Everything is indeed ****. But here's a crude, yet accurate, analogy. The cia created sadam. But they did not provide him with chemical weapons to kill his citizens. Russia not only created assad, it assisted him in the mass killing of his citizens. Its all relative and on balance I'd rather live in la than moscow
Brexit, for once some facts.
- Thread starter flecc
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No, that's not even a remotely accurate analogy. Integral to what I decribed was that Putin has been driven to his desperate measures on his borders by the successive US actions creating an impossible situation.
And Russia's major assistance to the lawful government of Syria was against the ISIS terrorists, through having the better planes for that selective job. And apart from anything else, the USA and some other NATO air forces in Syria were fighting against and killing the lawful governments's 50% of the people who had remained loyal to their government.
So in what way is it right for foreign interveners to kill the law abiding people of a country defending against a civil war, but not right for other foreign interveners on behalf of the legal government to kill those waging the illegal civil war?
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I get that you are obliged to keep a thread alive by taking up a contrary position. God knows we all do odd things to keep the road on the show. But that's ridiculous folie a deux. No let me rephrase, its ******* nuts, la la land, not a separate universe, a separate archetype. In what conceivable way has the Assad regime ever been legitimate? I mean legitimate as "conforming to law" not the way Putin (or truss) may use it ("whatever I can get away with")[/QUOTE]
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The Assad regime has always been as legitimate as any other of the Arab countries. They have different ways of administering a country, which, though we might dislike them, are still legitimate since we are not the arbiters of such matters.
Nor can we be, since it wasn't so long ago that we behaved similarly, or worse by our current standards.
I think it speaks louder than words that half of Assad's country stood with him against the Sunni rebellion, even his very large Sunni population. And his was always a free country, the citizens free to travel and live anywhere they wished, with many Syrian students studying in the West.
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I’ve done my good deed for today.
I saw a family making their way to a hotel. The husband had a bad accident which means he can’t work. He lost his job, couldn’t pay the mortgage / energy bills so they’ve lost the house. All the family must now move into a single hotel room.
To help them out, I put £50 in an envelope and posted it through the door of a massive mansion with a 22 plate Bentley on the driveway. That £50 is definitely going to trickle down and help out that poor homeless family. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
I saw a family making their way to a hotel. The husband had a bad accident which means he can’t work. He lost his job, couldn’t pay the mortgage / energy bills so they’ve lost the house. All the family must now move into a single hotel room.
To help them out, I put £50 in an envelope and posted it through the door of a massive mansion with a 22 plate Bentley on the driveway. That £50 is definitely going to trickle down and help out that poor homeless family. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
I believe you have been critical of my posts blaming the USA for Russia's actions over the last two decades. I'm not supporting either side's thuggish actions, but I believe in fair play when it comes to assigning blame. I've seen almost none of that in this thread, just a monotous one way view synchronous with the USA's dishonest propaganda.Come on flecc , remind me when I said I did?
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If we have to apportion blame, things become very complicated very quickly.
Putin did not have to invade Ukraine but he did.
He is responsible for inflicting misery on easily 6 millions+ Ukrainians and posibly 100,000+ deaths.
The sooner he goes, the better the world will be.
Sorry but the way Russia reacted to the USA is simply paranoid, and since they have behaved is very much the same way with interference invasions rigging elections, bribing politicians, rigging referendums etc., etc
I can find no justification in the claim that the USA provoked them
It's a case of a pan calling a kettle black.
And as for China
What makes them the worst of the three is the way that our so called "investors" put their money in China, resulting in not merely damage to our own industry, but causing damage to the climate in the process.
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And I can substitute the USA for Russia, responsible for far greater numbers of deaths over a far longer period of time using the most vile of weapons, and with ongoing misery over multiple lifetimes due to the horrors of agent orange. They had no just cause to do any of that, just a hatred of left wing politics was their excuse. Russia has had very much more cause for it's actions over the last two decades, namely being threatened by it's worst enemy, NATO, as it still is being today.
But that of course is apportioning blame with fair play, something unique to me in this thread.
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I don't think anyone is defending actions of USA. They have much to answer for but to assume that they are in any way responsible for Putins grandiose plans of expansionisn on Russia's behalf atually starts to sound utterly bonkers. Its exactly why I stopped posting. I began to think Flecc was losing plot and I didn't want to push him over limit and give him a soap box for his opinions
Yep, America have a sort of creeping, smothering way of expanding their power, I hate the affect its having in UK, from dominance of Internet, films, commerce, their unending confidence in everything they do and then tell us all about it is soul destroying, but look at at another way..
Post WW2 Suffocating Americanism /capitalism gave us West Germany , it gave us Japan and post Korea gave us South Korea. USSR gave us East Germany (upto Wall coming down) and between China and Russia we got North Korea..Neither great recommendations for either.
Putin and his gangster associates have pushed world to potential nuclear destruction, killed thousands, displaced millions. America wants to sell us all McDonald's, Coca Cola and useless films. Then tell us all how they saved us, post ww1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam and desert Storm.
I, ll take the latter. Its not perfect but infinitely better than that on offer by Putin and Xi Jinping.
Just examine how Putin is treating his own at moment and how Xi treats Uygyrs. Then tell me America is to blame.
Yep, America have a sort of creeping, smothering way of expanding their power, I hate the affect its having in UK, from dominance of Internet, films, commerce, their unending confidence in everything they do and then tell us all about it is soul destroying, but look at at another way..
Post WW2 Suffocating Americanism /capitalism gave us West Germany , it gave us Japan and post Korea gave us South Korea. USSR gave us East Germany (upto Wall coming down) and between China and Russia we got North Korea..Neither great recommendations for either.
Putin and his gangster associates have pushed world to potential nuclear destruction, killed thousands, displaced millions. America wants to sell us all McDonald's, Coca Cola and useless films. Then tell us all how they saved us, post ww1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam and desert Storm.
I, ll take the latter. Its not perfect but infinitely better than that on offer by Putin and Xi Jinping.
Just examine how Putin is treating his own at moment and how Xi treats Uygyrs. Then tell me America is to blame.
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Utter, blind, unthinking nonsense.
NATO, an invention of the USA specifically to oppose the USSR with overwhelming force was always a serious threat to Russia, albeit justified to a considerable extent.
But when Russia conceded moral defeat by ending the USSR, releasing all the satellite countries and with perestroika ending the cold war, wanting peace and co-operation with the western world, that was an immense and quite extraordinarily generous concession by the Duma.
The very least the west and particularly the USA should have done was to reciprocate by disbanding NATO. Instead the USA showed its hostile intent by its covert efforts to expand NATO right up to Russia's border, continuing right up to this day.
You can find no justification in the claim that the USA provoked them? Don't be so ridiculous.
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presidents of the USA don't pursue the dame politics.
To lump them together is just too convenient.
Reread my replies to Woosh and the latest to OG. Then ask yourself why you completely ignore all the far greater scale of deaths and misery the USA has caused.
And for accuracies sake, the USA aided by Britain gave us today's North Korea by fighting against the communist Koreans, resulting in splitting that country by China joining in on the other side with an impasse resulting. But of course I knew that because I served in the army with the men who fought that war.
If we and the USA had never interfered there, Korea today would be a single united country, whether their communists or capitalists winning who knows.
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Just a little too complex for a straight no
.. Yes NATO was a US invention and absolutely necessary in postwar Europe. It was only the existence of NATO that stopped Soviet Union taking over all of mainland Europe. The USSR was stronger than any single European country, including the UK,and had the wish and the will to do so.
Could NATO have been dissolved in the era of perestroika?. Maybe, but it was certainly scaled down. Your paragraph of the DUMA in the late 1980s and Glasnost,is spot on... And the opportunity was not seized upon.
But the USA and Western response was to reduce NATO. Barracks and entire armies were stood down.. remember the closing of the British Army presence in Luneburg Heath.
However the former Soviet satellites continued to fear a Russian resurgence and they actively sought to join NATO.
The West, including the USA continued to offer a hand of friendship to Russia ... probably naively. The flood of Russian money into Europe and the USA obviously sweetening the deal.
NATO did not encourage the Baltic States or Sweden and Finland and actively rebuffed Ukraine.
The notion of Russia joining NATO was such a contradiction in terms that it is laughable.
The current crisis comes not from the success of the West but the inability of Russia to accept they are not a Superpower
Yes indeed, they pursue the wrong politics, those that condemn with lethal force all those who do not follow their democratic model.
Communism is just another political system, a variant of socialism which has right to exist, and other peoples have the right to adopt it. They should be able to, by trial and error, develop it into a sustainable system as we see slowly evolving in China today. It's how modern democracy was born, gradually over hundreds, even thousands of years.
It is wrong of the USA to kill any left wing systems at birth or in early life, when like all such new systems they are struggling to find a successful formula.
Western democracy in its most common forms is hopefully not the final solution to how to run countries. I'd suggest something far closer to communism like the systems in the Scandinavian countries like Sweden are far superior.
We deserve to see such alternatives given a chance to become perfected over time.
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Agreed.
In your opinion, not mine. Russia is a superpower, by dint of its size, by dint of its immense resources, by dint of its technological prowess in space and medicine and by dint of its continuing increase in potential as the world continues to warm.
And of course they are at the top table of world politics, arguably with far more right to be there than the failing and slowly disintegrating resource poor UK.
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Russia is no longer a superpower just a failing Empire won by conquest, and it's real enemy is China, incidentally ours too.
Your second paragraph is correct
Is that taken as meaning it's Ok for a legal Government to use lethal force against it's own people even when the so called "legal" Government rigs the elections?
The snag is that while we wait Fascism sneaks in under the radar and takes over