“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
(Winston Churchill, 1937)
There’s a word for passing judgment on people who lived long before us based on current moral standards – presentism. But the British were (allegedly*) the first to use poison gas on Kurds of northern Iraq, so present standards have not changed much. A long view of history indicates that being Churchill’s dog in the manger is perhaps the most vulnerable position one can be in. To put it another way, he meant to have wealth without power to defend that wealth. That is where American Natives found themselves after the European migration, French aristocrats in the 1790′s, European Jews during the Nazi regime, and now Arabs and Persians of the Middle East who sit atop vast reserves of oil.
Projection accompanies plunder and murder, as we must justify our behavior. So those who we attack exemplify our own worst traits. American natives became savages, French nobility leaches, while Jews “poisoned” and “contaminated” the Aryan race. These days Arabs, Muslims, Persians, all the same to us, are violent people agaisnt whom we must “defend” ourselves and who are “terrorists.” We are, in fact, the most violent force on the planet, the world’s premier terrorists.
There appears to be progress in attitudes towards one another, but often enough we merely transfer our hatred from one targeted group to another. Where once it was thought normal to ban Jews from teaching in universities or belonging to the Republican Party, we now offer the same treatment to people of Arab descent and anyone who follows Islam. I’m not seeing progress here.
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*Churchill favored use of poison gas against “uncivilized tribes,” but actual use against Kurds in 1920 is not settled history. (British history concerning British atrocities is not reliable, I hasten to add.) I have a cousin who was stationed in the Middle East and flew AWACS missions (“Airborne Warning and Control System”) in 1988 when Saddam Hussein gassed Kurds at Halabja in northern Iraq. Missiles do not find their own way through the skies – they need coordinates, which is why AWACS fly high in the sky in battle areas. I asked my cousin who provided coordinates for that missile attack that day, and he much too quickly said it was an AWACS operated by the Saudies.
Which once again showcases the need for “imbedded” commercial media in the business of propagating untruth to the masses for fun and profit. Teamed with our public schools , both have earned well-deserved reputations for “dumbing down” our children, who grow up incapable of seeing through the smoke and mirrors. There’s no shortage of religion and sports to fill these empty vessels. Occupy might do well to refocus on the junk cluttering the average human brain before it tackles Wall Street.
AWACs operated by saudis and made in the USA. It is also a matter of record that we provided satellite imagery for Saddam to target the Iranian army with chemical weapons. Nasty old WMDS.