Trump seeks to pardon SEAL and others accused of war crimes

[Bob Butler 54]

(01-01-2020, 09:40 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...But Donald Trump has expressed his values well when he said "I love low-information voters" without recognizing a problem in such.

There is a big difference between American and European racism.  We are bad enough.  Preventing Chinese women from immigration, pushing Native Americans onto reservations whenever lands promised forever are discovered to hold valued resources, the traditional slavery and lynching of blacks, or the idea that no Irish need apply gives the US little excuse to call itself a city on a hill.

But the Europeans would build gas chambers, or ruffle an area’s entire population off to Siberia in order to make room for more approved populations.  We go retail.  They wait until a war can be declared then step in with government scale efficiency.  This makes calling a Democrat a communist or a Republican a Communist inappropriate.

Trump may have coined the phrase Fake News.  He did not originate the concept of the political lie, of vastly exaggerating what people want to believe in order to achieve a political end.  The mislabeling of the red and blue ideas is far older than Trump’s interest in politics.

But he seems to be a fast learner.  He uses falsehood to demonize the other culture.  He makes active use of one culture’s readiness tp hate the other rather than understand how and why the differences exist.  We used to have to do that, to demonize the enemy, to justify the organized murder of other peoples.

That is what we have to grow beyond.  That is one of the memes that we have to build up, a respect for the truth, a readiness to understand.  In the Industrial Age, wars were necessary to transform the culture.  Nukes and trust in democracy has begun to make the crisis war obsolete.  But for the trust in democracy to work we have to learn to respect other cultures and people, to cease the temptation to try to export our cultures by force.  There are reasons cultures exist.  It is expected that they will be stubborn, that they will not change.  We have to have less reason to hate, less need to cling to the past, less need to force unnecessary cultural change, and a great deal more listening and respect.