Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter and the Great Books of the Western World by Matt Burriesci

Author:Matt Burriesci [Burriesci, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dead White Guys
ISBN: 9781632280268
Publisher: Viva Editions
Published: 2015-06-08T22:00:00+00:00

In 2003, we invaded Iraq under many pretenses, but one of the arguments we made was that we were “liberating” the people from a tyrant. We found the tyrant, and the Iraqi people promptly hung him in a public square. Iraq had been “liberated” and we “gave the people their freedom.”

Was Justice served? Maybe. Were the Iraqi people better off? Not necessarily. After the initial period of conflict that removed the tyrant, we, as occupiers, allowed order to break down. The results were predictable: chaos, rampant corruption, and anarchy. People got blown up drinking coffee. There was no electricity, no running water. In a country with some of the largest oil reserves on the planet, nobody could get any gasoline. Buildings were looted, the infrastructure was picked clean by scavengers, and even the country’s cultural treasures (some tracing back to the very origins of human civilization) were stolen or destroyed. Once the conditions of chaos took hold, they proved very difficult to reverse. However odious Saddam Hussein might’ve been, we replaced order with chaos, and in this chaotic environment, we set out to establish an advanced, representative system of government. It failed. After a decade of war, trillions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, The United States finally withdrew. Shortly afterward, extremists seized control of much of the country, imposed horrifically brutal religious law, and began committing genocide. Now the Iraqi people were worse off than they had been under Hussein, and the United States was less secure as well. We had created a resource-rich haven for our worst enemies.

So you have to put men like Machiavelli, Sherman, and Alexander in context, Violet. You have to look at the long-term good, not just the short-term suffering.

Therefore a prince, so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the reproach of cruelty; because with a few examples he will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies, for these are wont to injure the whole people, while those executions which originate with a prince offend the individual only.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.