On 12/11/2015 1:09 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 spudboy100 via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>wrote:
>
Interesting. Your comments reminds me of the 1948 film based on
the screenplay by author, Graham Green, for the film, The Third
Man. This has become known as the Harry Lime Speech, and goes like
this: "Oh, don't be so glum. Under the Borgias, Italy had
assasination, and wars, but produced Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and
the Renaissance, and under the Swiss, they had 500 years of peace,
brotherhood, and democracy, and all it has to show for it is the
cookoo clock."
Good movie and a great speech, but.... although
Graham Green
wrote most of the screenplay he didn't write that speech,
Orson Welles
himself wrote
Harry Lime
's
s
peech
. And I love
Orson Welles
, but.... the Swiss were known for centuries as skilled mercenary
soldiers willing to fight bravely and skillfully and brutally for
whoever paid the most, and Switzerland also produced Leonhard Euler
the most prolific and one of the best mathematicians of all time, and
the Swiss didn't invent the cuckoo clock the Germans did.
>
One might similarly say, under the republic, we had slavery, the
wars against native americans, and the civil war, so maybe the
plutocracy is better?
Yes
plutocracy
and the free market
is better
.
Money is a form of power and people with power use it get other forms of
power (c.f. Nietzsche). Rome was already a plutocracy. What spread
prosperity in Europe was the idea of markets, of specialization and
trade. The new world was still stuck in tribal exploitation of natural
resources (including the neighboring tribe).
Brent
The Noble Savage never existed
,
I have no doubt the history of American aborigines from 16,000 BC to
1492 AD was at least as bloody and unjust as that of the Europeans
, but at least the Europeans got prosperity from all that blood and
suffering, the
native americans
were still dirt poor compared with the Spanish in 1492. If you're
going to be brutal at least get something out of it.
John K Clark
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