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Certain personal experiences of the past few days have led me to consider, yet again, how thin-skinned and tetchy Americans are --- how quickly their tolerance for dissent and the opinions of other people disappears when criticism of their society and ways of doing things becomes at all fundamental or sustained.
These experiences have led me to consider a novel design for waging the up-coming World War III in a way that would be much less destructive to life and private property than nuclear destruction or artificially engineered biological plagues.
I have noted how upset Americans become when they read my own modest and decorous criticisms of things American. Consider what would happen if the blogosphere were inundated with tens or hundreds of millions of postings like mine, or much more harsh than mine?
As I well know, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are deeply upset by the crimes and evils that have emanated from the United States in the past 50 years, people whose sufferings would make their criticisms very bitter, and much less likely to conform to the canons of polite discourse than my modest remarks.
First, I would imagine that most Americans would be somewhat incapacitated by shock to discover how many people in the world dislike them, or even hate them. Second, they would have real difficulties in retaliating in kind. Many hundreds of millions of foreigners speak and write English well, but Americans, being mostly very poorly educated, do not know any foreign language sufficiently well to be able to write a criticism of foreign ways of doing things.
Such an attack, like another Pearl Harbor, would seriously disrupt the processes of propaganda and indoctrination which keep Americans satisfied with themselves and oblivious to the outside world --- indeed, much of the internet might grind to a halt.
Perhaps there are those who would become pale with disquiet to imagine hundreds of millions of me, or people much more direct and harsh than I. I would like to comfort them by saying that you can get used to anything, and, once the barrier that prevents them from considering fundamental criticisms of the American scene is broken down, they might even learn something!
Perhaps there would be a crash program to teach Americans foreign languages so that they could reply in kind, and, of course, if their criticisms of foreign ways were to be at all convincing, they would need to learn something about the rest of the world.
In this way, World War III could actually be a very positive experience!
This is just a very modest and tentative proposal, and any suggestions to make it more workable would be greatly appreciated. I started this thread to consider ways to make World War III more humane and less harmful, so any other proposals, of whatever nature, would be appropriate.
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Certain personal experiences of the past few days have led me to consider, yet again, how thin-skinned and tetchy Americans are --- how quickly their tolerance for dissent and the opinions of other people disappears when criticism of their society and ways of doing things becomes at all fundamental or sustained.
These experiences have led me to consider a novel design for waging the up-coming World War III in a way that would be much less destructive to life and private property than nuclear destruction or artificially engineered biological plagues.
I have noted how upset Americans become when they read my own modest and decorous criticisms of things American. Consider what would happen if the blogosphere were inundated with tens or hundreds of millions of postings like mine, or much more harsh than mine?
As I well know, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are deeply upset by the crimes and evils that have emanated from the United States in the past 50 years, people whose sufferings would make their criticisms very bitter, and much less likely to conform to the canons of polite discourse than my modest remarks.
First, I would imagine that most Americans would be somewhat incapacitated by shock to discover how many people in the world dislike them, or even hate them. Second, they would have real difficulties in retaliating in kind. Many hundreds of millions of foreigners speak and write English well, but Americans, being mostly very poorly educated, do not know any foreign language sufficiently well to be able to write a criticism of foreign ways of doing things.
Such an attack, like another Pearl Harbor, would seriously disrupt the processes of propaganda and indoctrination which keep Americans satisfied with themselves and oblivious to the outside world --- indeed, much of the internet might grind to a halt.
Perhaps there are those who would become pale with disquiet to imagine hundreds of millions of me, or people much more direct and harsh than I. I would like to comfort them by saying that you can get used to anything, and, once the barrier that prevents them from considering fundamental criticisms of the American scene is broken down, they might even learn something!
Perhaps there would be a crash program to teach Americans foreign languages so that they could reply in kind, and, of course, if their criticisms of foreign ways were to be at all convincing, they would need to learn something about the rest of the world.
In this way, World War III could actually be a very positive experience!
This is just a very modest and tentative proposal, and any suggestions to make it more workable would be greatly appreciated. I started this thread to consider ways to make World War III more humane and less harmful, so any other proposals, of whatever nature, would be appropriate.
.
