You’re right, a Security Counsil resolution has never been passed because the United States vetoes them.
Which is…?
True. But so what? You say yourself that it’s arbitrary. Lay out for us the cohesive argument that demonstrates a conspiracy, rather than just a lot of short-sighted idiocy by a host of different administrations with different goals.
WHAT IS THE CONSPIRACY? Enough with all this ridiculous tiptoeing. Just tell us, already! Who are the individuals involved? What are their ultimate goals? How do the examples you cite fit into their nefarious master plan? What’s going on?
If you can’t answer these, then you DON’T have evidence of a conspiracy–just evidence of some bad, inconsistent US foreign policy. (Which is not a good thing, mind you, but is not in and of itself a conspiracy.)
You’re making this up as you go along. (Which, come to think of it, corresponds to what you have done in several of the threads you have started.)
I am not creating a strawman by “focusing on terminology.” I am pointing out that you are simply wrong in the claims that you make. It’s tough, I suppose, to be forced to actually provide evidence to support your fantasies, but that is how legitimate discussion works. You have no substance to your fears and you cannot justify your claims with facts, so you attempt to attack those who question you. Too bad. Since you are averse to facts, you should probably stick to IMHO or The BBQ Pit. This stuff is just silly.
Speaking of having things ass-backwards: firstly, the UK press has undertaken continuous and highly critical coverage of the crisis in Zimbabwe, so you are wrong on that count. This seems perfectly reasonable since the UK historically has had far more social and economic ties to Zimbabwe than has the US. Now if you want to say the US media has not pursued this story, fair enough, but I submit that this is more bacause the majority of US readers and TV viewers care very little about Africa in general, than because of embarrassment that a media ‘utopian dream’ has been exposed as false.
Secondly, I’ll add my voice to the others. The OP has proposed a conspiracy. Let’s hear who is behind this conspiracy and what its ultimate end is, if you please.
Hey I’m in bit of a paranoid mood myself. reading back overe this thread, I’ve got to wonder whether the OP’s reference to Rhodesia, rather than Zimbabwe, was just an inadvertant slip.
As an example of either deliberately or ignorantly posting nonsensical errors of fact:
It is true that many of the people involved in the Kosovo situation were ethnic Albanians, fleeing the turmoil in that country, and many of them were Muslim. (Of course, they had fled to Kosovo because they were joining the ethnic Albanian and Muslim people who already lived there. However, the greater number of atrocities that were committed against Muslims after the Yugoslav break-up occurred in the fight for Bosnia-Herzogovina, where the Muslims were, indeed, a substantial portion of the population who had been there for hundreds of years. (And, to the extent that some groups were new to specific regions, they were the victims of forcible relocation by Tito, and so could hardly be considered usurpers of the land as you hoped to imply with your original claims.)
Probably not. (Based on comments in this and other threads.)
The ethnic Albanians of Kosovo are descendnats of the Illyrians (and others) who inhabited the region before the arrival of the Southern Slavs (who as mentioned above split into three ethno-relgious groups - the Orthodox Serbs, the Catholic Croats and the Muslim Bosnians). Just because they are ethnic Albanian does not mean they came from Albania, it is a common misconception among peoples of that particular region where national labels are tied to what are infact religious groupings (see also the ‘Turks’ in Greece and the ‘Greeks’ in Turkey)
So my question is whether you, Razor really want the U.S. to get involved on behalf of the “neglected” groups you cite, or are just using them as examples of the conspiracy-driven inconsistency and favoritism you see.
The types of arguments I hear you making are ones that I usually hear from isolationists. There’s a principled and self-consistent argument for isolationism (I think), but it wouldn’t contemplate sending in peacekeepers to protect white farmers from Mugabe’s “war veterans” or using the UN to put us on the opposite side of the intractable Palestine issue by switching from heavy handed support of one side to heavy handed support of the other. It would involve letting disputes in far away countries work themselves out unless they threatened our borders, people, or direct economic interests (which the fate of 3,500 white farmers, or some Orthodox clerics having their church burnt down in Srebrenica, don’t), and treating the UN as an amusing but irrelevant debating society.
So which is it: are you arguing for non-interventionism, or for interventionism on behalf of the “non-favored” groups? If not the latter, then invoking their suffering doesn’t advance the argument much, except to show what has been admitted to be an inconsistent foreign policy.
I don’t think race is the issue per se. We’ve helped, and not helped, various pale and swarthy peoples, and – as noted – have intervened, and not intervened, in the intramural matches as well.
The media does have something to answer for on the issues you mention, but it’s probably not so much conspiracy or collusion as sheer laziness, ineptitude, and lack of imagination. Mainstream media outlets know about five stories, and there’s a tendency to try to shoehorn every new occurrence into those templates (hey, if it’s won a Pulitzer, why change the model?). WWII and Hitler vs. the Jews is one of the templates. The Civil Rights movement is another. Watergate and coverups revealed are a third. Babbit and the “hypocrisy” of authority figures is a fourth.
When a story fits, or seems to fit, into one of these templates, the media runs with it, and depending on how close the fit really is, the reporting may be a decent representation of reality. When the fact patterns diverge, the usefulness diminishes.
S. Africa under apartheid really was somewhat like Alabama in 1955. The analogy worked up to a point. Except Ala. didn’t have tribal warfare among the oppressed black underclass – and when the analogy broke down, the press largely ignored it (hence the surfeit of obvioius Mandela=MLK stories, and the failure to explain or even predict problems among liberated, but disparate, black populations). Kosovo, the press decided, was WWII all over – Milosevic was Hitler and the Kosovars were the Jews. Again, since the Jews had no inclination to counter-cleanse the Germans, and weren’t potential al Qaeda sympathizers or heroin traffickers, the analogy only carries so far.
So maybe the media aren’t reporting the Zimbabwe crisis right, because there’s no ready template, but again, that’s mostly laziness (mixed perhaps with a bit of moral narcissism; militating on behalf of well-off white farmers is never going to make a journalist or goofy college kid get to feel like a Freedom Rider, whereas equating De Klerk to Bull Connor did satisfy a lot of people’s desires to bask in the same warm glow as their parents had in the early '60s). But, as amply noted here, the media’s also not so hot on explaining Sierra Leone or Angola or Nigeria, where the bad guys and good guys (or bad guys and other bad guys) are both equally black and equally Christian (or equally non-Christian).
If you don’t like quagmires or American commitment of money and political capital to far away causes or entangling alliances, the Machiavellian view would be to encourage the media not to crusade about, and our politicians not to take sides on, any of these situations.
First, being that I am an American, I am referring to the American media. Sorry for not being specific enough for you on that matter. (sheesh) So, having straightened that out for you, I am right on that count.
Regarding Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, the using of “Rhodesia” was correct in the context it was used. “Zimbabwe” was also correct in the context it was used.
Evidently, I was being generous when referring to 50% of the users of this forum.
Not necessarily, the obvious theme of the OP was:
And
The conspiracy part comes in when our leaders tell us the reason that we, as taxpayers, should not object to the throwing of our money down those “rat-holes”. They don’t tell us the truth.
BTW: Good rebuttal, others should take note.
That would be the American media that has mentioned every outbreak of violence against the white Zimbabwe farmers while almost never mentioning the huge number of black citizens killed in Mugabe-incited riots that you are falsely claiming don’t cover the white deaths in Zimbabwe? Got ya.
Disingenuous, inconsistent, yes. Conspiracy, not necessarily.
AGAIN, tell us what the conspiracy is, and what it hopes to accomplish, for the love of god! You’ve made 9 freaking posts, but have yet to tell us what you think the conspiracy is!
This is not “Anatomy of a Conspiracy”; it’s just “spare body parts.” Outline the shape of the whole body for us, and show how these pieces fit together.
So the conspiracy is politicians not telling the truth? Stop the presses!!
Evidently, you are behaving very much like a jerk. Look, sunshine, if you are unable to formulate a coherent argument, it’s not my problem.
The time you just spent insulting me you could just as well have spent explaining what you meant by a ‘conspiracy’, as several posters have requested. Since you can’t be arsed to do so, I’ll leave you to talk to yourself. Cheers.
Yeah, similar to Mexicans coming accross the border to be with “ethnic” Mexicans who happen to be Americans. The migrants could be accuratly described as indigenous to the region, but alien to America. Oh well, we’re goin’ around in circles.
I’m somewhat disapointed in the limited response you offered to my lengthly response to you. I posed a question to you, that you ignored. I’ll ask again.
"Do you think that the terrorists that attacked the WTC did so because they have a hatred for the abstract concept of “freedom and democracy”?
"Every outbreak of violence against white Zimbabweans??? You’ve got to be kidding. Is that the same American media that trumpets every hate-crime committed against whites and supresses the reporting of hate-crimes against minorities?
Of course, not. That was Bush’s rhetoric to avoid dealing with any actual issues. However, the fact that Bush is willing to use large amounts of spin to put forward his personal agenda does not support your contention that there is some great “New World Order” that has manipulated every administration for the past 30 years or so. Every one who has posted to this thread agrees that politicians and governments lie to achieve their own ends. Only you, however, want to pretend that there is some big conspiracy spanning multiple years and thousands of people in every one of seven or eight administrations to achieve some vague, nefarious end that you cannot even describe in a coherent fashion.
Why would I be kidding? Unlike you, I actually do read the news. Every outbreak of violence that Mugabe has urged against white farmers has been reported in the mainstream U.S. press. To deny that is to admit that you don’t actually read that press. To deny that based on the assertion that the press gives more time to majority-on-minority crime than otherwise (and wrapping that in the assertion that it “suppresses” reports of minority-on-majority crime) indicates that you are not only ignorant of what is actually published, but that you are more interested in pushing your warped conspiracy feeling than you are in facts.
Now that we have established the fact-free content of your position, I guess we can move on.
There is no “the conspiracy” per se, there are a myriad of conspiracies, each one a peice of the “New World Order” puzzle.
An example of one such conspiracy would be “Citizenship USA”. Vice President Gore’s pet project that was sold under the auspices of expediting a “backlog” of aliens awaiting citizenship. The program became a conspiracy with the expediting of citizenship for the purpose of changing the political demographics of certain congressional districts.
What’s the “New World Order”? Basically camoflauge for “New World Communism”. A world system of government divided into hemispherical quadrants ruled by a “Security Council”, where traditional national borders will eventually be erased. National sovereignty will be a thing of the past. The proletariat will be dumbed-down to the level of “work drones”. (just about there, now.) Egalitarianism will be embraced and individual merit and excellence will go unrewarded, resulting in low productivity and shortages. There will be regional currencies. (i.e. The dollar, the Euro, the yen.) The citizenry will be under constant surveillence by a security apparatchik. The private ownership of firearms for self-protection will be verbotten. There will eventually be an issuance of an identifying “mark” that will be embraced by the “proles” for the convenience and the “good of the whole”.
Count me out.
Razor:
You know theres already at least one thread on this subject that does a much better job (in my opinion) of “fighting ignorance”.
What exactly is this “New World Order”? And why is anybody against it?
Posted by Balle_M over there:
So Razor, how about a beer? What about those concentration camps? Seen any lately?