Tunesia, Egyt and now Yemen: a domino effect in the Middle East?

Piffle post after post is not really the Lash I remember, Lash. If you were more willing to face up to some of the awful truths you wouldn't have to resort to lame arguments like, "There are a lot of truths".

And a hug back to you. I appreciate the information you're disseminating. I haven't found any of it to be false, and I've learned a lot I didn't know.
What you're saying needs saying.

RL - I don't think I'm ahead of others in my ethics. I just think I've been given the chance to see a different view of America - more of an outsider's view.

And because I do believe in it and love it - I hope it changes. I think it has to.

Thank you Lash.

I do think you are correct it is from our experiences [education] that we are able to advance in ethics!

When the master loses the war and is turned into a slave for a long period of time his ethical understanding about slavery can advance!

Just my opinion.

Everybody knows that Rebecca. Great Britain is not known as Perfidious Albion for nothing. It is presumably a name given to us by people from other countries trying to make out that if their government intervenes it's for the purest of motives. I have labelled the genre on the evolution threads The RIC. The reverse invidious comparison.

This thread is quite like certain theatrical productions with a long history. The action of the play takes place off stage and news of it is brought to the actors by messengers. The audience is invited to watch the interplay of reactions to the news in the social setting in which it is staged. In other words, the essence of the play is this interaction of various social types of the division of people into more crude categories such as philistines , idealists and realists. If the philistines don't win the play is flawed. Jesus being the ideal idealist. As you are when you cast youself in our play. I would of course be the philistine and those who seek to look like they know the inside track are the realists although they often betray idealism beneath the surface of which they are vaguely ashamed.

The general idea is to make an analysis of the current mores. Or, in this case here, the displaced geographical mores. In the John Smith's Extra Smooth adverts (silk in a glass) the philistine wins big.

The tangle in Coronation Street is so elaborate that it is often thought to be "irreducibly complex" and declared tripe for that very reason. People commonly resort to such expressions, which have a large number of synonyms, with anything they don't understand. As I understand it it resoves itself into three basic types. Blokes who want an easy screw, women who know that's what blokes want and jolly well see to it that they suffer for being so presumptious and a few who are past it or or not old enough. And with such a long running theatrical performance characters can change from one to another. And do.

Thought of realistically it is a factory. An industrial unit for the manufacture of sentiment, character, points of honour and conceptions of conduct. When Cary Grant was on a tourist barge on the Seine with Ingrid Bergman the guide shone the searchlight on a couple kissing on a bench on the bank. "We made them do that", he told her.

Libya is just the backdrop for this thread. We have a lot of messengers. The characters can pick and choose which to notice and which to ignore "for the purest of motives".

In most plays the idealist has inherited wealth (usually female) or lacks the nerve to be a philistine (male).

I think you are wrong there Lash. JT's position is that you wouldn't be as ready to say



if JT wasn't continually reminding you of the criticisms. Nobody likes JT saying these things so they would be quickly repressed if they were not repeated.

It is fair enough when you consider that there are not many people brave enough to level such criticisms at people who don't wish to hear them. Even my criticism of JT as a luxury living beneficiary of the system being castigated is flawed. The hobo can't do the reminding.

Hair shirts are supposed to be good for the soul.

Msolga,

I have observed that you have a very low threshold of acute indignation over disagreement or slights of almost any kind. That is something that appears curiously incompatable with your very free moral condemnations of others, ranging from Japanese fisherman to the country in which I live. You dish it out very well, often with a degree of acid subtlty, but take criticism in any form rather badly.

That makes you a rather disagreeable person, in my eyes at least. That was the motivation of my response to spendius' suggestion that you quoted. I really don't know anything else about you, and have neither an opinion or any curiosity about it.

I believe that in your rather overexcited response to this comment you have again demonstrated the shrill indignation that has become your trademark here.

However, as you so patronisingly say, Please continue.

I have observed, Gob, that you can remark, with not the least hint of embarrassment upon attributes you ascribe to others that you excel at. There's a word for that; it escapes me now.



Gob1: Ranging from the barely mentionable to the illustrious. I do wish that I didn't have to mention these other "things" [fingers barely touching the keys as a register of contempt] in the same sentence with "My country".

Many folks could in principle, at least, have saved the Jews, ranging from the Germans and other Europeans who facilitated or merely tolerated their removal & executions, to the British & French or the Russians, and, I suppose the United States. However, as you have previously noted, we were very late getting into the war, waiting as we did until we were attacked. Our excuse for that is that our involvement in WWI and its aftermath left a bad taste in the mouths of many Americans back then. However, I'll accept the critisism: we could have saved at least many of them.

Your comment about "the US blunder in '56 " intrigues me. I assume you are referring to Eisenhower's demand that the British, French and Israelis abandon their joint attack on Egypt and seizure of the Suez canal. These events were nearly concurrent with the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and there was a lot at stake for everyone. I am curious (really) to understand the connection you see between this event and the subsequent history of the region.

Hey !! Watch it ! I am a sensitive caring animal !

I think that Gob thinks he has here, a lesson in morality to dispense.

Do you ever read your posts ?

The US as monster is quite practiced throughout A2K, as well as all over the world. He's not saying anything new---just saying it as a response to weather, fashion, the price of tea in China...and everything else under the sun.

I think most American members here are pretty thick-skinned when it comes to criticisms of our country...but, you soon decide to stop listening to the criers that bleat about it in every single response to whatever is going on in the world. It loses relevance, and soon when the theatre IS on fire - nobody's listening.

And you don't think it left a bad taste in the mouth here I suppose. There's a war memorial to our WWI dead in every village. And the injuries were terrible.



Great Britain stood alone George and waited and waited and waited. The US ambassador thought we had no chance. Mr Kennedy Snr. The Russians had done a treaty and the French had rolled over. The US was the only hope and it waited and waited and waited. As it is doing now in Libya. And us too I admit. We are talking tough now the fox has been downed which everybody seems to think it has been.

I think you could have saved most of the Jews had you joined our cause in 1939. Not just "at least many of them" whatever that is supposed to mean.

On Suez, imagine if you had put your muscle into that. Do you really think we would be where we are now if you had. It wasn't long after Suez that Iraq's government was butchered in the palace and Saddam rose to the top. It's a complex picture, as are all historical processes. But what we risk now if we are genuine about the "people's right to democracy" in Saudi Arabia hardly bears thinking about. The US has been playing catch-up since 1956 and it is nowhere near over with.

Do you think any of those countries are ready for democracy?

I'm listening. Have you ever heard Dylan's Oxford Town? Have you heard him rasp "Something's outa whack!!" ? 50 years later.

The news gets worser and worser. This is not the end-game.

WWI was, as you say, a ghastly thing that destroyed the lives and much of the wealth of millions of Europeans. The United States had nothing whatever to do with the multiple imperial ambitions and follies that led up to WWI, and no involvement in the attendant unprovoked, aggressive and imperialistic effort to destroy the Ottoman Empire on the part of the UK, France and (early in the game) Russia - the direct consequences of which we are living with even today.

There was plenty there for everyone involved to regret. One element of it here that did last here was resentment for our excessive credulity for the wartime propaganda of Britain and France in a conflict in which we had no real interest - on either side. That is what influenced our "late" entry into chapter 2 of the same conflict. Hitler and the Soviet Union were the spawn of that war, and many Americans had equal distain for both, believing that they sould soon enough be at each other's throats, - together with a heightened version of our traditional mistrust of European politics.

I'm not trying to diminish Britain's truly heroic defense during the early years of WWII, but Munich and all that proceeded it following the German reoccupation of the Rhineland were also factors in that game.

Iraq's government consisted of a Hashemite King installed by the British after the Iraqi's kicked them out in the uprising in the 1920s. I believe it was doomed in any event. I cannot see how U.S. support (active or passive) of a 1956 British/French attempt to restore imperial supremacy in Egypt could have in any way improved the subsequent trajectory of a history that included a (then ongoing) bloody 12 year war for independence in Algeria, a parade of military governments in Egypt, the overthrow of King Idris in Libya.

There were other factors at work as well - significantly including the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the then ongoing revolt in Hungary.

You think that the people of the US know what their government does, Spendi. That's ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. If they knew, there would have been/would be resounding choruses of, "That, that's old hat, tell me something I don't know".

Instead, there has been outright denial, all manner of subterfuge, phony excuses 'til hell won't have 'em, various themes on 'shoot the messenger' and there's hardly been a person who has been anywhere near brave enough to directly address anything that has been posted.

There's a guy, a pretty honest guy, who will go unnamed, denies, though with a highly guilty demeanor, that the US is a terrorist state. Tico, a lawyer for dog's sake, [who will also go unnamed], you'd expect that he'd be a bit informed, almost comes to tears facing the prospect of his government being a group of terrorists.

You yourself have danced around these issue any number of times, speaking to it it in a very oblique fashion.

As Ramsey Clark said, paraphrased, 'The US is not so concerned that others know what they do, but they don't want their own citizens to know what they do'.

I seem to recall the Commonwealth supporting Britain . When we wanted our troops back to fight the Japanese, Churchill ordered the convoy detour to India . We ordered them turned around and brought to Australia as per the original orders from our government . A lot of unnecessary slow sailing through Jap sub waters because Churchill didn't want be alone, despite keeping the New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians and Indians .

Why should the French hep the USA in its mindless shoot-em-up games. The attack by the US on Libya in 1986 was entirely unprovoked. Imagine what would be the response if Libya had tried to destroy the President in the White House.