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The Arrogance of Power, William Fulbright

Toshi

Toshi

butthole powerwashing evangelist
Oct 23, 2001
40,253
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http://www.phys.washington.edu/users/vladi/phys216/Fulbright.ppt

well worth the read.

former Senator William Fulbright said:
[...]

Having done so much and succeeded so well, America is now at that historical point at which a great nation is in danger of losing its perspective on what exactly is within the realm of its power and what is beyond it. Other great nations, reaching this critical juncture, have aspired to too much, and by overextension of effort have declined and then fallen.

The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations -- to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work. [...]

[...] it is my hope [...] that America will escape those fatal temptations of power which have ruined other great nations and will instead confine herself to doing only that good in the world which she can do, both by direct effort and by the force of her own example.

The stakes are high indeed: they include not only America's continued greatness but nothing less than the survival of the human race in an era when, for the first time in human history, a living generation has the power of veto over the survival of the next.

[...]
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fulbright wrote this in 1966 in response to vietnam. we have learned nothing since then.
 
sanjuro

sanjuro

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Sep 13, 2004
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I can only hope the next generation of Americans will less quick to support our leadership if they believe our leadership is wrong.
 
B

blue

boob hater
Jan 24, 2004
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california
This really strikes at the heart of the American psyche...Most American politicians speak with such national omnipotence overtones that it's career suicide to do otherwise. If they don't, they're "unpatriotic"...whatever the fvck that means.

re: Obama's willingness to open diplomatic channels with Iran is shunned as if we're too good for that, or the savages won't understand us, or won't see the errors of their evil ways, or...yeah.
 
sanjuro

sanjuro

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stevew said:
He was not a fan of black people or jews.
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In 1956, Fulbright signed the Southern Manifesto, a call by Southern representatives and senators for resistance to court-ordered school integration, and he did not vote for a civil rights bill until 1970. And yet he had played a key role in toning down the Southern Manifesto and, deeply affected by the killing of four African-American girls in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963, he provided behind-the-scenes help on civil rights measures to both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. During Nixon’s tenure in office, Fulbright led the way in defeating the nomination of G. Harold Carswell, an outspoken opponent of the civil rights movement. He also combated the John Birch Society, the Christian Crusade, H. L. Hunt, Strom Thurmond, and the other organizations and personalities that made up the radical right of the period.
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By today's standards, Fulbright was a hoodwearing, concentration camp guard. However, he was a product of a very racist environment, the South in the first half of the 20th century.

Ultimately, his good deeds should not be blemished by what I think were compromises to wield political power during the Civil Rights era.

I cannot believe a man as intelligent as him would base his judgments solely on a person's color or religion.
 
Toshi

Toshi

butthole powerwashing evangelist
Oct 23, 2001
40,253
9,126
more. page 254-255.

Fulbright said:
The West has won two "total victories" in [the 20th] century and it has barely survived them. America, especially, fought the two world wars in the spirit of a righteous crusade. [...] But to our shack and dismay we found [...] that our triumph had produced at least as many problems as it had solved, and that it was by no means clear that the new problems were preferable to the old ones.

I [...] raise these events of the American past [...] to illustrate that the problem of excessive ideological zeal is our problem as well as the communists'. I think also that when we respond to communist dogmatism with a dogmatism of our own we are not merely responding by the necessity, as we are told, of "fighting fire with fire." [...]

The kind of foreign policy I have been talking about is, in the true sense of the term, a conservative policy. [...] It is an approach that accepts the world as it is, with all its existing nations and ideologies, with all its existing qualities and shortcomings. [...] I think that if the great conservatives of the past [...] were alive today [... they] would wish to come to terms with the world as it is, not because our world would be pleasing to them -- almost certainly it would not be -- but because they believed in the preservation of indissoluble links between the past and the future, because they profoundly mistrusted abstract ideas, and because they did not think themselves or any other men qualified to play God.

The last, I think is the central point. I believe that a man's principal business, in foreign policy as in domestic policy and in his daily life, is to keep his own house in order, to make life a little more civilized, a little more satisfying, and a little more serene in the brief time that is allotted him. I think that man is qualified to contemplate metaphysics but not to practice it. The practice of metaphysics is God's work.
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i quoted sparingly here. it's worth reading.
 
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