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Um… I have no idea what else to add to it so I’m confused. Is there always a cause or provocation in your mind? I know that almost everyone thinks they have a reason to do anything. But that’s not what I’m interested in the chain of causation.

I’m really not trying to be argumentative, I am just interested in how you would recommend we defend ourselves.

So let’s say the British citizens elect their own George Bush and Dick Cheney and they decide they want our resources and that’s reason enough to start attacking us. So as part of the effort they start attacking anything American – embassies, travelers, airlines, etc.

In your view, what would be a appropriate response or defense?

I understand your concerns, but I’m more interested in what you would recommend (and therefore see as moral/ethical) as a response to the hypothetical I proposed. Specifically, what would you classify as “repel[ling]” in that specific scenario.

I really am curious as to what thoughts you have on this.

The US occupation grew out of the Spanish-American war, in which the US claimed to be “liberating” the Spanish colonies. We see from what the US did to the former Spanish colonies (Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines formally made colonies, Cuba and others made into US “Protectorates”) what foreign liberation typically means; something important in the context of a discussion of patriotism and militarism.

There are wide ranges of estimates regarding the death tole during the US war and occupation (how magnanimous to assume that “We [the US] bear a hefty share of the responsibility for those deaths,” considering that the US is was the invading power…). Given that the devastation of the war played a large role in the malnutrition and disease which flourished during the occupation, I’d say the US is very much culpable for those deaths, estimates for which I’ve seen ranging from under 200,000 to possibly as high as a million.

re: 158

You are right, Morgan. Two wrongs don’t make a right, which means that the immoral actions of one nation does not justify immoral use of force by the US.

I’m not suggesting the imperial efforts of the West justified Japanese actions. I’m saying those efforts rationalized Japanese actions, and in many ways inspired them. The bottom line is that the US was also engaged in imperialism, and so it is hypocritical of the US to then condemn Japanese imperialism and use it as a pretext for very aggressive embargoes.

Neither is close to the truth. Every time the Japanese were organized under a new government they aggresively expanded as a way to justify their rule and place Japan instead of China as the Middle Kingdom. There are eery parrallels from the 8th and 16th centuries (and the 11th and 13th if you count invasions from the other way) that argue strongly against a Western cause for Japanese expansion.

156:

Your explanation is more acceptable Mark D. And I agreed with your more often than not in the previous debate over military service on this thread.

Sorry for the thread jack, Matt. Did any answer really sastisfy you concerning LDS patriotism?

I don’t agree with what the U.S. did in this case, but that is completely incorrect. No one pretended to “liberate” the Philippines (from whom? the Philippinos?). The U.S. purchased the Philippines from Spain in much the same manner as the Louisiana Purchase from France nearly a century prior, if while applying considerably more pressure (i.e. it was during Spanish-American war negotiations).

The Philippine-American War was not an invasion of the Philippines by the Americans, it was a war for Philippine independence, directly comparable to the American Revolutionary War.

If we had not purchased the Phillippines from Spain, the Phillipines would still have needed to fight a war for independence – it would have just been with Spain or with Germany, instead of the United States.

~34,000 Philippinos lost their lives as a direct consequence of the war. We bear a hefty share of the responsibility for those deaths. The number that died due to a cholera epidemic near war’s end is pure speculation. Some say 200,000. In any case, it is dubious to hold the United States responsible for that, let alone refer to such deaths as “butchering”.

Now of course, in these enlightened times we would recognize that the right thing to do would be to purchase the Philippines from Spain (for the same sum) and then grant Philippine independence, and (on their invitation) garrison soldiers there to prevent it from being taken over by the Germans. Perhaps they might even have been able to pay us back.

Morgan D., I agree with you, and I didn’t say they were. What I said is that one cannot impose a trade embargo that deprives a country of supplies it needs to survive and not expect a war in return. A blockade is an act of war. A trade embargo of sufficient seriousness is indistinguishable from a blockade.

On our part, we waited far too long to impose such an embargo. Perhaps if we imposed one in 1910, when the Japanese annexed Korea, or in 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, they might have backed down. To expect them to give up their empire half a century in the making without a fight is unrealistic, however moral it may have been for them to do so.

I would say, by the way, that one of the primary causes of Japan’s militancy was the virtual wholesale absorption of contemporary German culture in the Meiji era. Germany was at the time of course on the up ramp to the very same attempt at regional domination, and the contributions their leading philosophers made to such an attempt don’t appear to be exactly incidental.

As an example – Korea was virtually run by the Japanese from 1905 to 1945. The Japanese tried to extinguish the Korean language and eliminate knowledge of its history. But more to the point, the Japanese adopted the German legal system, which survives to this day in Korea – I assume in Japan as well.

When a nation is under attack, it has the right to repel the attack.

At all times, a nation has an obligation to interact ethically and morally with other nations and peoples. When nations interact in unethical and immoral ways with other nations and peoples, as the West generally and the US specifically so often did in the last one-hundred-plus years, it must expect that it will foster anger and hatred among those nations and peoples. In that case, it is not justified in perpetuating the cycle of violence out of jingoism, nor will such a course ultimately generate any practical results: hatred and violence will only foster further hatred and violence.

re: 153

And what, Morgan, of the rape of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific world by the Western powers, including the US? What about the rape of the Phillipines (300,000 thousand butchered and many tortured in “liberating” the Filipinos) and the nation of Cuba (made a US protectorate and plundered by US corporate interests).

Ironic, isn’t it, that while we were so opposed to Japanese empire, we continued to aid France in its brutal attempts to maintain it’s empire in Vietnam even after the war in which we stopped Japanese imperial aggression. No, there wasn’t anything racist about that…

Oh yes, the Japanese foreign policy decades earlier helped lay the foundation for the war. The Japanese policies fertilized the ground. But the seeds were planted by the Western imperial powers, who had inspired Japan to become an imperial power.

“Revisionism.” The word used by the victor when his sanitized account of history is challenged. That’s what is rank.