At risk of starting a new thread like the Snowden one, what should be done about the Syrian crisis?
With confirmation that chemical weapons have been used, do we as the rest of the World have a moral obligation to step in with military force, even if that puts our own troops at risk of similar attack?
It's clear that international law has been broken and while it's a bit early to conclude, it is also likely that a war crimes tribunal will be formed at some point in the future. But while major Governments are currently responding with some indecision regarding intervention, does the use of chemical weapons against civilians change the risk vs benefit and should we be more committed to stepping in to stop what happening?
Can we stop what's happening?
a revisit to the original nature and birth of capitalism can give you a better understanding what has been going on even in the postmodern world in terms of underlying driving forces:
let me quote:
All this raises the question of what “capitalism” is to begin with, a question on which there is no consensus at all. The word was originally invented by socialists, who saw capitalism as that system whereby those who own capital command the labor of those who do not. Proponents, in contrast, tend to see capitalism as the freedom of the marketplace, which allows those with potentially marketable visions to pull resources together to bring those visions into being. Just about everyone agrees, however, that capitalism is a system that demands constant, endless growth. Enterprises have to grow in order to remain viable. The same is true of nations. Just as five percent per annum was widely accepted, at the dawn of capitalism, as the legitimate commercial rate of interest—that is, the amount that any investor could normally expect her money to be growing by the principle of interesse—so is five percent now the annual rate at which any nation’s GDP really ought to grow. What was once an impersonal mechanism that compelled people to look at everything around them as a potential source of profit has come to be considered the only objective measure of the health of the human community itself.
Starting from our baseline date of 1700, then, what we see at the dawn of modern capitalism is a gigantic financial apparatus of credit and debt that operates—in practical effect—to pump more and more labor out of just about everyone with whom it comes into contact, and as a result produces an endlessly expanding volume of material goods. It does so not just by moral compulsion, but above all by using moral compulsion to mobilize sheer physical force. At every point, the familiar but peculiarly European entanglement of war and commerce reappears—often in startling new forms. The first stock markets in Holland and Britain were based mainly in trading shares of the East and West India companies, which were both military and trading ventures. For a century, one such private, profit-seeking corporation governed India. The national debts of England, France, and the others were based in money borrowed not to dig canals and erect bridges, but to acquire the gunpowder needed to bombard cities and to construct the camps required for the holding of prisoners and the training of recruits. Almost all the bubbles of the eighteenth century involved some fantastic scheme to use the proceeds of colonial ventures to pay for European wars. Paper money was debt money, and debt money was war money, and this has always remained the case. Those who financed Europe’s endless military conflicts also employed the government’s police and prisons to extract ever-increasing productivity from the rest of the population.
— Debt : The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber
