Hilla Monster

I just LOVE you people! I can't wait to CHEW YOUR FACE OFF!

(from here)

re: Open Debate (on genocide)

[This is continuing a debate I engaged in at the blog for the documentary film makers of This Divided State.]

If war is antithetical to Christ the Revolutionary War which gave the US our independence had no Christians in it - because the whole of them would have had to deny their faith to join the war. Unless you believe that they are absolved from the sin of participating in the war because it was the action of a government and the sins weren't on the heads of the soldiers. But myself, I believe God strengthened the Revolutionaries to claim their independence (and my religion, LDS, makes that claim), and I believe the line in the Declaration of Independence about "..a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence" had a great deal to do with that.

I noted with great anxiety the politically very far to the right soldier from Utah in your documentary, who connected extreme conservativism in Utah with religion in Utah. Such people do not properly see that the founding fathers also specifically forbad promoting any specific religion, while being either ambivalent or encouraging of religion in general - and God or the Divine is a general philosophy, not a specific religion. Although the post at this forum seems to have been deleted, I recall Steven describing this extremist's union of church and state as "brilliant". Where extreme conservatives in Utah try to make such mergers, they go against their church's specific disavowal of affiliation with any politic (while encouraging people to exercise their political and civic duty to their best judgement). It is particularly disturbing that this distortion was presented by a person active in the military, thus falsely symbolizing a merger of church, state, and military in Utah. That reverses everything and is one step away from calling the U.S. military a religious terrorist arm - completely reversing positions and making America the enemy. If that spin is used as propoganda in other nations, it is no wonder the film has success in nations with anti-American political sentiments. And I find it very disturbing that This Divided State is being so well recieved in a nation with politics predomenantly very far on the left, and that the interest in the film is political. I look at the film and see many extremely foolish stances taken on the left and right, and here at this blog you present all your heavily left-leaning propaganda. You have very little idea what film you actually have on your hands.

The clarification standing that the church, state, and military are not all the same thing in Utah (and it's just outrageous that this needs to be clarified), it is also the case that mainstream Muslim and Palestinian religious leaders decry militant extremists who profess what they do in the name of religion. Where your film presents this idea only one step away from calling the US military terrorist, it represents the US military (and religion in Utah) only as much as terrorists represent Islam and Palestine: which is to say, not at all.

If we can here stand on the ground of saying that mormons are Christians (and if we can't, there is no place for debate here, because to say they aren't is very false), there is a premise for war to defend life and liberty in the Book of Mormon - where captain Moroni rallies the Nephites to defend themselves from an invading Lamanite army by writing a standard on a rent garment, turned into a flag: "In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children."

[Note: the way I apply that idea to the Iraq war is my personal opinion only and does not represent my church. I'm exercizing the civic duty to engage politically in my best judgement as my religion asks me to.]

You say that morals are relative. If morals (all morals) are relative, it is because none of them are fixed and absolute. Some say absolutely that no morals are absolute, but in saying this absolutely they contradict the premise by holding it absolute. I don't know if you are such - I think not because you claim to value life. But I challenge how much you really value it.. If any moral is absolute and fixed, any moral that goes against it must fall as inabsolute. If there are some morals that are relative, it becomes a matter of which moral you choose to value above another. And to reiterate my thesis against your utterances - and here build it further off of what you say - you value American life above other life on this planet, despite all you say seeming to indicate to the contrary.

The left has very few or no absolute principles or morals to which they hold. The left tends to revere the ability to change morals by writing them into law more than they do any assent to any absolute moral (such as the absolute morals often claimed by religions). It is no wonder that the further left you get the easier it becomes to antagonize (or misrepresent as Steven's utterances have) religion, which asserts absolute morals.

You seem truly not to grasp how the religiously supported idea of defending life by war can (and in my opinion does) apply to the Iraq situation. You say by the most conservative estimates the United States has killed hundreds of thousand of Iraqis. Please describe to me who these Iraqis were. Were they soldiers in Saddam's army, or were they innocent civilians? I know that the US Army walloped Saddam's forces on invasion. Well, yeah. It's war. And those are soldiers - certainly recruited civilians, but soldiers - not just civilians. That is an amazing distortion. Completely glossing over a huge point as is so common in liberal thinking.

The United States HAS SAVED IRAQIS AND POTENTIALLY AMERICANS from the threat Saddam continued to pose long after HE slaughtered at least 100,000 Iraqis during his reign of terror - in genocide. Your claim of America slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is severly misleading. They were armies which Saddam pulled out (probably forced many of them - our troops volunteer) to defend his regime that had the blood of the innocent on its hands and which could very well continue to claim the innocent - as he occasionally did by assasinating people in his country opposed to him. The only way your claim stands in the semantic of civilians in which you state it is if you say that Saddam's army was defending an innocent cause. Which would be total rubbish. It is you who have taken things completely out of context, not I.

A war does not have to initially improve the status quo to be justified. If Saddam had "only" ever killed 50,000 Kurdish civilians, and the U.S. had to knock down an army of two million Iraqi soldiers compelled by Saddam to defend him, and the U.S. lost three million soldiers in the process before the war ended and he was removed from power, the war would be justified. It is not numbers that matter but principle. No matter the cost, it is worth it to defend the life of the innocents from genocide.

It is ludicrous to say we have created terrorists. This is the amazing, preposterous, truly insane lack of reality which many liberals have. TERRORISTS SEEK TO DESTROY THE INNOCENT NO MATTER WHAT WE DO. We neither created them nor can we stop them - unless we destroy them. To buy into any claimed right from a person who destroys life is to sympathize with them and permit them to continue destroying it. Yes, people suffer in a war to defend life, and unfortunately many of the innocent get caught and destroyed in the conflict. But when it is over, the innocent will no longer need to fear. And I fear, I greatly fear, that unless bleeding-mind lack of reality from the far to many folks of your pursausion stops, that the innocent worldwide will continue to have great reason to fear.

You say:

I might be anti-war but I'm also anti-genocide. If genocide is actually happening on an active and consistent basis (as it is in Darfur) then we need to react swiftly to fix the problem.

If to you fixing the problem means sanctions, I think that is not enough. The international community agreed on the growing danger of Saddam (until someone actually did something about it, and then too many turned cowardly), and Saddam violated 13 UN resolutions against him in the midst of our "fixing the problem". You now say that in Darfur we ignore the problem. I wrote Senator Hatch about it who informed me (this was some time ago, and I wish I still knew the situation) that negotiations and sanctions was changing it. That's the same as the typical liberal idea of "fixing" a tyrant (as if that murderous rage can just be castrated or something). You say the Darfur region is not sitting on a bed of oil. In fact it is. It's one of the much larger oil reserves in the world and the Khartoum slaughtered and drove peasants off of oil fields. In 2001 Chinese "security guards" in the Khartoum operation engaged in military operations against unarmed villagers in the south. That article also reports on a Canadian oil company's involvement with Sudan oil traffic to India, as does this excellent article, which also details the Khartoum brutalities. This, this, this, and this article - they all give information on India trafficking and selling Oil from Sudan. If the United States was looking for oil to gobble up militarily, Sudan would be a ten times easier target than Iraq. But the US isn't. The US is interested in defending it's own soil and liberating the Iraqis from a genocidal dictator who demonstrably has terrorist sympathizers who have now come out to defend his cause of brutal and trully terrorist reign. And GENOCIDE DID OCCUR IN IRAQ UNDER SADDAM'S HAND. Listen to this broadcast interview with Peter Galbraith, a US Senator who spent a lot of time among the Kurds. I linked it earler - did you listen to it? Here it is again. Do you do research to support your claims or just listen to the next mindlessly hyperbolic context-eliminating liberal? If you've heard the report, offer your arguments against it. Peter Galbraith's case is irrefutable - in Iraq, it was genocide. You say "if genocide is actually happening.." - genocide actually WAS happening in Iraq. You seem to have missed the fact. Republican leaders don't "connect" anything to terrorists that is not fact or "invoke" it to "make people unsafe and keep them voting Republican". They observe actual dangers, threats, and brutalities that exist in the world and connect their compassion to measures that will actually work, if they require sacrifice. Folks like yourself do not grasp the reality of the dangers and threats, and worse you play into the sympathy or apathy which tyrants and terrorists need in order to continue to exist in the world. No tyrant or terrorist is removed without sacrifice. Commit yourself to the cause. I myself would like to know if the Khartoum continues brutalities in Sudan or whether the Khartoum still exists. Its outrageous that the news doesn't make such questions front page news and that I have to search for it. At least I can. Thank God for the internet. If Khartoum brutalities continue, I actually agree it's hypocritical - or perhaps unevenly commited to defending human life - to not militarily intervene there.

If you value human life equally in all nations, I think this is the approach to take. No toleration of genocide anywhere - and the facts are against your case. Your denial of the facts and severe twist on reality demerit the principle of right to life which you claim to support equally in all cases. You have made the absolute principle of right to life relative - you are a relativist on the issue of life and either cry against our military losses or twist terrorist losses into U.S. slaughter of "Iraqis". Those terrorists are not Iraqis. They are brutal and supressing monsters who have no place on this earth. When the victory is complete (if folks like you don't get in the way of the cause), and the terrorists are all rooted out of Iraq and/or the Iraqis can stand to defend themsevles (one of you them thar liberals implied they could.. no way, not under Saddam - and they deserve our help either way), the U.S. will leave.

No one will argue that civilians of other nations have less right to life than United States citizens. Then it behooves us to support every cause of defending life on equal ground - and raise up against tyrants like Saddam and his terrorist supporters the bloody ground they soiled in the undeniable slaughter of innocents whom we previously failed to defend.

[I had said comments here are closed but I mistook - and I leave them open]

Devaluation of life and misdirection

I tried to post these comments to someone else's blog, but couldn't get through. Maybe it's a sign not to argue with them on their turf. So I'll just post it here. This was in response to this entry and it's comments:

bryan said:

Well, then does that mean we're also guilty of the genocide of the Iraq people?

Not any more than we are responsible for the death of millions of Jews in World War II. You make the call.

..since when did two wrongs make a right?

Since our nation was founded by warring against Brits for our independence. But that idea is misleading. When a tyrant murders, the tyrant has forfeited his right to life - or citizens and governments have the right to end his life to prevent the threat he poses to other lives.

Punishing a child for breaking a window is no comparison to punishing a tyrant for murdering civilians. To really even compare the two you have gone far off the deep end. Honestly. Comparing murdered civilians to a broken window? Poor allegory at best. A window is dead. A civilian is alive. Or these ones were. You don't care.

And if we needed to punish Sadamm so bad, why didn't we do it when he actually killed the Kurds?

We should have.

Your last paragraph there distracts from the point I made. You are focusing on the Iraqi lives that have been negatively affected by the US invasion (guess what? In any fight for freedom, people get hurt). The sufferings you list are far, far less than the hundreds of thousands Saddam Killed. But ultimately, it wouldn't have mattered if Saddam retaliated against his civilians when we invaded - because when we were done ousting him, he wouldn't have any opportunity to do it more, and since none can prove whether he would or would not have turned against his civilians again in any circumstance, the reality of the risk he posed should be acknowledged - and we should all be all for ousting him and getting Iraq the freedoms they deserve and the self-governance that every nation needs. Saddam didn't govern. He brutalized.

green jenni said:

If we are going to kill thousands and thousands of people to punish a guy, we're not any better.

Misleading in the same way bryan's last paragraph was.

If we're going to punish evil dictators that are killing their own people we have a lot of work to do, but I don't see Georgie boy going after anyone other than Saddam and Osama.

It does not matter how much work it takes to defend innocent people from genocide. No matter what it takes on our part, and even if it requires risking our own lives, it is worth it, it is RIGHT - it is wrong to shirk from it. After World War II the UN signed a convention to prevent and punish genocide. So much for that! The world didn't follow its resolve, and its learing the same lessons again - except that too many aren't.

If we are going to punish evil dictators that are killing their own people, we better stop putting them in power over the democratically elected leaders -- can you say Pinochet?

I'm unfamiliar with Pinochet. However, not putting dictators in power sounds like a good idea - if misleading I think.. some would argue the U.S. "put" Saddam in power, but if that's a bad idea, then let's throw down the tyrant!

Why not punish the evil dictators that kill their own people when they are doing it? Why reward them and build alliances and then 20 years after the fact come after them to punish?

Also good ideas - let's do the former and not do the latter. You must realize you are actually providing the very answers I think sound good. We should have gotten rid of Saddam long ago - and he never should have come to power. At this point I became so confused by the similarity of your rhetoric to bryans that I actually had to double-check that I was talking to different people.

Sounds nice, but doesn't make it through careful scrutiny.

Your scrutiny is glibly uncareful.

Again, your closing paragraph misleads in the same way bryan's did - focusing on the far less damage we have caused preventing Saddam from any further of the far more damage he caused. Defending the life of a peasant in another land from a tyrant (and the terrorists who have flocked to the state proving they had an affinity and vested interest in Saddam's machinations) is courage. Complaining about what we have lost doing so is cowardice. It's a noble cause. Your misdirected attentions detract from that.