The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Friday, September 6, 2013

BooMan turns isolationist?


He quotes Timothy Egan,

The isolationists in the Republican Party are a direct result of the Bush foreign policy.

A war-weary public that can turn an eye from children being gassed — or express doubt that it happened — is another poisoned fruit of the Bush years.

To which he replies,

When I read something like that, I think about the citizens of other countries besides our own.

Are the people of Norway or Brazil or Angola turning a blind-eye to dead children because they are "war-weary" or because Bush lied about Saddam Hussein?

There's this idea that simply by virtue of being born here that citizens of the United States are more morally responsible for war crimes than anyone else.

If nothing is done about a chemical attack in Damascus, then we are all somehow complicit, indifferent, callous, amoral, and unworthy.

But no one says that about the people who live in Australia or Canada or the Cayman Islands.

Or Russia or Germany or Japan or . . . . .

Welcome to the team, BooMan.

You will be a full-scale isolationist when you reject talk of a duty of rescue and denounce the idea, very popular among our rulers, that we are or should be “the indispensable nation.”

When you can no longer seriously believe “the world will be a more dangerous place if America is unwilling to ever take unilateral action to protect international norms,” or concern yourself much about it without first asking, “for whom?”

Without shame.

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