This thread of full of fail from the paranoia about stealthy Muslims imposing Sharia law all over the the world to blame America for everything. From skimming this thread there is a couple of basic problems that are being skirted. The big one is the idea that the US should be deciding what sort of government the Syrians should have. Leaving aside the issue of self-determination for a moment whether right or wrong there is a practical issue that the US is in no position to impose a a Pax-Americana that could decide what governments countries like Syria can have. Just look at how well things went in Iraq and are going in Afghanistan should tell anyone all you need to know about the US ability to install governments. We simply don't have the resources to do it. Keep in mind to that overthrowing a government is a very different matter than installing, and maintaining one. We probably could relatively easily defeat Assad's forces, or conversely help him crush the rebellion, but most Americans want no part of another situation where we are there for a prolonged period trying to run things. Consider that Libya was a very very limited action on the US part with wide ranging international support yet even there there was a lot of criticism about US involvement. We are simply not in a position to decide how Syrians, Egyptians and Libyans are going to govern themselves.
Just want to point out that Wilson advocated intervention and while he talked about self-determination his views clearly where about using American power to remake the world. He was essentially the first Neo-Con and Wilsonian views are echoed by people like Cheney and Wolfowitz. In fact GW Bush's second inaugural speech could've been written Wilson.
My bad on the peacenik jab - a simple "idiot" would have been a lot better. He wanted to remake the world by giving everyone their own separate, democratic state, and wanted to use American power explicitly for THAT end as opposed to using American power for the sake of America, because he thought somehow that world peace and cooperation would result under those circumstances. The point I was making is that even as people refute his interventionism, we still have everyone who acts like self-determination is such a wonderful idea. "Oh, the Tibetans should have their own state." "Oh, if we split Iraq up into three ways, it'll fix everything." "Oh, if the British and French had actually somehow magically given every African people their own state, then Africa wouldn't be such a ****hole." It's completely wrong. Reckless self-determination in fact leads to war, as the entire buildup to the Second World War or Yugoslavia in general proves.
From equating Bush and Obama to Hitler to recommending to read Al Qaeda's charter (and agreeing with it and rationalizing it), this guy has totally shown his true colors. "Off his rocker" is too kind for this. The guy is a fanatical, crazy, dangerous Islamist. I can't believe people like rocketsjudoka and FranchiseBlade would rather argue about other stuff and ignore this craziness (or silently agree?? what is it? why are leftists quick to argue with people who criticize tendencies in Islam, but go silent when an Islamist says the most outrageous things ever?). Some people owe me an apology. I have always seen that this guy is a fanatical ideologue, and addressed him accordingly. Compliments to Sweet Lou/New Yorker for somewhat speaking up against this lunacy.
Was he really wrong? The world has gotten progressively more peaceful as more democracies have formed, and it's arguably more peaceful today than at any point in human history. Most remaining active conflicts today are within a country as opposed to between countries, and those are almost universally within non-Democratic countries.
A lack of self-determination is what led to the troubles in the Middle East, Balkans, and Africa because these countries were drawn up with no regard for ethnic/religious/tribal divides. Self-governance wouldn't create a utopia of course, but we wouldn't have the mess we have now. Of course, as the song goes "Everybody wants to rule the world" whether they be Japanese, Turk, Saudi, American, or British- all superpowers and aspiring powers influence foreign affairs- often with little regard to the people there. The issue is transitioning- Iraq can't stay together without having a malevolent dictator. If we break it up, we risk seeing ethnic cleansing. Turkey doesn't want a Kurdish state on the border, US doesn't want a Shia ally for Iran and like Sudan, no one wants to share the oil. This is what happens when foreigners arbitrarily make decisions.
I basically attribute that to two factors. The important one is nukes/MAD. The second is simply due to capitalism, not democracy, and China has shown that the two aren't synomynous. There's nothing about democracy which makes it inherently less war-hungry than autocracies. The greatest empire in the history of the world, whose legacy the Founding Father borrowed heavily from, conquered most of its territory and fought its most important war against Carthage as a republic. In addition, my point emphasized self-determination, not democracy. Self-determination is from my perspective, an inherently nihilistic ideal, because no matter how small you group a set of people together, there will always be at least two factions, with somewhat different histories and such. It has no end whatsoever, as we can see by the fact that even in a world where there's fewer empires than ever before, various ethnic groups scream over the right to break away, whether it's Scotland or Tibet or Nagarno-Karaboh or East Ossetia. And Wilson's obsession with self-determination was why Versailles really was so ****ed up, because contrary to what you're taught in history class, Versailles wasn't harsh enough against Germany because he wanted to be such a moral leader. Or maybe he just didn't want to punish other white people harsh enough, I don't know which one.
1. First, I think what people forget is that it's completely impossible to draw up a state where all the people in country A belong to this ethnic group, and all the people in country B belong to another ethnic group. Wilson and his cronies literally crawled around on giant maps on the floor of Versailles trying to accommodate people. But as the Estonians realized when they broke away from Soviet oppression, pretty much any state, especially a state where the people are not distinguished through the geographic lines drawn by the British, will have mixing of these ethnic and tribal divides. So no matter what state, you are pretty much going to have these ethnicity problems. Take Hitler, for example. He justified his acquisition of the Sudetenland and Austria through the ideals and united the German people. But then what about the Czechs who lived in the Sudetenland? This example shows that you'll pretty much always have these fragments because that what's people inevitably do. They divide them into groups of 'us" and "them" within their own state. 2. You cite the Middle East. I cite India, where the British did try to split up the country alongside religious lines. And that fighting and the chaos that resulted because all the Hindu people fled to India and the Muslims to Pakistan was far worse than anything that occurred in the Balkan fighting ( which was actually caused because the countries couldn't agree on how to get all the people in all of their territory, which meant war) or in Africa. Heck, some Indian guy in the Hangout said that his country would have been better off if it hadn't been split up.
You're right. His fourteen points address was very sympathetic to the Germans. But the Versailles treaty wasn't led by Wilson. Wilson got usurped by the angrier European leaders and Wilson had to whisk away a ton of his ideals in the original fourteen points to salvage his golden egg, the League of Nations.
You can't draw up along perfect ethnic lines of course, but you can't expect a country to be made up of people with nothing in common besides a common enemy. Iraq's ethnic groups haven't coexisted for centuries, yet they told to form a country together. That's a disaster waiting to happen because they're too disjointed and different to stay together, but not isolated enough to seperate cleanly. That's why the transition to independence needs to be gradual and not immeadiate (like India and Pakistan).
I totally disagree with this part. Wars are fought by the people and the people are the ones that suffer the most in war. In a democracy, where the people get to participate in the decision making, there is a natural tendency to avoid war unless necessary. When a King/tyrant/dictator/etc that doesn't necessarily care about the well-being of his people gets to make that decision alone, there is more likelihood of war because the leadership has less "skin in the game" - he doesn't care if a bunch of his people die, as long as he is rewarded with more land/gold/whatever. And, of course, he doesn't care if his people hate him or are upset, since they can't kick him out. At the end of the day, democratic leadership has to please its people, and that helps put a limit on war. I do think nukes and other things have had an impact as well, but many countries of the world that don't have nukes also are less interested in warring with other countries with no nukes.
Agreed Major. one of my college professors favorite lines was "democracies don't go to war with other democracies."
You completely misunderstood my argument. I believe that the problem with Versailles was that it wasn't harsh enough, and that even those angry European leaders were too soft. Versailles hurt the Germans enough to make them angry, but geopolitically Germany was in fact relatively stronger in Europe after the war, due to the collapse of strong empires in the east. But what you forget is that a dictator DOES need to please its people to some degree, whether it's through material growth such as China or a bat**** crazy ideology like North Korea or theocracies in general. And since a dictator possesses more power, it knows that if he loses a war, he is screwed in a way that a leader of a republic wouldn't be, because then the responsibility is on him. Now, does that mean that dictators will sometimes get into unnecessary wars? Of course they will. But democracies don't avoid that. The first democracy in the world had that problem with Sicily. We've just finished withdrawing from one, and that wasn't even our first one in the last half-century. Yes, that's due to the nature of power relations. All of the great powers in the world have nukes, and if any of the second-tier powers try to exert undue influences which threaten the spheres of influence of the Great Powers ( Saddam and Kuwait, for example), they will be in trouble. Even if say, Germany or Japan became dictatorships again, they would not run around trying to redo what they did seventy years ago, because they know that the more powerful nations would beat their asses silly if they tried it. It's power relations, of which nukes play a substantial role, which keep the peace. It's never been about democracies. Few problems with that catchphrase. 1. Small sample size. Democracies in general have not been the normal government within most of human history. Only since the collapse of the Berlin Wall has democracy become the majority form of government across the world. To keep this in perspective, the Concert of Vienna lasted forty years without any European war, and almost a century with no general European war at all. 2. In addition, throughout the time period since when the Western world has become fully democratic, ( aka after the Second World War), there's been one super-duper power among those democracies, the US. There's two ways to keep global stability. First is a balance of power, second is unilateral hegemony. Therefore, the democratic world has had a hegemony which has kept the peace. Remove the hegemony, remove the nukes, and there's a good chance of chaos. 3. Even with that small sample, I can list the Peleponessian Wars, the Punic Wars, and the general fraticidal conflict among the Italian Republics. And I could find more if I bothered to research things.
This is true. Through history there has been chaos resulting from the fall of hegemonic powers. Even so, I'd like to believe that Democracy, the rise of instantaneous human networking via internet communications, and the dissipation of nationalism relative to prior centuries can help aid the world in ending the chaotic hegemonic cycle. Of course, this may entirely be too optimistic.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stressed that*Germany’s roots are Judeo-Christian. She said: “Now we obviously have Muslims in Germany. But it is important in regard to Islam that the values represented by Islam must correspond to our constitution. What applies here is the constitution, not Sharia law.” Shortly thereafter, Merkel addressed an October 16 meeting of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party in Potsdam outside Berlin, where she conceded that*Germany’s efforts to build a post-war multicultural society had “failed utterly.” In a landmark speech,*Merkel said: In November 2010, the*CDU passed a resolution*stressing “Our country benefits from immigrants who live and work here. But Germany does not benefit from a minority that refuses to integrate, does not want to learn our language, and denies participation and advancement to their children.… We expect that those who come here respect and recognize our cultural identity.” Polls show that*almost half of the German population*(from across the political spectrum) agree that German immigration policies have produced a deeply divided society. But y'all know better than the Chancellor & people of Germany. And that is just Germany. Ask the whole of Europe where crime rates, especially rapes and grooming of minors by (sic) Asian males. Talk to the people of Myanmar. I could go on, but y'all know better. I feel sorry for the Syrian people, just ask the Egyptians if they're happier now under their new regime?
Honestly man, I am not the only one who thinks that. If you want to set up a poll and see for yourself, maybe it would be eye-opening. I am not trying to bash you or condescend to you. I am being honest.
