Sarcasm? If so, show me a great leader before the 19th century who didn't do lots of nasty stuff. Or are you just so above them that you hate them all? ~String
Yawwn. Are you serious? Really? Either you're lying or just stupid. Answer the question: show me a "great" leader before the 19th century that didn't dispense with human life with casual demeanor. ~String
There are many who fought wars and were casual about it. But how many are held up as exemplary men today?
Hundreds. Again, you have to be holistic, SAM. The USA could have wound up a dictatorship or in total fragments. For better or worse (mostly for worse, for the Indians) they were going to be wiped out no matter who ran the continent. That's a fact that wasn't going to change whether Washington existed or not. The white man was'a comin' and it was the end of the Indian nations. If you remove the baseline facts of the time and judge him by those things that stood out, then you see what made him great. Cicero hired assassins to have people get killed. He owned slaves. Saladin, while fair, slaughtered people mercilessly (by our standards). He was also very forgiving and extremely honorable. Cyrus the Great freed the Jews and helped rebuild the Temple. He also wiped out whole villages. Bismark created the first universal health care system, and built the Second Reich. He prompted the Kaiser to invade and enslave parts of Africa. Murad I was a unifier and a passionate patron of the arts and sciences. He also created the Janissaries and used them to slaughter entire villages. Get it. Great men can also do very bad things. ~String
Yeah, but the Iroquois of yesterday are the Iraqis/Afghanis of today, so it doesn't look like the greatness has evolved much.
You still didn't answer my point. It's called discussing in good faith. You attempted to paint GW as something extraordinary in a negative way. Show me how he was different from his time in that thought, and in doing so, show me any great leader who didn't trample on people. You keep avoiding this point and keep bringing up the Iraqis. Why? I'm not talking about them (and, I'm not even disagreeing on that point). HELL! That's not even the discussion. Does your memory not encompass anything more than today's agitprops? Show me a single great leader of India prior to the 1800's who didn't treat women like slaves, and execute people for any crime he saw fit? Washington, in that regard, is not extraordinary. What he instilled in the democracy (that which would not have been there without him) was something great. He could have taken from it the very nature of it's being: an evolving institution. HE could have made it an absolute monarchy but did not. Again, answer the point about history. ~String
There have been plenty of leaders in India who did not treat women like slaves, the concept of gender discrimination has not always existed in our culture. We have had queens in power long before the west. Our goddesses are famous. I can cite names like Ashoka and Mahavira and Gautama Buddha, but even the Krishnadevaraya and Gupta period kings were magnificient. If I were to think great man it would not be Washington who would come to mind, but Leonardo da Vinci or Nelson Mandela or Gandhi. There are plenty of good people to choose from. One need not resort to a man who burned down women and children in desperation.
None of which are contemporaries of the era of George Washington, and the morays of those times, so cannot be used as a measure of greatness, against each other. Slavery existed in the time of Leonardo da Vinci, it was in wide practice, he was most probably the son of a slave. Da Vinci's mother was a slave, Italian study claims | Art ..... Apr 12, 2008 ... The seemingly far-fetched theory that Leonardo da Vinci was of Arab ... The only Caterina in Piero's life seems to be a slave girl who lived ... arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2273051,00... - 46k - Similar pages Leonardo da Vinci, designed and developed machines of war, and made a living doing so. He was a totally contemporary man of his times, a man who worked for the highest bidder, at what ever the commission was, weapons or art.
You seem to see such enormous disparities amongst culture's. But India is a place of enormous disparities and you are showing it now. This has been and will always be the crux of the humanities problems. The core. The very fibers run deep, deliberate, never turning, never branching off.
You're dense. I'd say almost idiotic. I didn't talk about gods or goddesses (who also existed in the west-- nice try though). Da Vinci wasn't a leader, he was an artist and scientist. So, wow... you can come up with an artist who is respectable. Big deal. Ibn al-Haytham was his equal. I'm surprised you couldn't pull his name out of your head. I also said before the 1800's and who was a LEADER. Name one SAM. Mandela and Gandhi were all modern leaders. Mandela also blew up trains (with good cause, but then again, that sort of plays into the "great leader who dispensed, casually, with human life" thing). You can't. Why? Simple: You're a blatant liar, and barring that, you're as deceptive as humanly possible. You argue in bad faith and lack both the content of character and intellectual capacity to actually answer a point honestly. Instead you throw out little red herrings as much as possible in order to avoid the glaring truth: Washington was a great leader. His sins were no more, or less, than those of other great leaders of his time or before him. You made a point, now contrast it. If Washington was so bad, name a contemporary, or any leader before him who didn't waste human life wantonly. Let me answer for you: None. ~String
You're not supposed to talk about that. Don't you know that the only thing that matters is how bad the USA is and how horrible George Washington was. India's horrific mess (and the mess it's been in for the better part of a millennium) is all the west's fault and stems from nothing native. This is how you know that SAM is uneducated: she can't see past her own agenda. It's the same thing you see in trashy racists who can only quote facts from one source, or sources that agree with them. Nothing else matters. All other facts are filtered. ~String
Just as they should have known better then. What's the difference? I understand your point of "It was a different time then" but shouldn'e we hold those who stand up against what is wrong (even if it is popular) as heroes. People in the 18th century weren't morons or retards. They understood right from wrong - they understood the concept of compassion. People throughout history were no different from today - they know what is right and wrong, they just don't give a shit, because they care about grasping at and maintaining wealth and power. I don't value that behavior today - why should I overlook it in the past? 1.) And that somehoe makes it OK? 2.) Bullshit. SOME people didn't, just as SOME people don't see Muslims as fully human today. What's the difference? Yes. Some people do. And perhaps more people should. There is one flaw with your argument, however. You say that men were more than half the earth, as if they were a group and should be treated as such. Should (blacks/Muslims/gays/Christians/men/women) be seen as a homogenous group or should they be judged as individuals? If they are being judged as individuals, they should be taken on their individual merits. Bullshit. We have every right to judge those who came before us. Not only do we have a right to judge them, but a responsibility to learn from history. Mankind would have not survived if it weren't for war, prejudice, brutality and deplorable beavior? I don't buy it. We absolutely should. Not only should leaders be held to a higher standard, the vast majority of them were/are leaders because they were/are power-hungry, corrupt bastards. George Washington may have been an exeption to this - he actually didn't want to serve as president in the first place - none the less, we should scrutinize him closely. The cult of personality is extraordinarily powerful - we need to balance the legend with truth. When we teach children the history of this country should we gloss over the dirty parts or ignore them entirely? I know someone who grew up in Southern California and was never taught that California used to belong to Mexico - she had no clue. She's not stupid, either, it is the Stepford and Prozac version of so-called "Patriotism" and "History" that caused it. We have to fully admit, acknowldge and examine our mistakes and sortcomings if we ever want to improve.
To answer most of your points, I never said that it wasn't okay to learn the lessons of history or to see people for who they are. In fact, I pointed out on several occasions that we should all be aware of the horrible things that people did back then to survive. What I said, however, is that we should be careful of taking their actions out of the context of their times. I can revere a past leader whilst recognizing that he committed horrible acts because those acts were the norm of the time. People certainly did know right from wrong, it's just that the bar of such actions was in a very different place. If you're raised to believe that it's a political necessity to do a thing it doesn't necessarily justify it, but it certainly puts it in perspective. And, I did say all of this already. There are a long line of posts for you to read and realize that part of what I'm saying. I never said that mankind wouldn't be there (though, we wouldn't, now that you mention it: evolution is a long line of stronger surviving while others perish, it's dirty business, but it's also the truth). The point I was making about recorded history is that you and I wouldn't be here were it not for the actions of some pretty bad people eons ago. There would be people here, but our existence has come about because of their actions, and honestly, I wouldn't change them. From the most horrible events comes the most powerful lessons. Humanity wasn't and couldn't be just born wise. Such knowledge comes about from powerful lessons. ~String
You and I wouldn't be here if it weren't for all the extraordinarily benevolent acts and for all the seemingly innocuous acts either. I fail to see the significance of the point you are trying to make.
The failure is yours then because I was clear. It's out of hubris that most people gasp at the notion of not sitting in petty judgment of people who lived in the past. Note: SAM's conspicuous absence from this debate now. She can't partake because she can't answer the pointed question. To do so would refute her pansy-assed remarks about Washington. The point I was trying to make is: It's pompous to look back and think we would have done something different if we were in their shoes, with their knowledge and education. It's outrageously convenient for us to sit here on our comfortable perch at this age in history and bemoan the horrible things that happened in the past. I refuse to feel horrible about what was done to bring me here, which actions I played no part in. I enjoy existing. And while I can look back at Cyrus, Qin Shi Huang or Washington and realize that they did some nasty things that I would never do, I can also put it in perspective of the times they lived in. They were great, but also flawed and very human. How pathetic are we that we can't look back and realize that? Up until a century and a half ago, life was terribly rough. No sanitation. No instant communication. People needed tyrannical governments to keep them in line. The proof is in the pudding: they were the only times that any civilization stayed "whole". Even under the most just rulers, powerful suppression existed just to make things work. Greek States? Roman Empire? Achaemenid Empire? British Empire? Mughal Empire? Umayyad Caliphate? Chinese Empire? All of them were prosperous and all of them were horribly oppressive and massacred on a massive scale. The fact is, you have to establish the baseline of times and judge the person in their divergence from that baseline. Understanding that even the most "progressive" white people of the early United States (i.e. John Adams) didn't view Indian wars as anything odd, puts in perspective of who George Washington was what it was that made him so great. Just the same, the Umayyad's (who owned slaves in rather large numbers) were considered outrageously liberal by the Europeans of the time (women had the right to divorce their men? Jews tolerated!? Right of appeal!!!), they nonetheless never hesitated to slaughter if it was required to expand the empire. That's the point of it all. Learn the lessons of history, especially the lesson about not judging people too harshly for being human in times that were unimaginably dirty and rough. ~String
Right. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with your over-enthusiastic zealotry in trying to prove Sam wrong and defend your country against the Shehadist.
Yes. That was it. I was defending my country. That was the gestalt of the whole debate. I trumped out all sorts of pro-American dogma and didn't talk about other, relevent, historical examples. None at all. If you had gone back and read, you'd see that I provided roughly ten posts throughout this debate on the matter. But sure, distill it down to Washington. I don't give a damn about Washington. Not everybody is going to like the guy. What bothers me is the hubris and judgmental nature people who look down their noses at someone who lived in a totally different era with totally different concepts of ethics than you or me. Likewise, I would never sit here and bitch about Muslim Caliphs and Ottoman Turks and that nasty business they engaged in. Why? Because it was the norm of the times. This entire debate is on that fact, and that fact alone. That Washington was the impetus of the discussion doesn't matter so much as the utter convenience of cherry-picking him out of the lot historical figures who ruled nations (as if you'd do something differently in his shoes, with his education and his upbringing) and decrying him for doing what was normal for the times and what history's greatest -- and most revered -- leaders had done. A person is the product of the times that breed them. Whether it be Washington (or any of the numerous other historical figures I mentioned), each person should be judged by the times they live in and not ours. But, I did say this all before and have said it once again for your benefit now. Apparently your overenthusiastic zealotry to defend a person who can't grasp history on a holistic level caused you to miss these glaringly obvious points. (which points, I might add, you casually avoid in an attempt to make it about the debate and not the facts at hand) ~String
