World Politics

[python]

here's an article that moved my eye brows almost to the crown

US officials circle globe to explain Iran policy but fail to persuade
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/05/us-officials-iran-policy-persuade-banks.html#ixzz48GFWjkAJ

in brief, the us has cowed and intimidated the huge international banks to such a degree, that it now has hard time to convince them it is ok to deal with iran.

wow, america changed its mind and the financial idiots at ubs and credit suisse dont believe it

trust me, i know the swiss well but aren't they just too thickheaded in this case... &#63

the takeaway messages here for me are these (not that i wasn't aware but the example seems staggering):

1. the irrepressible power of the us financial dominance in the world is such, that instead of telling the uncle 'fork yourself, i ain't obliged to follow the american law', they rushed to pay hundreds of millions of fines to avoid being driven out of business.
2. if such giants succumbed, what's left for the smaller players ?
3. is it really healthy for the world at large, forget about the elementary fairness or the military dominance, to be dominated to such a degree by one country ?
4. why anyone is still surprised that some govt's would like to redress the situation but keep failing ?

 

[blutto]

Re: Re:

@aphro
the religious component of the putin doctrine, as far as i understand it, is very significant, deliberate and real. just like it ever was over there, excepting the communist era. the orthodox christianity institution, exactly as it was during all their tsars, is essentially a tool of the state. the church was NEVER independent there. NEVER. to stress the fact, it is now customary for the orthodox priests to bless all any new military gear with holy water. it is done very publicly and deliberately. also, nowadays, every unit of their military, not unlike the us military chaplain corps, is staffed with the fully official, state-paid military clergy...the rabbis and and the muslim sheikhs included among the majority orthodox priests. vlad, as i said many times, took the most politically impacting page out of the tsarist book. just like he, the utmost politician, did with many populist ideas of the modern-day communists lead by zhuganoff. vlad steals ideas, adapts them, comes with his own...all to serve his political ends, which, at the end of the day, are the real-time cross section of the majority striving. didn't pres carter rule like that, except using the purely american tools and means ??

@max
if you are really interested in exploring the egg-chicken phenomena re. yeltsin and putin, i suggest you google the works of fiona hill... i only read some of her articles. in all she came across as the most serious western researcher of all things putin. virtually no fluff or any demonizing saliva. not sure which think tank she works for now, but she was, iirc, working for the british secret service before her academic career.

Yeah, but the ties between Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church became much closer after his re-election and the following protests in 2012, from there on Putin's rhetoric really changed, he started giving speeches about the values of the traditional family and the importance of the Russian Orthodox Church as a moral institution and the backbone of the "healthy" Russian society.
The Russian LGBT propaganda law should also be viewed in that context, Putin wants to appeal to the (mostly rural) conservative and deeply religious masses. Those who want reforms (intellectuals, the well educated urban youth and the liberal bourgeoisie) and hoped that Medvedev would be more than a puppet despise him and many of them have supported the protesters, so Putin has joined forces with those who could be viewed as their antagonists.
Yeah, you could compare it to the classic alliance between church and tsar, Patriach Kirill's various statements about the Human Rights should also be viewed within that context, just like their own definition of the Human rights.
The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights by Kristina Stoeckl is a great book about that subject, I share many of her views.

....this religious connection seems to get a lot of press and is relied upon to prove all kinds of things Russian ( read its a major part of the West's Russia narrative )....ran into an article this morning that has a graph in it that looks at religiosity in various nations...

...check the place that Russia has in the rank ordering...btw the rest of the article is a reasonably good read...

That said, if all the world’s a stage, America is a prime player: a rich, loud, attention-seeking celebrity not fully deserving of its starring role, often putting in a critically reviled performance and tending toward histrionics that threaten to ruin the show for everybody else. (Also, embarrassingly, possibly the last to know that its career as top biller is in rapid decline.) To the outside onlooker, American culture—I’m consolidating an infinitely layered thing to save time and space—is contradictory and bizarre, hypocritical and self-congratulatory. Its national character is a textbook study in narcissistic tendencies coupled with crushing insecurity issues

.

...and if the above is correct seems to explain why Trump has been doing so well in this election cycle...seems Trump is Merika...

http://www.alternet.org/media/compared-rest-world-americans-are-delusional-prudish-selfish-religious-nuts-study

Cheers

I take surveys with a pinch of salt. USA sees religion as much more important than Mexico, Israel and Poland ? Hard to believe. A pretty one sided article about the USA. As for the figures for Russia if that is correct then that just shows the power of propaganda. Interestingly Stalin was a novice priest before getting involved with the Communist Party.

...yeah, about that salt thing, I know what you're sayin', I usually take most Western views of Russia with a truck full of salt....as for Merika being choke full of religious nutcases ?....well lets see, more than 50% of the population thinks the world is 6000 years old, and The Flintstones is a documentary....may not be an expert at this but that information can be pretty reliability be attributed to belief in one source, and hint, it ain't a scientific cosmology.....

...as for the second bolded thingee you wrote....that makes absolutely no sense at all....just sayin' eh...

Cheers

 

[Brullnux]

Russia isn't very religious, it has never really been since Lenin probably. US is, on the other hand. I think Poland and Italy are slightly higher though, and the UK perhaps slightly lower (very slightly). I'm really surprised Soviet Canuckistan are more religious than Italy or Spain. Never considered them to be a very religious nation. Not surprised about Russia, though. The conservativeness in Russia comes from different places than the US' conservativeness..

 

[Maxiton]

. . . worst of them all definitely was Trotsky . . . Trotsky has as much blood on his hands (as) Stalin does.

You forgot to add, Echoes, "And Torquemada did not torture."

 

[movingtarget]

Re: Re:

...yeah, about that salt thing, I know what you're sayin', I usually take most Western views of Russia with a truck full of salt....as for Merika being choke full of religious nutcases ?....well lets see, more than 50% of the population thinks the world is 6000 years old, and The Flintstones is a documentary....may not be an expert at this but that information can be pretty reliability be attributed to belief in one source, and hint, it ain't a scientific cosmology.....

...as for the second bolded thingee you wrote....that makes absolutely no sense at all....just sayin' eh...

Cheers

Ignorance and and not having a world view is one thing but putting it all down to religion is another. I wonder what percentage of Americans actually attend church regularly now ? In most developed countries there has been a significant drop. But then again I don't know what happens in American schools re religion. I remember a documentary once where a guy on a street in New York asked people off the street where Iraq was ? He had a map of the world that was unlabeled. This was after the war had been going for quite a while. A couple of people pointed to Australia but no one was even close. At first I thought it was a set up but then realized it wasn't. Obviously Geography in American high schools needs some work. I would like to think that the people picked were not typical but never having visited the USA I am not sure. Maybe a bigger sample was needed !

 

[python]

Re: Re:

...yeah, about that salt thing, I know what you're sayin', I usually take most Western views of Russia with a truck full of salt....as for Merika being choke full of religious nutcases ?....well lets see, more than 50% of the population thinks the world is 6000 years old, and The Flintstones is a documentary....may not be an expert at this but that information can be pretty reliability be attributed to belief in one source, and hint, it ain't a scientific cosmology.....

...as for the second bolded thingee you wrote....that makes absolutely no sense at all....just sayin' eh...

Cheers

Ignorance and and not having a world view is one thing but putting it all down to religion is another. I wonder what percentage of Americans actually attend church regularly now ? In most developed countries there has been a significant drop. But then again I don't know what happens in American schools re religion. I remember a documentary once where a guy on a street in New York asked people off the street where Iraq was ? He had a map of the world that was unlabeled. This was after the war had been going for quite a while. A couple of people pointed to Australia but no one was even close. At first I thought it was a set up but then realized it wasn't. Obviously Geography in American high schools needs some work. I would like to think that the people picked were not typical but never having visited the USA I am not sure. Maybe a bigger sample was needed !

this is also my experience, though, unlike you (while not an american) i live here now for over 15 years.

before we moved here, i lived in a dozen of countries and i have to say, americans imo lag behind both in their knowledge of geography and the world outside. i mean this with out any pre-judgement or maliciously. of course, this is not a scientific conclusion. just an observation based on my many conversations (in my favorite area of foreign relations) with mostly quite well educated and intelligent people.

whatever the reasons (and i agree, attributing it all to a religion would be too simple) 'that's the way it is'.

 

[Maxiton]

Re: Re:

...yeah, about that salt thing, I know what you're sayin', I usually take most Western views of Russia with a truck full of salt....as for Merika being choke full of religious nutcases ?....well lets see, more than 50% of the population thinks the world is 6000 years old, and The Flintstones is a documentary....may not be an expert at this but that information can be pretty reliability be attributed to belief in one source, and hint, it ain't a scientific cosmology.....

...as for the second bolded thingee you wrote....that makes absolutely no sense at all....just sayin' eh...

Cheers

Ignorance and and not having a world view is one thing but putting it all down to religion is another. I wonder what percentage of Americans actually attend church regularly now ? In most developed countries there has been a significant drop. But then again I don't know what happens in American schools re religion. I remember a documentary once where a guy on a street in New York asked people off the street where Iraq was ? He had a map of the world that was unlabeled. This was after the war had been going for quite a while. A couple of people pointed to Australia but no one was even close. At first I thought it was a set up but then realized it wasn't. Obviously Geography in American high schools needs some work. I would like to think that the people picked were not typical but never having visited the USA I am not sure. Maybe a bigger sample was needed !

In most American schools they don't teach geography. You'd never guess, right?

According to a recent National Geographic survey, "About 11 percent of (Americans 18 to 24 years old) couldn't even locate the U.S. on a map." 29% couldn't find the Pacific Ocean.

Not real big on teaching history, either. I was watching a program on cable network RT recently, where they were doing man-on-the-street interviews of Americans. "What country played the biggest role in defeating the Nazis?" they asked. No one knew. A couple of people suggested, hesitantly, "Um . . . Germany?"

You might laugh, but I was once dating, or just starting to date, a recent graduate of a reputable but quite conservative Christian Reformed college. She was beautiful, very sexy, seemingly bright, and fun. I couldn't believe my luck. I had to call the whole thing off, though, when it turned out she'd never heard of Auschwitz or Dachau. Think about that. How is it possible to grow up in the USA, in the upper middle class, receive a four year degree from a not-too-bad school, and not know what Auschwitz is? It's not possible, unless you're completely stupid. Or unless your parents and teachers have some sort of weird political agenda. But I digress.

It takes extraordinary effort to develop a populace in the world's richest country and only superpower that can't find its own country on a map or locate the Pacific Ocean. A populace, moreover, whose bright young things have never heard of Auschwitz or Dachau. A country where some percentage of people don't know who fought in the last war or on which side, or when the war took place, or where to find it. It takes some real talent.

And we wonder how Donald Trump came to be? We're lucky we're doing that well.

 

[python]

winners dont apologize for their crimes, losers should...

Obama visit to Hiroshima should not be viewed as an apology, White House says
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/10/obama-hiroshima-japan-visit-second-world-war

call me crazy, call me naive, but i honestly don't understand why a country claiming its leadership in all things moral can't apologize for incinerating hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

i totally understand the fog of war then and not asking to reanalyze the necessity of the bombing...just totally puzzled over what seems to me so easy - an apology for killing innocent.

germany did apologize, japan is rightly pressured to for its crimes ...why we don't hear of pressure on the us &#63

 

[Maxiton]

Re: winners dont apologize for their crimes, losers should..

Obama visit to Hiroshima should not be viewed as an apology, White House says
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/10/obama-hiroshima-japan-visit-second-world-war

call me crazy, call me naive, but i honestly don't understand why a country claiming its leadership in all things moral can't apologize for incinerating hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

I think the reason for not apologizing lies, in some part, in not wanting to admit having done something wrong; but in greater part it lies in not wanting to compromise national defense strategy, which very much relies on nuclear weapons. If you apologize, you make further use of these weapons seen as less likely, but from a military strategy and power projection standpoint, you don't want it to be seen as less likely.

The Hiroshima Peace Museum is very powerful. I've been there, and had the strong feeling at the time that every world leader should go, especially U.S. presidents. Maybe Obama will set the precedent for presidents, and they will all go from now on. Preferably at the beginning of their terms, though, when it might do some good.

 

[python]

Re: winners dont apologize for their crimes, losers should..

Obama visit to Hiroshima should not be viewed as an apology, White House says
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/10/obama-hiroshima-japan-visit-second-world-war

call me crazy, call me naive, but i honestly don't understand why a country claiming its leadership in all things moral can't apologize for incinerating hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

I think the reason for not apologizing lies, in some part, in not wanting to admit having done something wrong; but in greater part it lies in not wanting to compromise national defense strategy, which very much relies on nuclear weapons. If you apologize, you make further use of these weapons seen as less likely, but from a military strategy and power projection standpoint, you don't want it to be seen as less likely.

i do understand the blue part...an apology automatically implies guilt and possibly opening oneself to a war crimes code. while in my opinion it was indeed a war crime, i also understand that ANY govt, especially the one claiming the right on setting the world's morals, would try to avoid the hassle if they can. the winners usually can, and as my post's heading said, they get away with it.

however, the red part, respectfully, i don't understand. i am a huge fan of military history in no small part due to my interest in a strategic-tactical background of conflicts. an apology for a misuse of power in a given conflict, imo does not preclude application of the very power in the next conflict, any weapons included, b/c the next conflict will have its own circumstances, like say being attacked by the nukes of someone, which would justify a retaliation.

but i appreciate your explanation.

 

[blutto]

Re: Re:

...yeah, about that salt thing, I know what you're sayin', I usually take most Western views of Russia with a truck full of salt....as for Merika being choke full of religious nutcases ?....well lets see, more than 50% of the population thinks the world is 6000 years old, and The Flintstones is a documentary....may not be an expert at this but that information can be pretty reliability be attributed to belief in one source, and hint, it ain't a scientific cosmology.....

...as for the second bolded thingee you wrote....that makes absolutely no sense at all....just sayin' eh...

Cheers

Ignorance and and not having a world view is one thing but putting it all down to religion is another. I wonder what percentage of Americans actually attend church regularly now ? In most developed countries there has been a significant drop. But then again I don't know what happens in American schools re religion. I remember a documentary once where a guy on a street in New York asked people off the street where Iraq was ? He had a map of the world that was unlabeled. This was after the war had been going for quite a while. A couple of people pointed to Australia but no one was even close. At first I thought it was a set up but then realized it wasn't. Obviously Geography in American high schools needs some work. I would like to think that the people picked were not typical but never having visited the USA I am not sure. Maybe a bigger sample was needed !

In most American schools they don't teach geography. You'd never guess, right?

According to a recent National Geographic survey, "About 11 percent of (Americans 18 to 24 years old) couldn't even locate the U.S. on a map." 29% couldn't find the Pacific Ocean.

Not real big on teaching history, either. I was watching a program on cable network RT recently, where they were doing man-on-the-street interviews of Americans. "What country played the biggest role in defeating the Nazis?" they asked. No one knew. A couple of people suggested, hesitantly, "Um . . . Germany?"

You might laugh, but I was once dating, or just starting to date, a recent graduate of a reputable but quite conservative Christian Reformed college. She was beautiful, very sexy, seemingly bright, and fun. I couldn't believe my luck. I had to call the whole thing off, though, when it turned out she'd never heard of Auschwitz or Dachau. Think about that. How is it possible to grow up in the USA, in the upper middle class, receive a four year degree from a not-too-bad school, and not know what Auschwitz is? It's not possible, unless you're completely stupid. Or unless your parents and teachers have some sort of weird political agenda. But I digress.

It takes extraordinary effort to develop a populace in the world's richest country and only superpower that can't find its own country on a map or locate the Pacific Ocean. A populace, moreover, whose bright young things have never heard of Auschwitz or Dachau. A country where some percentage of people don't know who fought in the last war or on which side, or when the war took place, or where to find it. It takes some real talent.

And we wonder how Donald Trump came to be? We're lucky we're doing that well.

....don't mean to be a jerk or start something but how much do you know about Holodomor, or literally translated The Hunger, an event that is arguably bigger than The Holocaust in its scale ( if sheer body count can be interpreted as scale )....

...file under history is a funny thing...or alternately, read, sadly history is almost always set by some weird political agenda....

Cheers

 

[Maxiton]

Re: winners dont apologize for their crimes, losers should..

Obama visit to Hiroshima should not be viewed as an apology, White House says
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/10/obama-hiroshima-japan-visit-second-world-war

call me crazy, call me naive, but i honestly don't understand why a country claiming its leadership in all things moral can't apologize for incinerating hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

I think the reason for not apologizing lies, in some part, in not wanting to admit having done something wrong; but in greater part it lies in not wanting to compromise national defense strategy, which very much relies on nuclear weapons. If you apologize, you make further use of these weapons seen as less likely, but from a military strategy and power projection standpoint, you don't want it to be seen as less likely.

i do understand the blue part...an apology automatically implies guilt and possibly opening oneself to a war crimes code. while in my opinion it was indeed a war crime, i also understand that ANY govt, especially the one claiming the right on setting the world's morals, would try to avoid the hassle if they can. the winners usually can, and as my post's heading said, they get away with it.

however, the red part, respectfully, i don't understand. i am a huge fan of military history in no small part due to my interest in a strategic-tactical background of conflicts. an apology for a misuse of power in a given conflict, imo does not preclude application of the very power in the next conflict, any weapons included, b/c the next conflict will have its own circumstances, like say being attacked by the nukes of someone, which would justify a retaliation.

but i appreciate your explanation.

I'm not saying I approve of it, mind you, or agree with it. Military planners basically want all options on the table. I think their concern is that any apology for prior use might constrain next use; or, perhaps worse, be seen as hesitance to use again.

Macarthur wanted to use nukes in Korea, and some generals wanted to use them in Vietnam. Nowadays they talk of low-yield tactical nukes. In this latter regard, you and I and most people outside the groupthink recognize that this would legitimize use of nukes on a large scale - which is why it's a good thing the military answers to civilian leaders, rather than the other way round.

 

[Maxiton]

Re: Re:

....don't mean to be a jerk or start something but how much do you know about Holodomor, or literally translated The Hunger, an event that is arguably bigger than The Holocaust in its scale ( if sheer body count can be interpreted as scale )....

...file under history is a funny thing...or alternately, read, sadly history is almost always set by some weird political agenda....

Cheers

I don't see how mentioning Holodomor would be "starting something". Not with me, anyway. For one thing, in the US and Europe, the Holocaust features in school lessons and popular movies and TV shows. You can't sit through a modern history class without hearing about it, so your parents would have to go to great lengths to keep you from hearing about it, or retaining it if you did hear about it. And it's a strange high school and college that could get a student through eight years of schooling without the student knowing about it. And the student would necessarily have some complicity in such ignorance.

The Holodomor, on the other hand, very few people in the US have heard of, because it generally isn't taught in general history classes. Which is strange considering it happened in the camp of the ideological and geopolitical rival of the time, the Soviet Union. Of all the many crimes of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, that one ranks right up there for most monstrous. On the other hand, though, it was by no means unprecedented in history. The British did much the same thing, for the same reasons, against the Irish, and then again against the Indians.

 

[movingtarget]

Re: Re:

....don't mean to be a jerk or start something but how much do you know about Holodomor, or literally translated The Hunger, an event that is arguably bigger than The Holocaust in its scale ( if sheer body count can be interpreted as scale )....

...file under history is a funny thing...or alternately, read, sadly history is almost always set by some weird political agenda....

Cheers

I don't see how mentioning Holodomor would be "starting something". Not with me, anyway. For one thing, in the US and Europe, the Holocaust features in school lessons and popular movies and TV shows. You can't sit through a modern history class without hearing about it, so your parents would have to go to great lengths to keep you from hearing about it, or retaining it if you did hear about it. And it's a strange high school and college that could get a student through eight years of schooling without the student knowing about it. And the student would necessarily have some complicity in such ignorance.

The Holodomor, on the other hand, very few people in the US have heard of, because it generally isn't taught in general history classes. Which is strange considering it happened in the camp of the ideological and geopolitical rival of the time, the Soviet Union. Of all the many crimes of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, that one ranks right up there for most monstrous. On the other hand, though, it was by no means unprecedented in history. The British did much the same thing, for the same reasons, against the Irish, and then again against the Indians.

Of course the Holocaust should be spoken about but so too should the Holodomor and the Armenian Genocide. The Jewish people have ensured that the world won't forget the Holocaust and like you said with the amount of books written about it, films and discussion it is always being spoken about. Russia could not even admit that that they were responsible for Katyn and blamed the Germans for many years and the Turks view that what happened to the Armenians as just a part of conventional war as do the Serbs in the Balkans. History is full of atrocities but some are much worse than others not only numerically but the fact that the atrocities are often government sanctioned.

 

[aphronesis]

We can throw in the Khmer Rouge among others, but blutto has a point in that the Holodomor is probably the least known of any of those in the US.

 

[Starstruck]

Re:

We can throw in the Khmer Rouge among others, but blutto has a point in that the Holodomor is probably the least known of any of those in the US.

How the World Runs on Looting the Congo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxa4YbmMkQ0

http://naturebatslast.podbean.com/e/nature-bats-last-%e2%80%93-051016/

 

[aphronesis]

Shhh. Just get in your electric car.

 

[Starstruck]

Re:

Shhh. Just get in your electric car.

I just bought a 1998 ford f-150, v6 manual 135 000 kms. with a bed liner and canopy for $3500.00, runs like a top. My adventure vehicle (that I can sleep in).
http://www.amazon.com/Walking-Off-Veterans-Chronicle-Wilderness/dp/0910055998/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1462985408&sr=1-1&keywords=walking+it+off

Hypocrite, yes. Some sort of sanity, better. Regarding the podcast ^ I was calling people in the system (all of us) well adjusted cancer cells 20 yrs. ago. meh.

 

[blutto]

Re: Re:

....don't mean to be a jerk or start something but how much do you know about Holodomor, or literally translated The Hunger, an event that is arguably bigger than The Holocaust in its scale ( if sheer body count can be interpreted as scale )....

...file under history is a funny thing...or alternately, read, sadly history is almost always set by some weird political agenda....

Cheers

I don't see how mentioning Holodomor would be "starting something". Not with me, anyway. For one thing, in the US and Europe, the Holocaust features in school lessons and popular movies and TV shows. You can't sit through a modern history class without hearing about it, so your parents would have to go to great lengths to keep you from hearing about it, or retaining it if you did hear about it. And it's a strange high school and college that could get a student through eight years of schooling without the student knowing about it. And the student would necessarily have some complicity in such ignorance.

The Holodomor, on the other hand, very few people in the US have heard of, because it generally isn't taught in general history classes. Which is strange considering it happened in the camp of the ideological and geopolitical rival of the time, the Soviet Union. Of all the many crimes of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, that one ranks right up there for most monstrous. On the other hand, though, it was by no means unprecedented in history. The British did much the same thing, for the same reasons, against the Irish, and then again against the Indians.

...not a great choice of words was it ?...whoops....

Cheers

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Re: winners dont apologize for their crimes, losers should..

Obama visit to Hiroshima should not be viewed as an apology, White House says
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/10/obama-hiroshima-japan-visit-second-world-war

call me crazy, call me naive, but i honestly don't understand why a country claiming its leadership in all things moral can't apologize for incinerating hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

I think the reason for not apologizing lies, in some part, in not wanting to admit having done something wrong; but in greater part it lies in not wanting to compromise national defense strategy, which very much relies on nuclear weapons. If you apologize, you make further use of these weapons seen as less likely, but from a military strategy and power projection standpoint, you don't want it to be seen as less likely.

The Hiroshima Peace Museum is very powerful. I've been there, and had the strong feeling at the time that every world leader should go, especially U.S. presidents. Maybe Obama will set the precedent for presidents, and they will all go from now on. Preferably at the beginning of their terms, though, when it might do some good.

@Python I agree with your comment on why the U.S. can't apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.



My ex is from Hiroshima and all still live there. My in-laws were both children when we dropped the Atomic Bomb on them. They have a unique perspective on the use / excuse to drop an atomic bomb on them.
I will be there next month and into July. My daughter goes to summer school there.

Small pockets of the city and survivors are bitter towards the U.S. I would say it is less than 1% but it does exist.
In the grand scheme of the world it is in the past but the past certainly effects today.

 

[Echoes]

People might not know about the Holodomor but the crimes of Stalin are widely known. I have to say I'm glad that Bolsheviks are exposed now, even if I have to repeat that Stalin also pays for other commies. You talk about Holodomor but who talks about the Kronstadt Massacre (1921) by Trotsky. Nobody because Trotsky still has some prestige, even in non-Commie left. Hitchens considered him a hero of left-wing resistance against Stalin !!! Several Trotskyist became neocon supporters of Bush and of the Iraq War !!

Besides, what you are referring to is always the crimes of other nations.

Wake me up when pupils in the US are told about the spraying of Agent Orange across Vietnam! The use of depleted uranium in Iraq & Yugoslavia! The Amerindian genocide backed with deportation, land robberies, parking in unproductive "reserves" and buffalo extermination! Wake me up when they are told about the 1759 Quebec bombing and the criminal burning of farms and crops around Quebec by the British (I'm deeply interested in that nowadays)! Wake me up when they are told about all the British & allied bombings of German towns such as Dresden, Duisbourg, Cologne, Karlsruhe, Hamburg, etc. which only killed civilians (not talking about the bombings of Belgian or French towns and of course Hiroshima)! Wake me up when the brutality of Sherman's March to the Sea is exposed! Etc etc etc.

I may talk for hours about the Armenian genocide, if you want. But before you accuse others, take a look at yourself, please.

 

[python]

unfortunately, the heinous crimes against the defenseless civilians are one of the military 'norms'.

the generals of the self-appointed high-morals holders call it very innocently - a collateral damage. the hiroshima and nagasaki deliberate incineration of the hundreds of thousands of women and children was just that - a collateral damage. and so was dresden etc etc.

btw, the crimes committed against the german civilians aren't 'sexy' to mention b/c of the nazi crimes, but they were committed on the huge scale. both by the allies and the nations suffering the nazis...in that regard another virtually unacknowledged crime, along with holodomor, was the expulsion of millions of germans to the east of oder–neisse. hundreds of thousands were murdered and raped by the poles and russians seeking their revenge. i suspect most here never heard of it...

but with holodomor, if i am not mistaken b/c i heard of it only recently, the victims were not directly related to or were the consequence of any military actions. it was, according to ukrainian sources, a deliberate mass famine intentionally caused by the expropriation of food, land, property etc. the background of the crime was the early communist years when anyone with private property was termed a 'class enemy', a bourgeoisie worthy of a bullet or the expropriation of their assets. the modern-day russian story is that everyone including millions of the ethnic russian kulaks (rich peasants), not just the ukrainians, suffered and perished. they also point out that it was nor a russian crime against the ukrainians b/c stalin, the driver behind the crime, was of georgian ancestry. there's imo white washing in such a logic...perhaps there is also an intentional play over the unfortunate victims fate by the supporters of the glorious revolution that swept the long suffering ukraine.

 

[blutto]

....an interesting look at why the war in former Yugoslavia and the Clinton connection to that war is so crucial ( especially given its place in this election cycle )...

The bell tolled for the UN and the old order in the 1999 Kosovo War. The bi-partisan effort to dismantle the architecture of the post war’s legal order played out there. With the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration launched the first humanitarian war and set the precedent for waging war without Security Council clearance of many to follow by both Republican and Democrat administrations. The Clintonites who used NATO to bomb Serbia to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from non-existing Serbian genocide may or may not have appreciated the fact that Hitler had used the pretext of R2P—humanitarian intervention—to launch WW II by claiming to protect German minorities in Poland, but they certainly knew that the monopoly on use of force rested with the UN’s Security Council. This monopoly was secured after WW II precisely to prevent unilateral attacks on sovereign states through bogus claims of altruistic interventions, such as Hitler had championed and pursued. Ironically for critics of the Soviet leader, it was Stalin who insisted at the Yalta Conference that if the USSR were to join the United Nations a veto in the Security Council was a must to insure that any war would be a multilateral consensus and a multilateral action.

As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go. In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally and deliberately destabilized the United Nations, substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill, Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not the only way to skin a country– especially one chosen by the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a cynic might add.

So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent “genocide”; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rain—in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/the-great-leap-backward-americas-illegal-wars-on-the-world/

....its looking more and more that the Clinton legacy may go down, in both the domestic and international spheres, as one of the most destructive in American history ( and in terms of the global financial spheres possibly the most destructive ever )....it is almost impossible to imagine the total and absolute disaster that the Bush administration was without the essential groundwork laid down by the Clinton presidency...one led directly to the other....

Cheers

 

[blutto]

....find below a modern example of the "for want of a nail ".....and the old saw "money makes you stupid"...

There’s a sour irony to the fact that it’s taken the extremely rare mad cow disease, which has thus far killed a very small number of people in England, to raise the alarm about the consequences of intensive meat and milk production. Over the past 150 years the demands of such production have destroyed much of the world’s ecological balance and impoverished millions.

Start today with one giant U.S. corporation, Monsanto, which makes chemicals and agribusiness products. It has spent many years and a billion dollars or two developing recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone. The purpose of this product is to increase milk yield in dairy cattle. Inject BGH into cows twice a week and the milk yield goes up by some 10 to 20 percent. But crucially, with the artificially increased milk production, the cows need the infamous protein supplements made from rendered cows and sheep, thus opening the way to diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease), which can transfer to humans.

There are other problems, of course. First, who needs higher productivity per dairy cow when there’s a huge milk glut in the United States? Second, as happened with poultry and now with hogs, BGH accelerates the demise of small producers and the emergence of the industrial dairy conglomerates.

Like any junkie, cows hooked on BGH tend to get sick, mostly with mastitis, an infection of the udder. Treatment of mastitis requires liberal doses of antibiotics. The antibiotic injected into the cow passes on to the human consumer, and thus contributes to the process whereby more and more bacteria are building up greater resistance to antibiotics. Moreover, BGH also causes cows to produce more Insulin Growth-like Hormone-1 (or IGH-1), which has been linked to a number of disorders in humans, including acro-megaly (gigantism in the form of excessive growth of the head and extremities) and an increased risk of prostate, breast, and ovarian cancer. There is also research to suggest that IGH-1 reduces the body’s ability to suppress naturally occurring tumors.

Mad cow disease–a degenerative brain disorder first detected in England in 1986–is a comparative trifle in some ways. Cattle apparently contracted BSE by eating protein supplements made from rendered sheep infected with scrapie, a form of spongiform encephalopathy. Infected cattle become disoriented, suffer seizures, fall down, and die. Scientists believe that consumption of meat from BSE-infected cattle leads to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a fatal neurological disease. The virus may incubate for 30 years. There is no way to detect it or treat

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/the-political-economy-of-dead-meat-why-mad-cows-are-the-least-of-it/

Cheers

 

[aphronesis]

People might not know about the Holodomor but the crimes of Stalin are widely known. I have to say I'm glad that Bolsheviks are exposed now, even if I have to repeat that Stalin also pays for other commies. You talk about Holodomor but who talks about the Kronstadt Massacre (1921) by Trotsky. Nobody because Trotsky still has some prestige, even in non-Commie left. Hitchens considered him a hero of left-wing resistance against Stalin !!! Several Trotskyist became neocon supporters of Bush and of the Iraq War !!

Besides, what you are referring to is always the crimes of other nations.

Wake me up when pupils in the US are told about the spraying of Agent Orange across Vietnam! The use of depleted uranium in Iraq & Yugoslavia! The Amerindian genocide backed with deportation, land robberies, parking in unproductive "reserves" and buffalo extermination! Wake me up when they are told about the 1759 Quebec bombing and the criminal burning of farms and crops around Quebec by the British (I'm deeply interested in that nowadays)! Wake me up when they are told about all the British & allied bombings of German towns such as Dresden, Duisbourg, Cologne, Karlsruhe, Hamburg, etc. which only killed civilians (not talking about the bombings of Belgian or French towns and of course Hiroshima)! Wake me up when the brutality of Sherman's March to the Sea is exposed! Etc etc etc.

I may talk for hours about the Armenian genocide, if you want. But before you accuse others, take a look at yourself, please.

The only one accusing others is you. Oddly. So much for Christian love.