Thread: Syria

Originally Posted by Hanna

You have completely misjudged my view of the USA. Your prejudice of somebody who dares to critisize your country, other than expressing a very polite "scepticism" is what's naive.

See this is the point, Hanna. I've argued only with what you have written in this here thread, while you have argued not with anything I've actually said, but with a caricature of me that you've constructed in your little head based on absolutely nothing but my nationality, and all the assumptions that you think automatically flow from that. I have said nothing, on this thread or any other, to give the impression that I object to anyone criticising "my" country, or to in any way otherwise inform you of my political views, and yet you have repeatedly suggested, first implicitly and now explicitly, that my responses are somehow based on nationalist, patriotic, or general pro-western sympathies.

As it happens I don't have a nationalistic or patriotic bone in my entire body, and I'd be very surprised if my antipathy to the US and British states is in any way less than yours. For the record, I think the US is an utterly corrupt, socially abhorrent, militarily belligerent kleptocracy whose foreign policy is as damaging and divisive as it is hypocritical, while the British state is its moribund, rather pathetic little side-kick that rides the coat-tails of the US in order to stave off irrelevance and allow its odious ruling classes to go on deluding themselves that they have even a smidgeon of the influence wielded so brutally across the globe by their great-grand-pappas and great-grand-mammas. The labels "British" and "Scottish" are as meaningless to me as "Northern Hemispherical". When the referendum on Scottish independence comes I will be voting "yes" not out of love for bagpipes, whisky and haggis, but specifically because Scottish independence will diminish the British state, essentially put a full-stop on the Empire, and hopefully fatally undermine the remaining international standing and arrogance of Westminster and the vermin who infest it.

But see, even having hopefully established my anti-Western bona fides, here's the crucial thing: None of that has the slightest bearing on my opinion on the Syrian government, or Bashar Al-Assad, or on the nature of the conflict there, or the question of whether or not the US is ultimately behind the uprising there, or whether a badly-photocopied and anonymous map proves anything either way, which is the subject of this thread.

I am not arguing with you because your posts are anti-British or anti-NATO or anti-American, I am arguing with because your posts are absurd, unreasonable, silly, childish, and hysterical.

If your family members had been killed by drone planes in the name of "anti-terrorism", if you had a military base of a foreign country in your backyard, lost your legs in napalm bombing, inhaled Agent Orange while being carpet bombed by a country from the other side of the planet.... or your country had been set up and manipulated for years by a foreign power... etc ad infinitum --- then you'd probably feel a bit more than "healthy scepticism". You know perfectly well that your country are doing these kinds of things. Mine doesn't.

Aside from the fairly obious fact that a Swede has no more insight into what it feels like to experience the things you list than a Brit, what part of any of this do you assume I disagree with? Please show me any post of mine from any thread that suggests I think the UK in any way superior to Sweden, either in the past or the present. You want to play western atrocities poker? Fine, I'll see your drone attacks and agent orange and raise you Dresden, the Mau Mau revolt, the invention of concentration camps during the Boer War, Sinchon, No Gun Rai, almost the entire history of the British Empire and almost the whole of post-war US foreign policy. I've spent my entire adult life arguing with British nationalists and British Empire revisionists and their mouth-breathing US counterparts and I know the story chapter and verse, so I'll take the Pepsi challenge with you any time you like, sweetheart.

So you see, we totally agree on the qualities of the North-Atlantic, Anglo-Saxon alliance. But where does that leave us regarding the topic at hand? Absolutely nowhere! Because whether or not we like or support NATO (tool of imperialism) or Barak Obama (massive hypocrit) or the Iraq War (unjustifiable adventurism perpetrated by messianic lunatics) or David Cameron (effete, gutless, over-privileged rich-boy) or Henry Kissinger (the most malignant, disgusting figure in the whole of US history) or Winston Bloomin' Churchill (grotesque, incompetent ultra-imperialist clown who would rightly have been remembered as an idiot and a monster had his legacy not been saved at the last minute by the emergence of Hitler), or any other figure, action, or quality of the past or present has, or at least should have, no logical bearing whatsoever on how we feel about Syria, or Assad, or for that matter Gadaffi, or Vladimir Putin, or China, or anything else. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a tactical statement, not a logical one. It's perfectly possible for two scumbags to exist concurrently. It's perfectly possible to oppose the US and at the same time consider the Syrian regime to be a bit rum, just as it's perfectly possible, and without the slightest internal contradiction, to view the BBC as biased and basically unreliable while at the same time considering RT to be just as bad or even worse.

I currently have and have had, throughout my life, American expat friends and acquantances. I admire many things about the USA as I repeatedly mention. I normally see no reason to discuss this with them, any more than I'd discuss the excesses of Stalinism with a Russian aquantance. But obviously, if I am asked my opinion about it, I would not hesitate to express it.

However this is a forum where we talk about international politics so obviously this is the kind of topic that comes up, not what American artists, what American technology I admire or my respect for American history.

As an English speaking person with access to only, or mainly English speaking media, you are probably not aware that a good half of the world's population, including, no doubt, many people in Russia share my views - which are by no means extreme.

There you go again with your binary-thought assumptions. You know nothing at all about me except that I'm British, yet you think you've got me all figured out based only on that one fact. OK then, once again, for the record, aside from several places in the UK I've lived and worked in Russia, and in Ukraine, and in Croatia, and in The Netherlands, and in Canada. I'm quite comfortable speaking in English and Russian and can follow news broadcasts in Ukrainian and Dutch, and French at a push. The only TV reception I have at home is satellite reception from Hotbird/ Eutelsat because a) my wife wants Russian-language TV, and b) I am a BBC refusenik, having risked a large fine and a criminal record by refusing to pay my TV license for the past 18 years.

This is getting tiresome and a bit of a waste of time though.

I agree. So how about you get back to the point by answering the question I asked you several posts ago, and which you dodged with another one of your mindless non-sequiturs, and explain why it's possible for sponteneous protests to have errupted in Egypt and Bahrain - US allies - while it's impossible for sponteneous protests to have errupted in Libya and Syria - US enemies - and can only have been the work of US agencies.

If you want to write me, and the billions who share my view off as nut jobs because they do not appreciate the foreign policies of your country, by all means do. But when it all comes tumbling down, or some *real* nutjob gives the USA gets a taste of its own medicine, don't say nobody warned you.

I don't write you or anyone else off as a nutjob because you "do not appreciate the foreign policy of my country", I've written off specific things you have written on this forum because what you wrote was specious, sophomoric bilge.