: In the above passages, the author clearly recognizes the pathological aspects. However, due to the lack of knowledge of ponerology, he cannot imagine those pathological elements as a separate subspecies. Instead, he tries desperately to mend his worldview by attributing those to traumatic experiences.
• While the Holocaust suffering of the Jews
  lasted for six long apocalyptic years, the suffering and
  persecution of many Palestinians has gone on for more than
  three decades and is no less cataclysmic for the victims
• Those who advocate support of Israel at the
  expense of enslaving Palestinians and killing them in small
  numbers at a time on a daily basis and wounding many more so
  that they would eventually die off as cripples but not raise
  the alarm in the rest of the world because numbers seem to
  define when mass killing is called a genocide and when it
  isn't, or removing them forcibly from their homeland
  euphemistically calling it a "population transfer", are
  guilty of the same crimes of genocide they accuse their own
  oppressors of.
• Their most impressive and successful
  myth, that will one day perhaps rival those in ancient
  civilizations, is that "it is the poor Israel that is under
  siege by the evil and barbaric Palestinians illegally living
  on land given to the Jews by God Almighty Himself and it is
  so written in their ancient scriptures".
• We can write and lament all we
  want, but so long as the American peoples continue to
  finance and arm Israel with their tax dollars and permit
  this genocide and hypocrisy to continue, there will be more
  and more books written in the future about the
  “banality of evil”!
• But if they perceive an enemy (real or
  imagined) is out to get them, they will rise in self
  defense, as any self respecting nation would.
• The power
  of an angry peoples willing to lay down their lives for
  their rights and justice worries all tyrants and empires.
• There is indeed a lot of thought behind his
  deceptively laconic statement “Democracy is inimical to
  imperial mobilization”, for what it really states is
  that public protest can be destructive to the oilygarchy
  interests
• Thus we see that ZB's
  observation for imperial mobilization has necessitated both
  a new Pearl Harbor, and the curtailment of civil liberties
  in order to counter the democratic instincts of the American
  public against imperial mobilization