So, I finally had an objection to something Dan said today (shocking) For a guy who prefaces all his podcasts with warnings about how much we’ll disagree with him, I think it’s been a phenomenal run of about 37 episodes (Pat Buchanan, episode 71. He’s someone I can’t listen to or read. His willfull ignorance on specific issues never ceases to offend) since I had anything to object to in a Common Sense podcast.
So, in episode 108 The Lure of Foreign Dragons, Dan is all in a quandary because he wants on the one hand to intervene for moral reasons in all the genocidal conflicts around the world (Where are you UN? What were you chartered for? Hello? Is there anybody there?) genocides like the one going on in Burma, and on the other hand he understands the (US) founders admonition that we not go abroad in search of foreign dragons to slay.
His insistence that there is a dichotomy here is flaw in his observation. If we are free men, we can volunteer our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor, in defense of Burma; while at the same time holding that it is proper for the government not to enter into entangling alliances. There really isn’t a problem here. Before the US government decided the whole world was its protectorate, there was a long tradition of individual Americans taking the fight to the bad guys all by themselves. What was wrong with that?
Postscript
2020 – Myanmar (Burma) is still a hotbed of genocidal aspirations, more than ten years later (Rohingya) I don’t know what the solution is, but military intervention by the US in someone else’s domestic squabbles is not the thing that will fix it. Setting up international bodies that keep genocides from happening might be the solution. But we’d have to be willing to see our own power struggles interfered with if we set up an authority with actual teeth to handle these kinds of crisis. I don’t think we’re that interested in fairness or human rights, myself. Not if it means we can’t lock up brown-skinned people just for being brown-skinned.
Maybe things would look better if we took anthropogenic climate change and the challenges of the sixth global mass extinction seriously. Here’s hoping we see policy changes soon.
