Well I was amazed that the hunter gatherers from 30,000 BCE were never consulted by the UN regarding Iraq.
Discussing the timeline would be pointless. You may as well ask, “So, what events in human history do you feel are worthy of discussion? Discuss!”
The site, as has been mentioned, is a collection of typical radical leftist drivel. If that’s your bag, than read it and enjoy. But don’t expect to get many actual facts from it.
ah yes, now we have a debate, and it all stems from reading the contents of the site. i apologize for the lack of info. in the OP, but again, my intent was to have the educated ppl here point out what they consider inaccuracies.
i looked through the site throughout the day, and the author makes some hard-to-verify statements regarding the JFK assassination. AFAIK, there was a history channel documentary special about this recently & I remember their conclusion being that the CIA did it. Please correct me if I’m wrong because I didn’t watch the whole series.
In any event, the site mentions “Operation Northwood” regarding the US stance towards Cuba in the sixties. The cite links to a declassified PDF file here:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/
Please read page 5 of that PDF file. It seems to state that there needs to be a pretext for the US to invade Cuba, and that world opinion would be favorably influenced by having Cuba appear rash & irresponsible.
Basically, I view the site as a summary of european intervention in the world, and while i enjoy my air-conditioning & automobiles, I have concern for the rest of the world. This site seems to aim to bring certain facts to light.
Your disparaging summary of the site as leftist drivel without disputing specific facts justify my post IMO. It reflects an ideological difference between people that I would say loosely supports or fuels much of our recent conflicts with other nations.
In my opinion it all depends on where you want to draw your moral line. The site references contempt held by early european colonists to “mud races”, and depending on which side you’re on, opinions can be formed without real effort or factual info.
I look at the example of Operation Northwood, in addition to US intervention in Panama and El Salvador, and I see continued attempts to gain wealth and power at the expense of others. You’re probably white, so frankly, this doesn’t concern you directly.
We can then extrapolate patterns of past behaviorby the US to current events in Iraq.
WMD? maybe.
Potential of terrorist threats? Likely, especially due to our stance with Israel.
A continuation of a power-play for the oil-rich region that has a history dating back to the early 1900s? Highly likely IMO.
Well if they had been truly sinister we would’ve made the play before we knew there was oil there. That would’ve been sneaky. :rolleyes:
I still can’t believe I’m up looking at this but what the hell. The timeline (and I’m just skimming the 20th century) is … what would be polite… thin. It goes on and on about Skull and Bones (various alleged grave robberies), fluorine, cigarettes and oil. Oh and I liked the bit about American making the USSR invade Afghanistan. That one was new to me.
It did miss out on all that fun stuff in …where is it again…Russia. The whole establishment of the USSR, the induced famine in the Ukraine, the establishment of satellite states after WWII, the invasion of Hungary, the Prague spring, the building of the Berlin wall and consequent shooting of Easter Berliners trying to get over it.
All in all a remarkably reliable site.
Oh and Clu (the irony), Western European powers have exerted significant influence for 500 years not 1000. In the 11th century they were all snuggled up in flea infested straw while the rest of the world made power plays where and when they could.
sorry for exaggerating. i was thinking about the crusades.
Speaking of teh crusades, has the Chicago Manual of Style finally caved on the BCE crap?
Why crap? There is no reason in the world to change it. None. It’s faddish to be faddish. Our language is litered with religious relics, from all manner of faiths.
Yeah, some of it goes into strange territory, I’m sure a lot of that can be de-bunked to a respectable level.
Re: Skull & Bones, are you aware that Bush has admitted being in it?
In the article here we see:
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/from_search/0,10987,1101991115-33904,00.html
Do you discredit this? I assume you’re OK w/ a secret society, the question then is are you OK with three of them having been involved in US gov’t in FL, and Wash DC. x2, assuming the grave-robbery allegations are untrue.
Again, I don’t know much about world hist., so I guess you’re mentioning bias towards that set of anti-communist info. It’s interesting you mention this as important because the site’s general vibe is that of an anti-exploitative capitalist gov’t IMO and your comments are directed specifically about how socialism has failed.
I don’t know enough to try to explain why they failed. From what I understand, Stalin was paranoid & aggressive by nature, so I might speculate that under a different leader, the Soviets may have done OK.
I’ll have to come back to your other points tomorrow. Thanks for pointing out a few specific things to research.
Oh no! Secret societies! At least they’re not Masons or, god help us, Shriners on tricycles. I would point that your…cite… continually uses word like “alleged”, “rumour” and “possibly” when dealing with the skull and bones club. The fact that rich people know each other through school and social circles definitely seem suspicious to me! Besides how secret can they be when everyone knows about them?
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No my comments are on the fact that your lousy European timeline fails to mention Russia at all during the 20th century, aside from as a dupe to sinisterly clever US foreign policy. The 20th century without the USSR is like missing half the sky when you look up. That type of systematic omission appears to be deliberate and so the whole site becomes questionable
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If only Lenin hadn’t died so early, the beauty of communism would’ve become apparent. :rolleyes: Oh those nasty western powers ganging up and preventing the ideal world from happening.
the anti-masons were formed here as a political party for a reason, not because the founding fathers were afraid of shriners.
your stance at this point is that it is not suspicious that various Bushes were in the club. If it were true about Geronimo’s grave, what would you say then? That it’s just a teenage prank? I’ve had a difficult time getting a reputable cite for info. about this. I assume most of it would have to deal with Prescott’s record at Ft. Sills (if he was even there; can anyone reputably cite this? i’m still looking).
I’m not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but when one head of the CIA, two presidents, and a gov. in FL have belonged to this club, you had better pray that DON’T have a common agenda (other than the fact that they’re all rich white men w/ many interests to look over). Considering the nature of the exploitation of the US and Latin America, something sinister among ANY powerful group wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
I’m not the type to spread conspiracy theories, and I really don’t have much to say about skull & bones, but at least you’ve acknowledged their existence. I’m more concerned about the methods used by our gov’t. in “Operation Northwood” I mentioned earlier. I’m concerned about the fact that if the US would consider at an administrative level fomenting hatred towards Cuba as a pretext to invade, THERE NEEDS TO BE A DEGREE OF OVERSIGHT.
I get the impresssion from you that these details are unimportant. If you’re a white male they might not be an issue for you. I’m just thinking about this in the context of the current war w/ Iraq, not to say that the US attacked itself on 9/11, but that the US/Israel seem to have a policy to instigate problems among arabs to keep them as the antagonist.
I can’t argue that. Bear in mind that the site is titled “The American Empire” not “Imperialism Across the World”. I’m thinking about e-mailing the author to see if he has specific reasons to exclude this based on the fact that his page appears biased. Hell, with as much as he’s written, he might know a bit about the subject.
So your opinion is that the timeline is lousy. Is this due to any reason other than the exclusion of the evils of communism?
No, its because it completely excludes the existence of the other ideological “empire” of the 20th century. You’ve also thrown up the straw man of evil communism. I never said that. I said that the time line omitted (explicitly I suspect) some of the imperialist actions taken by the USSR. In short the cite, such as it is, is ridiculously slanted.
Oh and the fluorine stuff in a world history time line :rolleyes:
I can’t tell wit from bad humor. Are you referring to the crusades? How much earlier before the discovery of oil are you referring to?
Scathing wit. Scathing. Damn these limited smileys.
I looked through that site and also some of the links within it. When taken as a whole it comes off as somebody’s book about his paranoid conspiracy theory, with lots of footnotes as “proof.” The section regarding his involvement in a search for a “free energy” and corporate espionage is much more entertaining than the timeline.
Look, leftist or not there’s no question that every ,government,every society throughout history has done some heinous things, our own included. There’s no excuse, but to put all the blame for the worlds problems on Western Europe is as short sighted as it would be to blame Eastern Asia or Northern Africa.
Yea, like I said, some of this stuff might be easily de-bunked. I dunno, I get my flourine from toothpaste. In any event, I wasn’t alive during the inception of flourinated water supplies, so I don’t know if there was a public outcry about it. If there was, some people might still hold the opinion that it’s a bad thing.
IMO, the author mentions flourine, as well as the faked moon landings.
The moon landings he concludes really happened (duh), but I haven’t yet read all that he’s said about flourine. It appears to me that the author is merely giving airtime to various underground belief systems. Is there anything wrong with asking questions? Will you now take the stance that since some of the info. is discredible, the rest of the site is? IMO, someone with such a leftist background would have to take an interest in the flourinated water subject considering the work he’s writing.
I assume then that you support early 1900s UK intervention in the middle east for oil because it shows that we weren’t truly sinister by taking the land from the outset?
As I posted earlier:
proofread…proofread.
I try to keep things in context of current events, i.e. exaggerated pretense of threat of Iraq, etc. It seems to fit well with the theme of the page I linked.
Thanks for the help with the homework guys.
No. As an example from here http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0502.html you can see that crude oil production in the US was 6.342 million barrels while imports from this cite http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0503.html were 0.656 million barrels or roughly 10% of demand in 1954. Hardly what one would consider critical to the survival of the country. Aside from being 50 years after your supposed date of early 1900 to control the gulf region for oil.
The desire to prevent the USSR from engaging the Gulf states and monopolizing the fields (or possibly achieving a warm water port out side the Mediterranean) led to American entanglement in the Gulf. Likely the US (and the rest of the industrialized west) also projected the increase in reliance on imported crude (9.146 million imported vs 5.853 million domestic for the US alone). The fact that the industrialized west had no desire to have their development hobbled by Soviet control speaks only to the fact that we live in a world filled with people of differing ideologies and not some secret cabal secreted away at Yale sipping single malt and giggling manically in the dark.
I’ve been screwed haven’t I.