2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: A few observations on "progressives" I've noticed from this election [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)We're never going to get a pacifist president, but we do need to work on the assumption that we're coming to the end of the time in which war can actually liberate anyone from oppression, can make anyone's life better(other than people who own stocks in weapons companies). It can be a defense of our "interests", but whose interests are those, really?
And is it any more legitimate for OUR country to seek to order the world around and impose our dominance on it(which is what imperialism is, effectively-and you can be an "imperialist" without setting up a formal colonial structure)than it is for anyone ELSE to do it? An empire is an empire is an empire...and the world really doesn't need empires anymore.
We need to defend the country from external attack...but we can't do anything more in the Arab/Muslim world by military means, and it should be our objective to actually CREATE non-violent methods of conflict resolution, if the world is to survive.