QUOTE OF THE DAY
"The more I puzzle over the great wars of history, the more I am inclined to the view that the causes attributed to them -- territory, markets, resources, the defense or perpetuation of great principles -- were not the root causes at all but rather explanations or excuses for certain unfathomable drives of human nature. For lack of a clear and precise understanding of exactly what these motives are, I refer to them as 'the arrogance of power' "
- - J. William Fulbright (1966)
RHINO HERE:
Thanks to my friend (and Rhino's Blog subscriber) Ina May Gaskin for directing my attention to the classic text, The Arrogance Of Power, published in 1966 by then Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright. The book, currently re-reviewed on tompaine.com:
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6443
provides insights on the current war drum atmosphere and the growing peace movement. As the article's writer, Jim Lobe, explains Fulbright's critique, "legitimized the growing anti-war movement in a way that had not been possible before the book's publication and shattered what until then had been an elite consensus that U.S. military intervention in Indochina was necessitated by the Cold War geopolitics."
On U.S. Foreign Policy: "Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But... when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism."
On War Fever:
"Past experience provides little basis for confidence that reason can prevail in an atmosphere of mounting war fever. In a contest between a hawk and dove, the hawk has a great advantage, not because it is a better bird but because it is a bigger bird with lethal talons and a highly developed will to use them."
On The Arrogance Of Power:
"Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations -- to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work."
TO READ MORE EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK, GO TO:
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6443
Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law ( http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html ).
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8:41:09 AM 
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