On Friday 07 September Thom asked whether, if we accept for the moment the argument that we are fighting them over in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here, we have the moral right to do so. He played a clip of Robert F. Kennedy asking the same question about Vietnam (Face the Nation, 27 November 1967):

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Now we turned. When we found that the South Vietnamese haven't given the support and are not making the effort. Now we are saying we are going to fight there so we don't have to fight in Thailand, so that we don't have to fight in the west coast of the United States, so they won't move across the Rockies...

I mean, do we have the right here in the United States to say that we are going to kill tens of thousands, make millions of people, as we have, make millions of people refugees, kill women and children as we have. Because there are thirty-five thousand people without limbs in South Vietnam, a hundred and fifty thousand civilian casualties every year. Thousands of children are killed because of our efforts.

Do we have that right, here in the United States to perform these acts, because we want to protect ourselves so that it is not a greater problem for us in the United States.

I very seriously question whether we have that right. And I think other people are fighting it, other people are carrying the burden. But this is also our war. Those of us who stay here in the United States. We must feel it when we use Napalm or a village is destroyed and civilians are killed, this is also our responsibility. This is a moral obligation and a moral responsibility for us here in the United States. And I think we've forgotten about that. And when we switched from one view to another, I think that we've forgotten about it. And I think that it should be discussed, and all of us should examine our own conscience of what we are doing in South Vietnam. Not just the fact that we're killing North Vietnamese soldiers, or Viet Cong, we're also responsible for tens and tens of thousands of innocent civilian casualties. And I think we're going to have a difficult time explaining it to ourselves.

Do we have the moral right?

Those paying any attention know that the media insulates the public from the stress of seeing the true results of war. This war does not have flag draped coffins on the teevee. This war does not have women and children blasted to a red mist by high explosives.
Though polls show the majority opinion of the citizens is for ending the carnage, the "leaders" continue to pursue an Imperial design, looting the treasury, ignoring the commonwealth, content to reap material gain so long as they might.
The sub text here is one of the school yard bully-"What are you going to do about it?"
Pretentious words and phrases are tossed off to the minority which believes in the "goals" of the war, whichever way the policy of the day might go.
The moral questions are not allowed to be presented in any fashion which might disturb the sleep of the passive citizenry, the "righteousness" of national policy is set out in vague phrases which are just sufficient to ease whatever doubts might surface when facts are unpleasant.
It may take a century to bring the people of this country to a level of awareness which will bring about substantial change.
In Russia, a century passed from the Decemberist Movement to revolution.
I do not see revolution as a likely outcome in this country, more likely it will be a slow disintegration of the base of support for adventurer conqueror types, as the standard of living continues to fall.
My fear is that the world may not have a century to wait upon this change.

The morality of the Iraq War isn't really a consideration...immoral as it is.

The focus is on saving face, saving money, saving a disgraced national honor.

The moral outrage is on the back burner. The unjustified suffering and/or death of millions is irrelevant. Such is the moral level in the United States today. Many Christians, shamefully, are in the forefront of this sort of thing.

American morality seems to be limited to who is sleeping with who, not on who has brought about human suffering on a scale overshadowed only by Hilter, Stalin and a few predecessors of an earlier historical time.

Our tears should flood the Mississippi for what we have wrought, but they don't.

Retired Monk
"Ideology is a disease"

These answers will come in time. Gotta wait till the fever drops to see this stuff clearly.

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Do we have the moral right?

NO

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Originally posted by JoeSzynal:
These answers will come in time. Gotta wait till the fever drops to see this stuff clearly.

I wish you well in getting over your fever.

I'm with bamboo on this. But, you see, we've already been through it.

Do we have the moral right to do nothing in the world?

I think it depends on if you think the war was moral to begin with.

quote:

Originally posted by meljomur:
I think it depends on if you think the war was moral to begin with.

That is a decision that I will leave to historians. I was in essence trying to expand our discussion beyond this one war. Do we have the moral right to NOT give aid? Or to help the suffering people of the world? Should we turn our back on the people of Zimbabwe, Sudan, Somalia...? Let them eat cake?

But what do I know?

quote:

Originally posted by meljomur:
I think it depends on if you think the war was moral to begin with.

I see in thinking about this point, that a problem was raised in the title of this thread, and it has to do with the confusion of "we" and the concept of "moral rights," which you'll discover with some research has to do with control of an individual's work -- artistic or authorial.

Moral rights as a concept is generally applied to authorship and an author or artist's rights to control her work: Moral Rights

How can it be asked, then, with any degree of accuracy if a nation has "moral rights"?

If I think it was or wasn't moral for the US to invade Iraq to begin with, does that determine whether the act of a "we" in making war is a moral or immoral right?

We actually have a couple of "Terms of Service" agreements regarding this issue on this board:

quote:

2. Altering Quotations: Do not alter the wording or make it appear as though another member had said something which they did not.

10. Copying from the board: Content from this message board may not be posted, except by its original poster to this board, to other venues on the internet without the explicit written permission of the owners of this message board.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER:
Users are legally responsible and liable for the content of their posts. Additionally, The Thom Hartmann Program, employees, and moderators will be held harmless against any and all claims resulting from the use of these boards and Chat.

As an aside, this is something I find problematic with this and other message boards, because I've had instances where my words have been quoted and misused or misconstrued, and then I have others on this board telling me I'm not supposed to worry about that behavior. I find that troublesome.

Back to the problem raised by referring to the action of the US as a whole as a moral right:

From my above "Moral Rights" link:

quote:

What sources of law govern moral rights in the U.S.?
In the U.S., moral rights are primarily protected by VARA. Before VARA was passed, courts and commentators struggled to find moral rights in the "derivative work" provision of the Copyright Act, the laws of defamation, the rights of privacy and publicity, the doctrine of misappropriation, and especially the Lanham Act, which deals with trademarks and unfair competition. Gilliam v. American Braodcasting Co., 538 F.2d 14 (2d Cir. 1976); Flore Krigsman, Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act as a Defender of Artists' "Moral Rights," 73 Trade-Mark Rep. 251 (May-June 1983).

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Moral rights are not transferrable, and end only with the life of the author. Even if the author has conveyed away a work or her copyright in it, she retains the moral rights to the work under VARA. Authors may, however, waive their moral rights if do so in writing.

Ronald,

This statement is very interesting, because it shows that you equate NOT waging war with doing nothing:

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Do we have the moral right to do nothing in the world?

Of course, I understand that you did not literally SAY that, but it is implied.

Question, though: if we HAD done nothing, for instance, if we HADN'T re-arranged the Middle East, if we HADN'T teminated the Indians, if we HADN't exterminated 200.000 people in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, would 'we' be in a situation where further war is 'necessary'?

In other words, are YOU, Ronald, ready to break the circle? I'm asking, because from your post I get the impression that you're not, and that you're trying to put that responsibility outside of yourself. After all:

quote:

That is a decision that I will leave to historians.

Personally, I try to take resposibility NOW, and MYSELF, rather than wait untill I'm dead so someone else can do it for me.

But of course, it's your life, and you should do as you think is best

quote:

But of course, it's your life, and you should do as you think is best Smiler

Well thank you Randal. May I say the same in return?

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This statement is very interesting, because it shows that you equate NOT waging war with doing nothing:...
Of course, I understand that you did not literally SAY that, but it is implied.

I am sorry if you felt I "implied" anything in my passage. I think we both understand that war is not a single binary oppositional response. And we do have a State Department for a reason.

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In other words, are YOU, Ronald, ready to break the circle? I'm asking, because from your post I get the impression that you're not, and that you're trying to put that responsibility outside of yourself.

I neither have the power to start or stop democides that are occurring all around the world so I have no control over breaking any circle. Anyway maybe you can ask our pedantic nihilist whether you can "break" a circle?

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Question, though: if we HAD done nothing, for instance, if we HADN'T re-arranged the Middle East, if we HADN'T teminated the Indians, if we HADN't exterminated 200.000 people in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, would 'we' be be in a situation where further war is 'necessary'?

Are you saying that Arabs also did not participate in the drawing of the lines? The only true way to not have terminated the Indians was not to step off the boat. Sure we could not have dropped "the bombs" and we would have just firebombed more cities including those two that we were setting aside.

Did our isolationism of 1920-1940 suddenly stop war? If so then yes unilateral disarmament is the way.

quote:

Anyway maybe you can ask our pedantic nihilist whether you can "break" a circle?

Who would you be referring to?

On second thoughts, never mind. There's not much in your writing that warrants the trust that you are willing to communicate on this.

Again, this is fine by me, whether or not you choose to turn the world into 'the enemy' is not for me to have an opinion on either way. Good luck, I mean that.

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Originally posted by Randal Graves:

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Anyway maybe you can ask our pedantic nihilist whether you can "break" a circle?

Who would you be referring to?

Shhh, be vawee quiet...

We don't mention names here.

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Originally posted by /rén:

quote:

Originally posted by meljomur:
I think it depends on if you think the war was moral to begin with.

I see in thinking about this point, that a problem was raised in the title of this thread, and it has to do with the confusion of "we" and the concept of "moral rights," which you'll discover with some research has to do with control of an individual's work -- artistic or authorial.

Moral rights as a concept is generally applied to authorship and an author or artist's rights to control her work: Moral Rights

How can it be asked, then, with any degree of accuracy if a nation has "moral rights"?

If I think it was or wasn't moral for the US to invade Iraq to begin with, does that determine whether the act of a "we" in making war is a moral or immoral right?

We actually have a couple of "Terms of Service" agreements regarding this issue on this board:

quote:

2. Altering Quotations: Do not alter the wording or make it appear as though another member had said something which they did not.

10. Copying from the board: Content from this message board may not be posted, except by its original poster to this board, to other venues on the internet without the explicit written permission of the owners of this message board.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER:
Users are legally responsible and liable for the content of their posts. Additionally, The Thom Hartmann Program, employees, and moderators will be held harmless against any and all claims resulting from the use of these boards and Chat.

As an aside, this is something I find problematic with this and other message boards, because I've had instances where my words have been quoted and misused or misconstrued, and then I have others on this board telling me I'm not supposed to worry about that behavior. I find that troublesome.

Back to the problem raised by referring to the action of the US as a whole as a moral right:

From my above "Moral Rights" link:

quote:

What sources of law govern moral rights in the U.S.?
In the U.S., moral rights are primarily protected by VARA. Before VARA was passed, courts and commentators struggled to find moral rights in the "derivative work" provision of the Copyright Act, the laws of defamation, the rights of privacy and publicity, the doctrine of misappropriation, and especially the Lanham Act, which deals with trademarks and unfair competition. Gilliam v. American Braodcasting Co., 538 F.2d 14 (2d Cir. 1976); Flore Krigsman, Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act as a Defender of Artists' "Moral Rights," 73 Trade-Mark Rep. 251 (May-June 1983).

quote:

Moral rights are not transferrable, and end only with the life of the author. Even if the author has conveyed away a work or her copyright in it, she retains the moral rights to the work under VARA. Authors may, however, waive their moral rights if do so in writing.

Ren, are you telling me that because I may not have construed the meaning of the post as you have, that I have somehow gone against message board rules??

Are we being told how to interpret threads now?

As an avid listener to Thom, I can't imagine he would ever create a message board where everyone was told how to interpret the thread???!!!!

Sorry, I didnt realise that "moral right" was a legal term meaning something else. I was trying to include "what gives us the right to" with "is it moral" in a short headline.

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Ren, are you telling me that because I may not have construed the meaning of the post as you have, that I have somehow gone against message board rules??

Are we being told how to interpret threads now?

As an avid listener to Thom, I can't imagine he would ever create a message board where everyone was told how to interpret the thread???!!!!

Sorry, meljomur, didn't mean to imply anything about what you said.

I referred to what you said because it had stimulated me to re-explore the meaning of "moral right" and I delved into this really complicated legal problem in the process. And then I went off on it a bit. You stimulated me to do that because of the way you phrased it with the ambiguous impersonal "you" that also had for me an implied personal meaning. I hope you can appreciate that. What I tried to do was illustrate the kinds of moral issues that "moral right" involves, and I saw that these message boards, and our very words on these threads, invoke that very important and complicated personal rights issue, that has to do with our individual responsibility within an organized collective, and the consequent moral right to determine what happens with our own words.

Perhaps you can imagine that for me, when the discussion is about a "we" acting, as the US is said to be doing in the ME, I also recognize that this ambiguous "we" is violating individual rights in the Middle East, as well as what I would consider my own moral rights to not want to choose to act collectively. I may not personally agree any "we" has the moral right to violate the individual rights of others in foreign countries by preemtive attack and occupation. And it turns out that's a very relative concern in the realm of "moral rights" because in the legal realm, moral rights are based on individual rights. Collectives tend to be looked at differently.

All sorts of things started coming up in my mind. Issues like patriotism and personal freedom of choice of moral based action in a so-called democracy, and so forth.

So I was only referring to you because what you said raised the problem.

quote:

Sue:

Sorry, I didnt realise that "moral right" was a legal term meaning something else. I was trying to include "what gives us the right to" with "is it moral" in a short headline.

Sue, I understand, and when I first read your title, I read it as "framed" that way. But as I said to meljumur, I was reminded by the wording of his/her post that there are some very interesting discussions about "collective rights" and "national rights" with regards to issues of morality, and the very concept of a moral "right"eousness and acting in a moral way in the world. I realized my first instinct in reading the thread title included a sense of confusion because it implied an authoritarian conclusion of some sort of ultimate morality that would be, in this day and age, difficult to determine.

Then, as I read into some of the issues today, I could envision this thread getting really complicated.

I'm glad that we got rid of a lot of the declensions, etc., that Latin and other languages have, but I wish we had kept 'thee' and 'thou', or at least that "one" hadn't gone out of fashion.

Whew, I'm glad we are all friends again.
BTW, Ren, I have duly noted that you are quite the deep person, so I am not surprised you may have read much more into this post than I did.

Meljomur, my apologies for not being clear. I appreciate your kind thoughts regarding what you perceive about me through my words, although I'm not sure I warrant the assessment.

What stimulates my concern about this issue is that I'm acutely aware of the potential legal ramifications of my words from my writing as a consultant in a business/legal environment. It's kind of instinctive for me now to think about my personal responsibility for what I write any time I write. So the result of that is a sense of needing to be clear when I say things.

My efforts at attempting to be clear it turns out may have their own unintended effect of bringing about an appearance that I may be a deeply searching person, and I think that's because of the nature of self reflection and the sort of questioning that goes into the process of simply trying to be certain one has said something clearly. It just a simple, ordinary writing process that may begin with an objective of making certain one has put oneself in a good position to defend oneself legally, but it tends to become a kind of habitual practice in all writing endeavors -- for me, anyway.

I think what you may be seeing when I write here isn't much more than that. And I must also note that any such certainty that one has actually managed to achieve clarity is not all that easy to come by! At least not for me.

Ren,

Well that certainly clears things up for me.

I still believe you are a deep meaning person, or you couldn't put into words the thoughts that you do have, so eloquently.

BTW, where is Road Prison 36?

quote:

BTW, where is Road Prison 36?

Somewhere in the south. It's from the movie Cool Hand Luke.

Though one could argue that you have the moral responsibility to fix that which you broke, you lack the credibility among the locals to be able to do so successfully. At least that is what we are being told.

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we are fighting them over in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here

Even the US, doesn't have the capacity to bomb the Middle East from some place in Utah. The worse you have to worry about is the Timothy McVeighs in the various communities.

Did you hear about the homegrown Terrorist-wannabes in Toronto? You know when you complain about something to the police and it seems like they aren't doing anything about it? They probably are, but trying to gage how big it is before they put a stop to it:

quote:

Summer 2004: Sayyid Ahmed Amirridun, a moderate Muslim leader at the Meadowvale Islamic Centre in Mississauga, starts noticing Saad Khalid and Zacharia Amara trying to recruit other young men to their extreme version of Islamic Salafism.

Fall 2004: CSIS agents take notice of Fahim Ahmad and Zacharia Amara on a website called Clearguidance.com, where anti-western ideology is shared among some of the participants.

February 26, 2005: In Atlanta, Georgia, Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 18, resident of Roswell, Georgia, buys two Greyhound bus tickets for himself and Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, of Dawsonville, Georgia.

March 6, 2005: Together, Ahmed and Sadequee take a bus to Toronto, Ontario. They spent six days in the Toronto area with at least three people under surveillance by anti-terrorism authorities, including Fahim Ahmad and Jahmaal James.

They discuss suitable targets to attacks, including military bases and oil storage facilities and refineries. They talk about disrupting the global positioning system. According to one law enforcement official, they thought this plan would wreak havoc over the skies of Atlanta. It turns out what they thought was a GPS system was, in fact, controlling CNN's main broadcast uplink.
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/torontoterror/

(written information and video link)