On 12/11/2012 7:23 PM, mike brown wrote:
>those of us too young to be guilty..
How does that line above fit in with the "genetic propensity" to drop
nuclear bombs on Japan (or at least wage war)?
Short answer: a baby already has genetic propensities, but has not had
time to manifest many of them; it has not done anything evil ... yet. I
was just saying that those of us who were too young to support the
political warmakers had no responsibility for their nuclear atrocities,
yet we are living in a nation diminished by that and so many other evil
acts. Of course, realistically, individual citizens could do little to
stop the elites, but might NOT, for instance, have volunteered to fight.
Nor is it likely the Japanese would have refrained from using nukes on
us if they had been able to; it seems to me they were only restrained by
capacity, rather than propensity, so I am not saying Americans were
especially evil, but that they had the national capacity to wage
imperialistic war, and were attracted to/supportive of the sort of
political elites who were inclined to use that power.
All human populations have the propensity to wage war, though it /does
/seem to be more highly expressed in some ethnies and cultures. The
thing that has made America such a menace is the national
economic-industrial- resource (rather than genetic) capacity to sustain
technological warfare. I did not mean to imply that the American
population had a particularly war-like genetic propensity, but, rather,
that they do not have any particular social /virtues/ that would make
them resistant to the manipulation of their political elites. Right off
hand I can't think of /any/ ethny that /has/ resisted the imperialistic
ambitions of the political power-seekers. We humans come from ancestors
who were selected /for/ fitness competition rather than pacifism. On the
other hand we were also selected for cooperation, so we have a
propensity to cooperate in waging war.
RAF
