Thread: 'Victory' in Tripoli, Libya. A big lie?

Not to mention the fact that half the country is in pieces by now. Infrastructure, public buildings etc.

As I said - Gaddafi had a choice - to resign (like his neighbours) or start a bloodbath. He chose the second option.
Egypt and Tunis dictators chose the first and their countries suffered relatively minimum damage.

You are for it. You complain about foreign occupiers of your country and then applaud this.

Thanks to "foreign occupiers" British, Poles and Estonians - Latvia is an independent country (with current borders at least) now and not "Russian republic" like Tatarstan.
That's why I'm - "pro western".
Let's not pretend that there is "multi polar world" where everyone have good life in different way.
There is not.
There is "Western world" which is democratic and respect human rights.
And then there is the rest of the world where quality of life is (much) lower and there is no or little democracy and human rights are not respected.
That's why this is BS:

average moslem and the average Libyan in particular is no lover of the West

Of course they want human rights and democracy, and not dictatorship and oppression.
Soviet propaganda was full of this: "We will achieve prosperity in different way than rotting capitalists" - it turned out that only communist elite lived in prosperity, and not majority of people like in the west.
But officially "soviet people" were not "lovers of the rotting western bourgeois capitalism". But secretly they listened to "Voice of America" (which was filtered using special expensive noise generators) and were in ectasy if they got anything from the "rotten western world".

Arab spring to me looks really similar to events in Eastern Europe in early 90s - and that's why it would be extremely hypocritical of me to say that they better live under dictatorships and democracy is not for them.

Hanna - were you against Baltics joining EU too?

Originally Posted by nulle

Hanna - were you against Baltics joining EU too?

No of course not. It's their decision if they want to be in the EU or not. In fact, I campaigned FOR the Eastern Europeans joining the EU, back in the mid 1990s, in a youth movement that was popular at the time. A lot of people were saying "there are too many problems there, too much criminality etc, and it does not fit with the agricultural policy." I felt that was irrelevant, that it would be grossly unfair to exclude Eastern Europe on any of those grounds, and completely against the principles of the EU. This movement was called "Paneuropa", and it had a big part in the changing of public opinion about this across Western Europe. I am all in favour of the EU as long as it helps Europeans and doesn't become some kind of little NATO muppet.

I was against the Baltics joining NATO though, simply because that means having American war ships crusing around in the Baltic Sea, and whatever else they might want to get up to on the shore of the Baltic Sea which is extremely important to Sweden, and to me, as I grew up on its shore. The US has always wanted a foot in there, but they couldn't in the past, due to the USSR and the fact that Sweden and Finland are neutral. But because of the Baltics, now they can come and go as they please.

As far as I am concerned, American warships are no improvement to those of the USSR - and they, at least, actually had a shore to this sea, which the US does not.