Replies to stupid comments by poliricians worldwide...

[Phision]

Eh? Now that is dumb. Why do people keep referring to Jews as if they are a separate race? They are not. Jew is a religious denotation. It has nothig to do with the parameters that define ethnicity such as geography and topography. That's as bad as Hitler's master 'Aryan' race when really Aryan is nothing more than a linguistic thing. People you got me

 

i agree, hitler made the mistake of classing Jews as another race rather than a religion, and look what happened there!!!

[Totenkopf]

But the Bonn government has survived for almost 60 years now.

 

 

Right, 60 years AFTER WW2. The Weimar government, which I was referring to, was before the second world war.

 

@phision--Well, by 1939, Hitler had already consolidated his power and had a pretty firm grip on Germany. He actually gained power in the early to mid 1930s.

[JediMaster12]

Hitler's gain to power was brilliant in my opinion. Sure he was a madman but the strategies he used were...good. His book Mien Kampf outlines what he did. It was smart of him to latch onto a war hero like van Leudendorf (forgive spelling).

 

I think that was part of our problem in Iraq. We tried to get them to write their own constitution, then in the very first true election after it was ratified, we didn't want the person the people had chosen.

 

If the terrorists and insurgents would leave them alone for even a month, it would work out. As it is I can forsee it breaking into four separate nations, and that would be both better and worse than what we have now.

What can I say. Even though Iraq was secularly ruled by Saddaam, the imams, or religious leaders were in control. You cannot force or even encourage democracy on a people whose religious principles suggest that democracy is the devil's own invention. True that there are Muslims who are progressive and think democratically but they are still Muslim meaning that they believe that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. They are still governed by Islamic law which comes from the teachings of the Koran and the hadiths or the sayings of Mohammed.

[Jae Onasi]

What can I say. Even though Iraq was secularly ruled by Saddaam, the imams, or religious leaders were in control.

 

Actually, Hussein was very much in control. Any religious leader who openly disagreed with him had the propensity to 'disappear' or meet with a very unfortunate 'accident.' Iran has been run by religious leaders, though Ahmadinejab is certainly making things quite interesting.

[machievelli]

the funny thing is Germany was almost completely opposite to Russia, in that, Germany was not ready for democracy, and russia was so ready for democracy that it had 4 or 5 different revolutions, some within the same year, and yet both still ended up in dictatorship.

 

About fifteen years ago PBS did a special called 'Peter Ustinov's Russia. In one scene he was supposedly talking to I believe one of the Alexanders. The Tzar in Question made an intersting comment about the Russians. He said that 'The Russian people want freedom, but that desire is balanced by a need to be led. If they have too much freedom, the almost always merely give away that freedom to whomever will promise them the most stability.

 

After the Russian Revolution, the Kerenski government collapsed after less than six months because they couldn't fix the problem in that time. The Bolshevik government fixed it easily. They merely arrested and shot anyone who complained.

[JediMaster12]

True Jae but Saddaam's reach didn't go deep to where the nomads are. Even then, Islam plays a significant role in the Middle East. Plus we still have talk about Sunni Muslim insurgents and Shia counterattacks. Sounds like Islam still a major player.

[machievelli]

Sounds like Islam still a major player.

 

What most of us in the west fail to realize, is that Islam teaches that there can be no just government unless Islam is part of it.The very idea of our own conutry, where any religion is allowed to practice is shocking enough, but to determine what is a crime and a suitable punishment by vote is to them absurd.

 

However we are attempting to set up a western style democracy, and there is going to be resistance to that. Add in the fact that the Shi'a and Sunnis have hated each other since around 635, not to mention the more conservative and radical members among either group and you have an explosive mixture. As it is, when the insurgency began, there were three factions by my count. There are now at least seven.

[JediMaster12]

So true mach. I know that the conservatives think the US as the devil's resting place. Just thinking about democracy in Iraq reminds me of other times the US has interferred in other world events. It seems to me that each country we touch spoils it. Look at how screwed up some of the Latin American countries are after our interference and that was capitalistic reasons.

[machievelli]

So true mach. I know that the conservatives think the US as the devil's resting place. Just thinking about democracy in Iraq reminds me of other times the US has interferred in other world events. It seems to me that each country we touch spoils it. Look at how screwed up some of the Latin American countries are after our interference and that was capitalistic reasons.

 

 

We can't take all of the blame JM, Democracy has not caught on in either South America or Africa. In South America it's because any decent democracy interferes with religions and the Catholic church has done more to screw it up than we ever did. Every revolution in the last 150 years in Mexico has been because the Church threw it's support behind the rebels instead of the government. I admit a lackluster foreign policy didn't help. But everyone south of us has used those nasty Americans as the evil empire long before Cuba went Communist.

 

As for Africa, some of the nations (England and France) never allowed the natives any real authority, so they ended up as dictatorships. Belgium, which has been accused of the worst excesses, at least gave full medical and education options to their citizens, and had administrators who were black, local and trained to keep things running after the Colonials departed.

 

Then of course the 'disenfranchised' slaughtered the educated, and blamed it on 'quasi colonialism'.

 

As for conservatives, the American liberals are worse. When someone calls you a liar because you use a study by an internationally renowned organization (SIPRI) and it doesn't agree with an Op-ed written by a political hack, you really asee how stupid a lot of Americans are too.

 

Remember, I read more history than anything else.

[JediMaster12]

You got a point there. El Salvador went through a civil war with the whole liberation theology movement with Oscar Romero. The guy was originally a conservative but he became liberal after a member of the clergy was murdered for his beliefs. The Church mainatained a conservative view since Catholicism was the unofficial leader of the governenment.

 

That bit you mentioned with England and France is true too. The best example I have has to do with South Africa and apartheid. In 1948 the Afrikaaners came into power and instituted it as law of the land. Pre-WW2 the English did the same thing but then we all know that British imperialism was the thing in those days.

[Darth InSidious]

Right, 60 years AFTER WW2. The Weimar government, which I was referring to, was before the second world war.

 

@phision--Well, by 1939, Hitler had already consolidated his power and had a pretty firm grip on Germany. He actually gained power in the early to mid 1930s.

IIRC, he'd consolidated power by 1934/5.

 

@phision: Weimar would have fallen eventually anyway, IMO. Yes, it faced economic problems, but these were also related to the general global trends of the time. Also, you do not mention in your argument the effects of having elections every six months or so, and the problems of the proportional system, which meant it was impossible to have a clear electoral victory. Couple this with a senile president and the 'Red Peril' obsession, and Weimar, in my opinion, could not have survived for much longer than it did.