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Comment by deutschew | Hacker News Reader

> Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society.

There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were successful at making people FEEL as such. We are quick to point fingers at Nazis, Terrorists, Enemies yet the Western perspective is always 'we can do know wrong, if we did, its justified' which is exactly what the opposing side does.

Once a subtle reminder that many supported Nazi ideals early in America, even as Jews were being sent to gas chambers, companies like IBM were happy to do business with the regime, very much like they do with CCP companies as well as Putin.

There really is no way to change this without outside intervention, I will leave that to your imagination.

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> There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were successful at making people FEEL as such.

I understand what you're trying to say with respect to dirty hands, and not wilfully misunderstanding you.

But, wrong. There _was_ a moral high ground. It subsisted within the group of people you claim were duped. Those were and always will be the people who count, who hold the _normative_ values of a society. What they "feel" is American Values (more broadly "western ones").

The "establishment" you mention were the bad guys, and remain so. To the extent they spit on normative values then claims refuge in the necessity of dirty hands, they are unsoldierly and they play into the hands of the enemy who seeks to divide us and undermine our values. They may was well be KGB/FSB agents in our midst.

What I'm saying is pick up a history book or even read through various things America was involved in all over the world. It is anything BUT moral and yes the average American has no say in the matter in the decision making. So perhaps that absolves them of the sins of the state but nevertheless the blind masses continue to push away these ugly things under the closet with various political labels and in doing so they are implicitly approving these actions because it ultimately benefits THEM at the expense of other humans.

My point was try to see it from the people on the receiving end of pax Americana and tell me why the opposing sides reacted the way they have.

History is written by the victor and you simply don't get to hear from the losers. Therefore, there can be no absolute comparisons. You push somebody to poverty or vilify them, there is no exit but the desired outcome you seek. Once again, narratives is what shapes our reality, and the one that continuously virtue signals is the one that ultimately wins.

I understand you.

May I humbly give you links to some reading which I hope will benefit your views and arguments in the future. It pertains to a specific phrase I used above.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/

https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/s152...

respects

thanks for being respectful here, I will take a look at those.

So the Noble Lie was real because some people believed it. But those who told it lied. Moreover they didn't follow it. Moreover they were in fact bad guys. And why is that bad? Because they were caught and now those other bad guys will undermine our values... that we don't have (but we thought we did).

This makes absolutely no sense unless you insert some unfounded premise of national/Western exceptionalism somewhere.

I took u/martksn's comment to be that the State needs to behave morally as much as it can. The State is composed of and run by people -- people who are imperfect, of course, who make mistakes, are corrupted, or even outright evil.

We can only try to make the State consist of institutions that keep it mostly moral. Doing so, and mostly succeeding, gives us the moral high ground even when there are some failures.

But when those institutions fail to keep the State mostly moral, watch out, because then we're in trouble.

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