In response to: Re: If might always made right, we'd all be in trouble

There is a somewhat dangerous historical misprision here. The paradox of American power is not that America has been a Global Policeman, and rather that it has not. The problem is that America is not an Empire, not that it is one. The C.I.A (an organization which should be extirpated as soon as possible) is an exemplification of the Isolationist equation: Inaction=Negative Action. It has managed to protect and uphold Nothing. The United States is not a superpower, not a 'hyperpuissance' (as a mediocre French diplomat once termed it, to the choral assent of Attenuated Europe); it needs to become one.

What appears to underlie your position (and your disposition) is a notion that you appear to hold of manifest cultural differences, i.e. the possibility of a Different Morality. The prescription which proceeds logically from that presumption, of course, is that one must respect cultural differences.

Moral seriousness, however, has never involved Politeness. Your 'Good natured-man' is a frivolous and insouciant sort of subhuman; nothing more. Thus Hazlitt:

'A person of this kind has no feeling of anger or detestation, when you tell him of the devastation of a province, or the massacre of the inhabitants of a town, or the enslaving of a people. But if his dinner is spoilt by a lump of soot falling down the chimney, he is thrown into the utmost confusion, and can hardly regain himself for the whole day.'

One should always insist upon the superiority of Athens to Jerusalem, and this indeed is one of the proofs: All thought, for Greece, was Agonized, i.e. presented in competition with itself. Whether there is an ethics that is 'apodictically certain' (as Uncle Manny would have us believe) does not concern me; it is merely the potency of your Ethic, of your Metaphysic, that matters in this world. America has every right to inflict itself upon the rest of the world, to subsume it all under its own 'Will to Lycurgus,' the Law it gives to itself and then to its Sphere. Our enemies seek to do nothing less; we should meet them on our terms.

It is a very glib and stupid assumption to make: 'different culture, different morality.' There is no such thing; either one possesses an Erotics of Morality (as Shelley adumbrates in the prose Defense of Poetry), or one does not. Only anomalies (meaning sociopaths, not cannibals) lack access to that Erotics. The capacity to Feel is, as far as I can tell, universal; Culture and Religion can have the effect, merely, of attenuating that capacity; that, and only that, is a Cultural Difference.

Our respect for the 'International Community' (as, indeed, our Respect for Islam) needs to be abjured. The United Nations allows China and Russia (the two countries of the world which appear to think solitarily in Commercial terms, which have actively aided the Iranian and Syrian regimes, the genocide of Rwanda, the Fedayeen Saddam, etc. bloody etc.) to act as Peremptory Agents. Your 'International Community' is an historical Parody.