You lost me there.
I said:
“Sometime when people feel threatened they will also respond with violence.”
You said:
“… give me an example from history of a docile populace provoked to violent revolt by sudden threat. You will usually find that populace was in all-out revolt already, which the threat of violent suppression might further exacerbate.”
then I said:
“Whence the discussion of revolution?”
You brought up the idea of revolution by limiting the scope from the ‘sometimes’ that I used to the “docile populace provoked to violent revolt.”
Which seems odd to me given that we’re discussing resistance to an occupation of a country -Iraq- by a foreign army -US’s, which is something other than a revolt. Hence I wondered why you wanted to start talking about revolutions all of a sudden.
I’m likely to leave at any moment not to return until the new year.
Well, what is going on?
Doesn’t apply. It has to be little guy defying big guy, not vice versa.
Thought like me… what? I am trying to understand the real roots of Iraqi resistance. That’s exactly what Brits failed to do.
I don’t understand why the Iraqis are even called insurgents.
These people are not rising up against an established government - Neither the USA government or the ‘interim government’ that they set up has any legal basis - and the coalition troops can certainly be recognised as ‘belligerent’ after bombing the bejasus out of the country with their ‘shock and awe’ tactics.
If anything, the coalition troops are the real ‘insurgents’.
hhmm… now I’m lost. Are you really trying to understand ?
To me it just seemed you proposed that killing every Baathist would endear Iraqis to the US since that would mean removing the “oppressors”. Most responses seem to think and so do I… that the problem isn’t Baathists or Insurgents being oppressors. That even if they are killed it won’t mean Iraqis will be happy about the US. The insurgency is more than just baathists…
You seem just a bit enthusiastic about the capability of violence and guns solving things… and like you said above the Brits failed to understand the roots of resistance and I think many here beleive americans are failing to understand as well…
… quick addition… maybe the Brits didn’t care for the real reasons in fact…
Obviously, we have a huge disconnect. Perhaps it’s because I am not expressing my thoughts well enough. Or maybe you are intent on selecting only negatives in my posts.
So I spoke freely about killing of “few hundred thousand” people and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. In your eyes that makes me a monster, right? I guess it’s all my fault that killing was happening quite freely through all of human history. I’m only observing the facts. Some killing most people find outrageous (like 6,000,000 Holocaust victims) and some killing most people find commendable (like 10,000,000 Germans in WWII) and some killing most people don’t care much about (like 20,000,000 Russians in WWII). So killing can be bad, good or meaningless, depending which way you look at it. If you care, a single victim is intolerable. If you don’t care, millions of dead people don’t matter much. That’s why I think it’s so important to understand who are those people killed in Iraq. How many of them are really innocents?
You know how long time ago some people in US said that “good Injun is dead Injun”. The way media presenting news from Iraq, they almost like saying in reverse that “dead Iraqi is good Iraqi”.