12-07-2021, 09:41 AM
One of the faults of an echo chamber is that although one may think oneself more right due to incremental confirmation of one's beliefs, one learns nothing. This is very different from objective reality, whose objective is the refinement of knowledge although political beliefs and language may be very different in Beijing and Buenos Aires, scientific reality is the same. Even a cold war cannot change that reality. (Culture? I have no specific knowledge of whether Buenos Aires has a vibrant Chinatown, but I would not be surprised).
To step out of the echo chamber is to realize that biases (including to the extent of bigotry) that one thinks pure truth are anything but that. Discovering that people with very different foundations of religious faith can have much the same ethical values can be a shocker. It is a necessary one.
...This is the eightieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, the consequence of a gangster regime making an assessment that it could win a quick and decisive war against the United States and reshape the surrounding area of a thug empire expanding a colonial empire into places in which such was unwelcome. So were the earlier colonial empires of the French in Indochina, the British in Malaya and India, and the Dutch in Indonesia. America had already planned to give independence to the Philippines, knowing well that it was not going to ever be a part of the USA. With a population now of 109 million it would give the expanded USA a population of roughly 440 million and have nearly a quarter of the electoral vote as a state. How a Philippine state would give huge power in American politics is obvious enough. The gangsters in Tokyo believed that their more compact empire closer to themselves would be easier to rule and would have logical cohesion.
The Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere was of course a nightmare with the Japanese overlords bleeding the people of their expanded empire to feed their soldiers on the advance or controlling the empire. Demonization of a political entity that did horrible things to people who ended up as subjects or captives is to be expected. America became an echo chamber on how awful the Japanese were. At the end of the war, occupying troops would find that the Japanese people were not valid reflections of Hideki Tojo and other war criminals, just as the people of Italy were not reflections of the bombastic absurdity of Benito Mussolini. At the end of the war much had to be forgotten or at least treated as a gross anomaly.
Single-Party dictatorships of all kinds are nasty regimes, and they tend to do the very worst possible to people. There lie America's main enemies of the Second World War. There lies the Greater Gulag of Stalin's Soviet Union, the superficial chaos covering the despotism of China under Mao, and basically all Communist regimes. There lie the murderous regimes of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the Apartheid regime of South Africa, Ba'ath regimes in Syria and Iraq, Daesh, contemporary Iran, and the Rwandan dictatorship that established Hutu Power over the dead bodies of Tutsis. Those regimes are themselves echo chambers, and the more that the echo chamber drowns out other ways of thought, freedom dies. There may be fervent participation as a supposed exercise of civic ritual that is also a good way to prevent unwelcome difficulties on the job or in getting ration coupons. The echo chamber of a totalitarian regime drowns out the screams of its victims and numbs the conscience, moral values, and needful empathy of people who avoid the worst (although their lives become more circumscribed).
Within five years of the Pearl Harbor Attack, the single event that defined the Crisis of 1940, partisans had executed Mussolini and displayed his cadaver in a degrading way; Hitler had offed himself in a bunker, and Tojo was under arrest to be tried as a major war criminal. Few predicted that on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack. Britain and the Soviet Union were still reeling, and by March 1941 many thought that it was only a matter of a short time before Australia and New Zealand would undergo a particularly brutal and genocidal occupation with a 'restructuring' of their populations.
As I write this I recognize that the United States, in 1945 the model of freedom for much of the world (except for Jim Crow practice that was itself doomed) has done severe backsliding on freedom. Freedom House still has the USA among the free countries and is thus the world's most populous democracy as India goes into the "partly free" category. It may be an odd coincidence that in the five months from September 11, 2021 to January 6, 2022 we have had, are having, or will soon have the 80th, 20th, and first anniversaries of three of the most infamous days in American history. People not born on or before December 7, 1941 (there are comparatively few left who can remember hearing the speech in which President Franklin Roosevelt announced a declaration of war upon the Japanese thug state with the words " a date that will live in infamy") occasionally hear his words resound. Eighty years since, Japan is a model democracy. It might be a horrible place in which to be a criminal... well, fcuk crime. I don't want my car stolen or my home broken into. We had the memory of the 9/11 attack, and on the whole we have solved little except to make air travel safer until COVID-19 started hijacking jetliners. The Taliban is back in charge in Afghanistan doing Taliban stuff again. In a little less than a month we will face the first anniversary of the Capitol Putsch.
The Pearl Harbor Attack and 9/11 were done by people not Americans. The Capitol Putsch was done by Americans far from representative of America as a whole. These people have gone through American schools from K-12 to secondary education. They should have assimilated the rules of our system in defining who wins and who loses elections and thus who wins elected office and the grave responsibilities therein. They should know that disruption of the political process is tolerable only if the system is itself unrepresentative. They should know that elected officials do not decide who wins a Presidential election. They should know that attacking the police is a crime whether one is a well-connected political fanatic or a street thug that the locals dread.
Republicans should ask themselves, if they think that people in majority-minority communities do not vote for arch-conservatives, why those people see themselves unable to align with the plutocratic agenda as does the majority of the rest of America instead of deciding that such people are un-American due to their voting habits. The GOP used to be simply the Party amenable to economic growth at the expense of the environment, job growth through corporate profits and low taxes, exorbitant rents to foster the building of new housing, and personal responsibility through the gutting of the welfare system. As conservatives of the Reagan era said, if you hate your job because it doesn't provide a living, then take another job that you thoroughly hate. After all, there will be Pie in the Sky When You Die -- if you comply and smile inste4ad of griping.
OK, maybe that is a raw deal.
To step out of the echo chamber is to realize that biases (including to the extent of bigotry) that one thinks pure truth are anything but that. Discovering that people with very different foundations of religious faith can have much the same ethical values can be a shocker. It is a necessary one.
...This is the eightieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, the consequence of a gangster regime making an assessment that it could win a quick and decisive war against the United States and reshape the surrounding area of a thug empire expanding a colonial empire into places in which such was unwelcome. So were the earlier colonial empires of the French in Indochina, the British in Malaya and India, and the Dutch in Indonesia. America had already planned to give independence to the Philippines, knowing well that it was not going to ever be a part of the USA. With a population now of 109 million it would give the expanded USA a population of roughly 440 million and have nearly a quarter of the electoral vote as a state. How a Philippine state would give huge power in American politics is obvious enough. The gangsters in Tokyo believed that their more compact empire closer to themselves would be easier to rule and would have logical cohesion.
The Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere was of course a nightmare with the Japanese overlords bleeding the people of their expanded empire to feed their soldiers on the advance or controlling the empire. Demonization of a political entity that did horrible things to people who ended up as subjects or captives is to be expected. America became an echo chamber on how awful the Japanese were. At the end of the war, occupying troops would find that the Japanese people were not valid reflections of Hideki Tojo and other war criminals, just as the people of Italy were not reflections of the bombastic absurdity of Benito Mussolini. At the end of the war much had to be forgotten or at least treated as a gross anomaly.
Single-Party dictatorships of all kinds are nasty regimes, and they tend to do the very worst possible to people. There lie America's main enemies of the Second World War. There lies the Greater Gulag of Stalin's Soviet Union, the superficial chaos covering the despotism of China under Mao, and basically all Communist regimes. There lie the murderous regimes of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the Apartheid regime of South Africa, Ba'ath regimes in Syria and Iraq, Daesh, contemporary Iran, and the Rwandan dictatorship that established Hutu Power over the dead bodies of Tutsis. Those regimes are themselves echo chambers, and the more that the echo chamber drowns out other ways of thought, freedom dies. There may be fervent participation as a supposed exercise of civic ritual that is also a good way to prevent unwelcome difficulties on the job or in getting ration coupons. The echo chamber of a totalitarian regime drowns out the screams of its victims and numbs the conscience, moral values, and needful empathy of people who avoid the worst (although their lives become more circumscribed).
Within five years of the Pearl Harbor Attack, the single event that defined the Crisis of 1940, partisans had executed Mussolini and displayed his cadaver in a degrading way; Hitler had offed himself in a bunker, and Tojo was under arrest to be tried as a major war criminal. Few predicted that on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack. Britain and the Soviet Union were still reeling, and by March 1941 many thought that it was only a matter of a short time before Australia and New Zealand would undergo a particularly brutal and genocidal occupation with a 'restructuring' of their populations.
As I write this I recognize that the United States, in 1945 the model of freedom for much of the world (except for Jim Crow practice that was itself doomed) has done severe backsliding on freedom. Freedom House still has the USA among the free countries and is thus the world's most populous democracy as India goes into the "partly free" category. It may be an odd coincidence that in the five months from September 11, 2021 to January 6, 2022 we have had, are having, or will soon have the 80th, 20th, and first anniversaries of three of the most infamous days in American history. People not born on or before December 7, 1941 (there are comparatively few left who can remember hearing the speech in which President Franklin Roosevelt announced a declaration of war upon the Japanese thug state with the words " a date that will live in infamy") occasionally hear his words resound. Eighty years since, Japan is a model democracy. It might be a horrible place in which to be a criminal... well, fcuk crime. I don't want my car stolen or my home broken into. We had the memory of the 9/11 attack, and on the whole we have solved little except to make air travel safer until COVID-19 started hijacking jetliners. The Taliban is back in charge in Afghanistan doing Taliban stuff again. In a little less than a month we will face the first anniversary of the Capitol Putsch.
The Pearl Harbor Attack and 9/11 were done by people not Americans. The Capitol Putsch was done by Americans far from representative of America as a whole. These people have gone through American schools from K-12 to secondary education. They should have assimilated the rules of our system in defining who wins and who loses elections and thus who wins elected office and the grave responsibilities therein. They should know that disruption of the political process is tolerable only if the system is itself unrepresentative. They should know that elected officials do not decide who wins a Presidential election. They should know that attacking the police is a crime whether one is a well-connected political fanatic or a street thug that the locals dread.
Republicans should ask themselves, if they think that people in majority-minority communities do not vote for arch-conservatives, why those people see themselves unable to align with the plutocratic agenda as does the majority of the rest of America instead of deciding that such people are un-American due to their voting habits. The GOP used to be simply the Party amenable to economic growth at the expense of the environment, job growth through corporate profits and low taxes, exorbitant rents to foster the building of new housing, and personal responsibility through the gutting of the welfare system. As conservatives of the Reagan era said, if you hate your job because it doesn't provide a living, then take another job that you thoroughly hate. After all, there will be Pie in the Sky When You Die -- if you comply and smile inste4ad of griping.
OK, maybe that is a raw deal.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.