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Nan White Professional care a great help in dealing with dementia Kiwanis Club names new officers Community Blog: From Deficiency to Contentment Aging Happens Inner Peace Column Inner Peace Blog Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » Obituaries Photos Videos Blogs NEWS NOW (No heading) ... Police reports ... CALENDAR ... (No heading) ... Police reports ... CALENDAR ... RELOCATIONS Us versus them DailyTidings.com Writer Posted Sep. 27, 2014 @ 12:01 am Posted Sep. 27, 2014 @ 12:01 am » Social News At the University of Houston there was a not-very-thoughtful student who spoke a lot in an Honors College seminar I taught. The recent break-up of the USSR came up during discussion one day. I asked whether we would have condemned then-President Gorbachev had he used force to keep the break-away republics in the Union. “Of course,” this student immediately replied. Then I pointed out that President Lincoln used force to bring the Southern states back into the Union, and asked him to square that action with his position on the USSR. In a little laugh suggesting he knew the intellectual inadequacy of his reply, he said, “Because that was us.” At least that young man, when faced with his blatant contradiction, felt uncomfortable, and to his credit he pinpointed the sole justification for it — a partiality that led him to hold the “other side” to a different standard than “our side.” We are all disturbed by contradictions that work to our disadvantage. If our parents had withheld from us what they gave to our siblings, we would have demanded an explanation. And if their answer had been, “We just don’t like you as much as we like them,” we would have resented their partiality, probably forever. Members of my former profession are trained to systematically seek out as much truth on a subject as is available at any given time. And so we become unusually sensitive to contradictions. We cannot publish findings that assert conclusions contradicted by the evidence we present or that we purposely exclude from our study. If our scholarly integrity won’t act as a brake, the scrutiny of our colleagues will. For many of us this habit carries over into our thinking on all subjects, not just our academic specialties. Alas, the majority of folks haven’t formed this habit. We are alert to contradictions in the assertions and behavior of others, but far less to those in our own. Further, if someone points them out, many of us just don’t care. So it is, for example, that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been successfully demonized by our government and the mainstream media for aiding militarily the ethnic-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. Yet just last week Congress, at President Obama’s request, voted to aid militarily the so-called “moderate” rebels in Syria. Nor is our support for that insurgency unique. Just two other examples: our support of Joseph Savimbi’s insurgency in Angola and of the “Contras’” effort to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. When it comes to the contradictions of our foreign policy, we seem unbothered by them, perhaps because we rarely have them pointed out to us. Nonetheless, there are consequences, because we are not alone in this world, and other nations don’t share our partiality for ourselves. One consequence is that our ill conduct licenses similar conduct by others. It’s no accident, for instance, that Nikita Khrushchev felt free to crush the Prague Spring three years after Lyndon Johnson crushed the democratically elected government of the Dominican Republic in 1965. A consequence at least as important is our forfeiture of moral force, which we could use all the more now that our vast military superiority has proved inadequate to determine international outcomes. Our long-continuing and self-serving contradictory behavior has exhausted the enormous moral capital we accrued by defeating the Axis powers in World War II. And the moral self-righteousness with which our nation habitually speaks to the world merely underscores our failure to hold ourselves to the same standards we apply to other nations. But what the hell? It’s us. Herb  Rothschild  Jr. is chairman of the board of Peace House, an Ashland-based nonprofit group promoting  public advocacy, nonviolence and cooperation among similar organizations.       DailyTidings.com Writer Posted Sep. 27, 2014 @ 12:01 am » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. calendar Connect with DailyTidings.com Facebook Twitter RSS Back to top Reader Services Reader Services home Subscriptions Subscriber controls Contact us Submissions Photos Events Letters to the editor Corrections Alerts Email alerts RSS feeds Text Alerts Advertise Media Kit Home Products and services Ad rates Advertising contacts Mail Tribune Daily Tidings The Nickel Shop Our Valley Blogs Stay Informed Email newsletter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. 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