Good! People should vote for Nader, because Kerry is not the alternative. Voting for Nader would send a strong message to the Democrats: There already is a party for your goals – the Republicans. Whining won’t help.
So basically, if you’re opposing the way the war in Iraq was run and is run, you have take into account that *both* Bush and Kerry support it.
And as for Kerry’s foreign diplomacy, read *Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy* ¹
Our guiding principle is “together when we can, alone when we must.” (page 16 of the PDF file)
A recent WOZ article also said that Ronald D. Asmus and Kenneth M. Pollack (two of the authors) both publicallly and enthusiastically applauded Bush’s plan for a violent transformation in the Near East towards democracy and market economy. Both of them would have been given high posts in the Kerry administration. Brrrrrrr!
So what to do? Everybody must send strong messages. If your government in Austria, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, the United Kingdom, Portugal or Spain is still best friends with the US, if they still trade weapons, if they’re still worried about their economic relations, then that’s just what it is: They prefer the money, even if there’s blood sticking to it. I guess it doesn’t smell.
So I don’t want to hear anybody here in Europe complaining.
When the storm had passed, Bush was welcome in Paris and Berlin. The Swiss declared the war in Iraq over *before Bush did* so that they could sell armored vehicles to the USA. It is a big embarassment for humanists. And we’re all part of it.
Personally, I believe the domestic problems in the US require first and foremost *more taxes* – and I didn’t see Kerry advocating higher taxes and less military spending. On the contrary, he was busy telling us that he defended his country as a young man... Great.
Using single people as the focus of attention is a fallacy in general, I think. Out of frustration, people would love to blame it all on Bush, because he’s the only one they know personally. But the fact is that nearly half of the nation voted for him, and the most of the rest of the nation voted for somebody very similar to him. The Americans are getting the government they deserve, and we are getting the ally we deserve. If you think that lack of education or resignation explains the result, then ask yourself: What have you done to improve education and fight resignation?
Indeed, I’m asking myself this question...
😠
#USA
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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Alex, Alex, ...
Please understand our situation over here:
If we vote Nader, there’s zero chance of winning. That’s just pragmatics.
American policy is like a huge train, it just goes forward. You can switch it left or right, but it’s going to go in pretty much the direction it’s been going. When it switches to one side or the other, it’s going to do so from the place it switches from (ie it’s not going to teleport,) and it’s going to do so in a way that has similar momentum to what it already has (it’s not going to suddenly shift direction.)
It’s not going to happen, barring the eventual from-outside calamity that will befall us here in the states, that the minds of the US people will suddenly change.
That’s why we have to vote for Kerry, not Nader. (It’s also why we have to admit people into our would-be cabinet, and vote for things that we don’t believe in.) Even Chomsky backs Kerry. Most people who voted Nader last time, voted Kerry this time. That’s because they recognize the gravity of this, and they recognize what a collossal mistake it was to vote for Nader *last* time. And now Bush has the Presidency, the Senate, and Congress.
I understand the fury you feel for American foreign policy. Believe me: //I'm trapped in it.//
But please have some consideration for your brethren States-side. I mean, even Osama bin Laden recognizes that people in the United States are basically good people.
It hurts to read what you write here some times; I feel terrible for having happened to be born in the wrong country.
Now, as for: “What have you done to improve education and fight resignation?” ...well, I think you know my response to that. My answer is: “I w Social Software.” It sounds sissy some times, but I really believe that these communications technologies are going to help us get our way out. It’s a *long term proposition,* so it’s not as sexy as, say, murdering people who I disagree with, visions of which have torchered me, and it’s not as sex as, say, becoming a revolutionary poet and “leading the masses.” In fact, working on and championing Social Software appears positively, well, “flakey,” and irrationally hopeful, to many, if not most.
But, looking into the future, this seems to me to be the thing that will really, truely, work.
Maybe I should write on CommunityWiki about why I think that’s the case. I’ve already done so, to a tiny degree.
But I’d rather work on actually writing it.
I don’t know; I continually weight those scales.
I’m pre-emptively asking for Mercy. Serious shit’s going to go down here, in the states. I feel it in my bones.
– LionKimbro 2004-11-04 07:08 UTC
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Basically what I’m seeing is that I wasn’t enthusiastic about Kerry, *and you still didn’t win*!
As for the blaming part, I’m trying to make it clear that people here in Europe are not much better. The semi-fascists in Austria, in Italy, in Belgium, the right-wingers, and the so-called third-way between the left and the right in Germany and the UK, leaning ever-more towards the neoliberal right... Our education-systems being dismantled, our water and electricity markets being liberated... I dunno. There’s a lot of frustration penned up inside a lot of people, and suddenly you get riots and all that. I don’t like it. I don’t like it in the states. And I don’t like it here.
– Alex Schroeder 2004-11-04 12:57 UTC
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Alex, that last paragraph could almost describe Australia. In fact, it seems like the entire western world is going down the drain.
– ClaudineChionh 2004-11-04 23:10 UTC
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Two words:
INTERNATIONAL RESISTANCE.
– LionKimbro 2004-11-05 06:21 UTC
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From the ElectronicIntifada newsletter:
“Had we awakened to a John Kerry victory, anyone seriously concerned about the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq would have faced the stark reality that Kerry offered nothing substantially different from President George W. Bush in either situation. Yet that provides little consolation for seeing Bush re-elected, as the desire to see him defeated had little to do with support for Kerry. What many wanted was accountability - to see the author of so many disastrous policies thrown out. ¹
– Alex Schroeder 2004-11-05 21:33 UTC