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Highgate

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Everything posted by Highgate

  1. As I've been saying to @Leeds Ram I don't know if it is or isn't and I don't think it matters, nobody will ever be convicted for genocide for these particular crimes. It's a incredibly difficult crime to prove at any time, many historic examples that seem to meet most people's definition of the term have gone unpunished I agree it is a horrific loss of life on both sides, but I'd say it's even worse than that, as that terminology could be applied to an plane crash or an earthquake, what we have been witnessing is the deliberate taking of lives, by Hamas and to a greater extent the IDF.
  2. Well we both agree the 53 Coup was wrong then, maybe for different reasons but at least that's a start. I think all that has been said here is that Iran should have been allowed to continue without the malign influence of the US and UK. Who knows what may have happened if the West hadn't interfered, it could be a democracy now or it could have regressed into something as bad as exists there now. The point was, merely, that it grates when Israel is praised in the West for being the only democracy in the region, when the West actively prevented another country in region from having any chance to become a democracy, as well as supporting friendly dictators in the region (against their own populations) whenever expedient. I think you are under representing the difficulty in proving genocide. It's always extremely difficult to prove not only that some event happened but also the intent of the perpetrators. And does it have to be the prime minister, or will a general do? Or a government minister? I accept that a few rogue soldiers is insufficient. How many successful convictions of genocide have occurred since WWII and how many actual genocides have taken place since then, by your definition of the term? Here is an interesting article on whether the current situation in Gaza should be classified as a genocide or not. https://time.com/6334409/is-whats-happening-gaza-genocide-experts/ I don't really care how the unfolding events are defined, it's not like Netanyahu would ever be convicted for his crimes as the US will have his back regardless. All I know is what has been happening in Gaza is an atrocity, conducted by a state actor and that's all that really matters. Needless to say, the attack by Hamas was an atrocity too.
  3. It seems to me that you almost support the decision to instigate the coup that removed Mossadegh in '53. If so then we definitely have different perspectives. Yeah, absolutely Israel has committed war crimes (as Hamas have). Are their actions better or worse than Assad? It's a needless comparison, suffice to say that Assad is awful in his own right. As for genocide, it's an unhelpful word really, mainly because the UN's definition is so vague. 'An intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a religious, national or ethnic group' or something along those lines. An intent by whom, the decision maker?, the army that carried it out? individual soldiers? everyone involved? And In whole or in part? How big is a part? Are 100 people a part? 1,000? Who knows? So vague, the definition is almost meaningless. To debating what is and what isn't genocide seems like a wasted endeavour to me. And yet we know war crimes when we see them, and we know that Israel have been committing extensive war over the last several weeks. It even announces them to the world beforehand. Orwellian because at a time when Israel was brutally bombarding Gaza, killing literally thousands of children, to be suggesting that the same IDF are some sort of world leader in the exercise of military restraint was just a bizarre moment on the DCFC forum.
  4. Sounds like the West should have just left him alone to get on with it then. You've misunderstood me if you think I'm saying we should be making those comparisons, I've been saying that we should be judging Israel's actions on their own merits and forego relative judgements. I'm not sure Israel being a country that historically accepted legal limitations on how to conduct warfare is particular relevant now, given the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza that the world has just witnessed. Nor do I think the news would be much comfort to the tens of thousands of Palestinians who are currently mourning the death of a loved one. I'm not sure why anyone would bother mentioning it at this point to be honest. It's all a bit Orwellian if you ask me.
  5. True, they've always been in a precarious position and with their particularly tragic history in the background their siege mindset is completely understandable. But the dodgy way in which Israel was created in the first place and the forced expulsion of so many Palestinians in 1948 are the injustices that have placed Israel in this unenviable position from the start.
  6. This makes a lot of sense, for Mars especially. I think some of the timescales being mentioned for a colony on Mars are just wildly optimistic. And with a few billion years before the Earth is toast, we are not exactly racing against the clock here. I'm totally in favour of these projects in principal, but I don't see the need to rush anything. When you see the state of astronauts when they return from the ISS after a few months, in what is effectively a zero gravity environment, not being able to walk unassisted without the ground crew's support, you've got to wonder how we expect people to cope on Mars after a 6 month minimum trip, without any helpful ground crews to hold their weakened bodies upright. And we think those people would be in a condition to start building a base on Mars? it all seems unrealistic to me. For now. Now if we were planning building a giant telescope on the moon, I'd be all for it.
  7. That's quite the understatement. From the instigators of the Coup against Mossadegh perspective, namely the US and UK, I would say you have their concerns precisely backwards. Their fear was that parliamentary rule wouldn't collapse entirely and Mossadegh (who was considered by the West to be impervious to bribery) would succeed in developing an independent democracy that would look after Iranian interests, and one that was unconcerned with Cold War politics or BP's profit margin. Incidentally, was it the nationalizing of Anglo-Iranian oil (BP) that you consider to be stretching the limits of constitutionality? Considering that Israel's neighbours have been the likes of Saddam Hussein, Assad, the Saudis and recently ISIS, that's a pretty a pretty low bar. Maybe we should just judge Israel on their own actions and forget the comparisons. Hamas too.
  8. A weak argument I would say, considering the man involved, but by all means make it. Obviously, as with all historical counterfactuals, we have no idea how things would have turned out, but what we do know is that the US and UK had no interest in allowing the Iranian democratic experiment take hold as they perceived it to be a potential threat to their own political and financial interests. The reflexive support for Israel by many commentators in the West, on the basis that it's more democratic (provided you are not a Palestinian) than it's neighbours, has always been irritating, given the West's full support of many authoritarian regimes in the region and even their outright opposition to the birth of democracy in Iran. Furthermore, even though you'll get no argument from me that democracy is better than the alternatives, we still have to hold countries that are democracies (genuine ones as well as those that are merely democratic for some of their citizens) to the same standards as we hold other forms of government. There is a tendency in the West to be more lenient when judging Israel because it's a 'democracy'. The structure of a country's government is neither here nor there when that country is killing people en masse.
  9. It is, if you are not a Palestinian. Especially one of those that was born there but never allowed to return to the country of their birth by the 'democratic' state of Israel. It's interesting to speculate what the situation in the Middle East would look like now if Iran had been allowed to keep it's nascent democracy in the 1950s, rather than having the US and UK destroy it, and replace it with a pliant, if brutal, dictator. I guess that's something we will never know. It seems to me that the Hamas attack was intended to prolong the war with Israel and prevent peace at all costs. A twisted and immoral strategy no doubt, but the overwhelming response from the IDF is probably exactly what they hoped for.
  10. But how can you justify making, in my opinion, the most inaccurate and biased post on the thread and then ask others to 'dial it down'?
  11. That's absurd. The state of Israel have been committing unarguable crimes against the Palestinian people since 1948. That's not even debatable. Hamas commit them too, no doubt, but to say it's only them...?? That's surely an example of a profound pro-Israeli bias.
  12. It could happen to anyone I suppose...
  13. I'm starting to realize I should be grateful that it was President Bush in charge and not President Leeds Ram. 😂 I mean what could possibly go wrong with the US invading Russia's biggest ally in the region as well as Iraq? Scary stuff.
  14. 'Bush's incomplete freedom agenda?' That's how you are summing up his Middle East legacy? I'm not sure we have enough common ground for a fruitful debate here.. 🤔
  15. It was terribly incompetent, but I think the problems with that war are far deeper than just post war planning, as inept as that was. Not wishing to defend Obama's record in the least, but I'm not sure there is any such thing as being 'worse than George W. Bush' in the Middle East.
  16. Didn't Bush start a catastrophic war in Iraq?
  17. It's hard to even comprehend the courage of someone like this.
  18. I'm certainly not accusing you of approaching this form a jingoistic perspective, but in my opinion the highlighted sentence isn't nearly critical enough of Empire. I don't think that's me adhering to an agenda, that's just an honest assessment of the history as I see it. The phrase 'wasn't all beneficence and roses' seems to be suggesting that the whole imperial enterprise was something of a mixed bag in terms of outcome for everyone involved. However, for me empires, particularly those of the 19th century, were just theft and wealth extraction on a global scale. That's the foundation and motivation for them and we don't usually talk about the crime of armed theft in terms of pros and cons. It's to be expected that within the countries that benefitted financially from empire building that public opinion will typically be more defensive or even positive about the imperial past. However if you were to ask the populations of the countries that have been colonized, especially those that remained so in the relatively recent past, I think you would find that public opinion would be overwhelmingly negative. That tells it's own story in my opinion. By all means reply but I'll leave it at that for now, this all really belongs in another thread.
  19. Nearly 50% of Israeli Jews consider themselves secular. It clearly can't be a religious conflict for them. Which leaves a smaller glimmer of hope for the future. We should start a thread on whaling sometime!
  20. Yeah, I can't argue that history isn't filled with example of groups of people being appalling to one another. And of course violence breeds violence. It's hard to think of the barbaric attack by Hamas on Oct.7 without thinking of the line in an Auden poem which read; 'Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.' The decades long unjust treatment of the Palestinian people, creates Hamas, and their violence brings about further violence from the Israelis. The current relentless bombing of Gaza will result in more violence in return, and the cycle will continue on and on with no end in sight.
  21. Of that there is no doubt at all. The rest is a bit more dubious in my view. For what was the rule of law instigated, for the good of the conquered or to make them easier to rule? The Indian railways are often held up as a benefit to the benighted Indians, as if unconquered nations could never build a railway. But in reality, they were payed for by Indian taxes (earning British shareholders enormous profits) and they always seemed to head towards a port, all the more convenient to extract raw materials out of India. They were never built for the Indians but rather to make India a profitable and governable colony, the fact that have inadvertently benefited Indians afterwards is a side-effect. Yes Britain led the world in abolition, but also led the world, by volume, in slavery and bizarrely in reparations for slaveholders too. I think the reason why the Empire is heavily scrutinized and criticized in many quarters is, partially at least, is because by many others it is still seen as something to celebrate or be proud of, so therefore the reaction is to try to explain why those sort of feelings should be inappropriate.
  22. We can study back as far as we want and sources allow. Reparations for any group based on historical grievances is hugely problematic and probably totally unworkable for all sorts of reasons. Maybe the people with the best case for reparations were the Jews themselves after WWII. All the European countries who persecuted them could have paid into a fund and with the money they could have bought land for themselves, somewhere safe from all the inexplicable hatreds that they traditionally faced. Maybe in hindsight, Palestine wasn't the best spot to escape to given that it was already well populated by Palestinians who were quite attached to their homeland. Maybe Iceland would have been a better spot....? I'm watching Trapped at the moment, and there is practically nobody there by the looks of things! 😄 Apologies @ramit
  23. I can readily agree with some of that, but disagree with other aspects. I totally agree that nobody today should feel personally guilty for the wrongs committed by their nation in the past. That would thoroughly unfair and unnecessary. I agree that it's something that needs to be acknowledged and learned from as you say. But I don't agree that we need to remove the 'critical' eye from imperialism, in fact I think we should, to twist your words somewhat, lambast it as fundamentally wrong. That is lambasting the practice of conquest and empire building, and again leaving the current descendants of the imperialists blameless. Empires often destroy the existing hierarchy in the conquered country, rule as they please, and then withdraw for whatever reason, leaving a vacuum. What happens in such situations? Often the result is a very nasty civil war, which can very plausibly be blamed on the Empire, who had presumably removed the original rulers and therefore caused the dangerous power vacuum when they left. Or, as is often the case, the relevant Empire be it British or French or whatever, has simply created a country with traditionally antagonistic ethnicities within entirely new borders, again sowing the seeds for further war. Yes, the indigenous populations of wherever are well capable of fighting their own wars with their neighbours or with themselves, nobody is saying that there was a utopia anywhere, but I can't really see anyway reason to withhold criticism for some of the most extensive examples of exploitation the world has ever seen. It's ok to look back and say that those systems were brutal and unjust, rather than just say, 'well ok...that happened'.
  24. Yeah, but I don't think you can feel sorry for anything that's founded on exploitation and the systematic extraction of wealth from other nations. But I agree, when you remove the Imperial tyranny, often the anarchy that's left behind is just as bad. And domestic populations are often able to mess things up all on their own, without any help from Empires.
  25. I definitely don't. If there was a list of people I don't have sympathy for, the avaricious, mendacious, self important Imperialists would be right near the top. Still trying to clean up their mess all over the world. And failing in a lot of places, unfortunately.
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