Christian Democrats in the United States
Global Issues - Israel and Palestine Israel does exist, and we decry all attempts to terrorize its civilians with useless and counter-productive attacks. However, a peaceful world of international civil law can never exist while some people are denied citizenship in any country. Everyone has a right to form governments so they do not live in a brutal state of nature, and so do Palestinians. Israel must accept the existence of a Palestinian state, and must work to provide a level of civil equality for them. President Clinton accomplished marvelous results in the Israeli-Palestine conflict before the end of his term, and the first thing G.W. Bush did was to withdraw Clinton's special envoy and adopt a hard-line stance. This action sabotaged efforts for peace and destabilized the region, led to further conflict and let the violent Hamas group step into the power vacuum. We must return to the diplomatic table in Clinton's spirit of reconciliation, to build a Middle-East world in which Israelis and Palestinians are able to peacefully co-exist. Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
7:14 PM
Some say democracy blurs people into compromise, that it destroys cultures, but this is simply not true. Putting aside for the moment the sorrow of history and the injustices of displaced reservations, look at the Native American cultures. Native Americans who are citizens of tribal nations or of the United States have not forgotten their ancestors or the beauty in their cultures, and they never will. Many cultures thrive side by side in and around free democracies, and I think that is amazing. The more people are able to see each other as equals, the more we can create independently and together to honor the miracle of our shared existence.
From the history of democracy, and of political rule in general, we know that the concentration of power makes regional and trans-regional governments unstable. In the Mediterranean, Sparta fell because their elite authoritarian minority oppressed all other classes with violence. But earlier in Athens, the ruling Forum was a democracy of elites who oppressed merchants with money and oppressed slaves and foreign colonies with violence, and it met with a similar end. The Athenian Forum refused to allow the remote conquered island of Melos rule itself, but instead slaughtered and enslaved them. Then Athenian resources were sapped by foreign wars to suppress subjects, allowing Sparta to step in, and fifteen years later the brief flirtation with democracy was destroyed.
Similarly in Rome, the Senate attempted to make decisions for the Empire from Britain to Persia, and were so out of touch that governors and commanders on the frontiers had to rule by force to carry out the Senate's edicts. After a while, the Senate was largely irrelevant because the military was doing everything anyway, so it was easy to concentrate power in the Caesar. This lead to depraved excesses of power, and eventually the period of the "thirty tyrants" who destroyed the empire's industrial and mining capacities in their mad chase to kill one another to take the purple. Finally Christ's teachings got through to someone and Constantine remade the empire, and though darkness continued in some forms, a light did shine that shielded the world from total destruction.
It seems like Israelis do not understand these lessons of history. The creation of a rift of those enfranchised and those denied is only a short-term tactic of political manipulation, and a nation relying on such a tactic cannot sustain the disparity forever. Perhaps this was set up from the beginning, that the former enemies and persecutors of the Jews were all too happy to whisper in the ears of the Israeli military and to channel them weapons behind the scenes, because they knew it would corrupt their religion and their search for God... not because they wanted to help the Jews or Israel, but because they wanted to load them up with so many bombs and so much hatred and conflict that they could destroy the Jews and Israel with a word. If the United States is doing the same thing by proxy, playing the role of Rome, then we don't have long either unless we wake up and take charge of our own destiny.
In Palestine 2000 years ago, a small group of men who wore the signs and symbols of history were corrupted under the occupation by Rome. Those men would rather have killed anyone offering a way out of the disparity than give up their own, artificially and externally imposed power. That seems all too familiar, both today in modern Israel, and in ancient Israel under the lines of kings who forgot the prophets and their wise progenitors David and Solomon, and alternately corrupted Israel into debauchery or exerted vicious and bloody wrath in the name of religious purification.
Don't forget that the way out has already been offered, that we already know which way to go to escape death - that way is love.
universal suffrage necessary for modern democracy
Suffrage, the freedom to independently choose representatives in cooperative government and to vote on issues, is the right of all the people of the modern world. If democracy is to succeed anywhere, then every person must be free to express opinion and to participate in the creation or repeal of laws. Because the creator gives us all the ability and the instinct to separate right from wrong, in freedom we trust that we will be okay in the long run, even though many of us make mistakes.Some say democracy blurs people into compromise, that it destroys cultures, but this is simply not true. Putting aside for the moment the sorrow of history and the injustices of displaced reservations, look at the Native American cultures. Native Americans who are citizens of tribal nations or of the United States have not forgotten their ancestors or the beauty in their cultures, and they never will. Many cultures thrive side by side in and around free democracies, and I think that is amazing. The more people are able to see each other as equals, the more we can create independently and together to honor the miracle of our shared existence.
From the history of democracy, and of political rule in general, we know that the concentration of power makes regional and trans-regional governments unstable. In the Mediterranean, Sparta fell because their elite authoritarian minority oppressed all other classes with violence. But earlier in Athens, the ruling Forum was a democracy of elites who oppressed merchants with money and oppressed slaves and foreign colonies with violence, and it met with a similar end. The Athenian Forum refused to allow the remote conquered island of Melos rule itself, but instead slaughtered and enslaved them. Then Athenian resources were sapped by foreign wars to suppress subjects, allowing Sparta to step in, and fifteen years later the brief flirtation with democracy was destroyed.
Similarly in Rome, the Senate attempted to make decisions for the Empire from Britain to Persia, and were so out of touch that governors and commanders on the frontiers had to rule by force to carry out the Senate's edicts. After a while, the Senate was largely irrelevant because the military was doing everything anyway, so it was easy to concentrate power in the Caesar. This lead to depraved excesses of power, and eventually the period of the "thirty tyrants" who destroyed the empire's industrial and mining capacities in their mad chase to kill one another to take the purple. Finally Christ's teachings got through to someone and Constantine remade the empire, and though darkness continued in some forms, a light did shine that shielded the world from total destruction.
It seems like Israelis do not understand these lessons of history. The creation of a rift of those enfranchised and those denied is only a short-term tactic of political manipulation, and a nation relying on such a tactic cannot sustain the disparity forever. Perhaps this was set up from the beginning, that the former enemies and persecutors of the Jews were all too happy to whisper in the ears of the Israeli military and to channel them weapons behind the scenes, because they knew it would corrupt their religion and their search for God... not because they wanted to help the Jews or Israel, but because they wanted to load them up with so many bombs and so much hatred and conflict that they could destroy the Jews and Israel with a word. If the United States is doing the same thing by proxy, playing the role of Rome, then we don't have long either unless we wake up and take charge of our own destiny.
In Palestine 2000 years ago, a small group of men who wore the signs and symbols of history were corrupted under the occupation by Rome. Those men would rather have killed anyone offering a way out of the disparity than give up their own, artificially and externally imposed power. That seems all too familiar, both today in modern Israel, and in ancient Israel under the lines of kings who forgot the prophets and their wise progenitors David and Solomon, and alternately corrupted Israel into debauchery or exerted vicious and bloody wrath in the name of religious purification.
Don't forget that the way out has already been offered, that we already know which way to go to escape death - that way is love.
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