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The Forum > Article Comments > The Gallipoli Experience - a traveller's reflection > Comments

The Gallipoli Experience - a traveller's reflection : Comments

By Sharon Fox, published 21/4/2011

How a tourist trip turns into a pilgrimage.

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LEGO
My views only seem contradictory if you take the state as the starting point of what is good. The state gives people rights, the state determines what the greater good is, the state makes society successful, the state can do no wrong.

But I don't believe that. It ignores the very real conflicts of interests between those who make their living through the state’s monopoly of coercion as against those subject to it. Thinking of the problem at a collective level only leads to error because you affirm the good things the British-descended states have done and the bad things in the one breath.

I don’t aspire to spread my beliefs and values by force. But neither am I a pacifist: - I believe that anyone is justified in using force to repel aggression.

It’s not true that the western democracies are less belligerent than the military dictatorships. Take for example Burma, Indonesia and Libya. In the last fifty years, they haven’t been in nearly as many wars as the USA, UK, and Australia, and these were *not* wars in which other countries invaded the west, but the other way around!

Also in very many ways, people under those military dictatorships have more, not less personal and economic freedom than people in the west, where the state seems to think its purpose is to monitor, restrict, register, regulate and criminalise any conceivable aspect of human activity. Try setting up a petrol, cigarette or airgun stall by the side of the road in the west and see what happens.

Yes it is good to get rid of political pests and sociopaths by force if necessary. But the western democracies’ stipulation of Germany’s unconditional surrender, after her defeat was inevitable, cost millions of lives. A far more humane and economical way to do it is for voluntarily funded commandos to go and assassinate the chief sociopaths. What stops it is that states don’t want to do it – it threatens their own chief sociopaths and their own coercive monopolies.
Posted by Peter Hume, Tuesday, 26 April 2011 1:02:00 PM
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I am curious about why you are so hostile to “the state”. “The state” is simply an organized form of government for advanced societies. Would you prefer to resort to tribalism or Anarchy?

The reason why military dictatorships are not more warlike, is because they know that the western democracies will come down on them like a ton of bricks if they try it. Then West tried pacifism, Isolationism, and “peace in our time” in 1939, and were almost destroyed. We are not going to make that mistake again. Now if some despot tries it on us, or on one of our allies, we bloody well hammer them.

Would you have preferred that South Korea was now enslaved by the North? Or are you glad that the yanks put the block on Kim il Sung? The USA invaded both Granada and Panama, and I remember the people of those two countries kissing the US troops for freeing them from tyrants. Then British prevented the Chinese minority in Malaya from making Malaya a province of Red China. Was that wrong? What about when the British prevented the Indonesians from invading Malaya and taking Malayan Borneo?

Then the British kicked the Argies out of The Falklands. Do you object to Britain defending itself? Then there was Kuwait, not just a member of the UN, but a founding member of the League of Nations, who was invaded by its neighbour in another blatant grab for another person’s country.

The western nations, and particularly the USA, are the world’s policemen, and I am very happy for that to continue. I think that the world would be a much more dangerous place if the Americans once again embraced Isolationism and let the Kim Sung Il’s Saddams, Galtieris, Noriegas, Austins, Honeckers, Ghaddafis, Castros, Mugabe’s, Assad’s, Khomeini’s, Stalin’s, and every other Hitler wannabe do whatever they like.

Your claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in western democracies makes me shake my head in pitying wonder. If you prefer the freedoms of totalitaianism, you have my permission to go and live in one.
Posted by LEGO, Tuesday, 26 April 2011 6:50:21 PM
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I suppose you are right, Morganzola, the British are entirely responsible for the catastrophes in Uganda and "Zimbabwe".

After WW2, the stupid British took heed of the whinings of their Socialist "angry young men", who had this peculiar idea that "all men are equal", and they gave Independence to many of their African colonies. The young Socialists thought they were living in a new Age of Aquarious, where the new black societies would show the rest of the world that black people are the equal in every way to whites and Asians.

Anyone who had experience in African countries, and who knew that the Africans were not real bright and could never handle running their own countries, were dismissed as "Imperialist racists".

Every black ruled country has now reverted to little more than barbarism, and is now holding out the begging bowl while spitting at the people who once governed them properly and are still trying to help them. One wonders how many older Africans now pine for the good old days when they had a functioning economy and a legal system that was not totally capricious.

The last to go was Rhodesia, once the bread basket of Africa, and where lately some comical "Zimbabwean" Minister for Agriculture claimed it would be a "good thing" for a couple of million Zimbabweans to starve to death, as there was not enough food to feed them all.

Then there is the total anarchy within Australian aboriginal aparteid areas and all because people like you inssited that it was "racist" to deny aboriginals the right to drink alcohol. When the Oz government tried to save the kids, we were then told that we were committing "genocide" on aboriginals, by "stealing" the kids.

One wonders how long it will be before the western world decides on a aboriginal type "intervention" in Africa to stop the Africans from self suicide. Then people like you can call us all "Imperialist racists" again.
Posted by LEGO, Wednesday, 27 April 2011 8:30:04 AM
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lego,

Voltaire wrote:

"Prejudices are what fools use for reason."
Posted by Poirot, Wednesday, 27 April 2011 9:20:18 AM
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To Poirot.

Voltaire's quote is a prejudgment.
Posted by LEGO, Wednesday, 27 April 2011 1:35:47 PM
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LEGO
It’s you who are advocating violent anarchy, as between states.

And within states, you have not denied that life is more minutely regulated and dictated under the contemporary western states than is life in Burma, Indonesia or Libya, with the exception of forming political parties.

Aggressive war does not further the cause of freedom or civilization.

On the contrary, it sets off a decivilising process. Quite apart from its direct cost in deaths and destruction, it promotes:
• higher taxes and debt
• a military-industrial complex permanently attached to the teat of government
• the acceptance of the principle of wealth redistribution on the basis of political favouritism
• growth of bureaucratic rule with all its attendant dysfunctionality and waste
• government’s sneak tax of inflation, with all its evils including institutionalized wealth transfer from the poorer to the richer, chronic deranging of the economy, the boom/bust cycle, recurrent problems of severe bankruptcies and unemployment and punishment of savers and workers for the benefit of debtors and speculators
• the idea that our freedom is what is left after the government has taken and done whatever it wants.
e.g. see http://mises.org/daily/5236/Americas-Will-to-War-The-Turning-Point

To fail to distinguish between wars of defence and wars of aggression merely exhibits your moral confusion.

The two pieces of intelligence you are missing are that might does not make right, and it’s not your job to forcibly improve everyone else in the world.

I shake my head with pitying wonder that in this day and age there are still people who explicitly believe that racial and nationalist chauvinism justifies aggressive war, and confers a licence for the large-scale killing of innocent civilians including children – because that’s what’s happened in Iraq and Afghanistan - again!
Posted by Peter Hume, Wednesday, 27 April 2011 7:47:39 PM
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