North Korea Executes Uncle to Kim Jong-Un

[R.B.S.]

If there will be anarchy in North Corea, the victims will be people.

The USA killed Hussein. And so ordinary people in Iraq kill each other. But people in the USA din't undertand this, they believed that you can kill a bad guy and there will be democracy.

And China is the country that didn't let anyone to make anarchy. The result is that it's growing.

In Russia there was anarchy of 1990s, and later people who were angry of that anarchy supported Putin.

So the result is not democracy. But again the new tyranny. Because in 1990s there was no order, but anarchy.

So, from that perspective the way of China seems at last more logical. Autocratic reforms vs tyranny - anarchy - new tyranny (in Russia).

 

[Benvolio]

The US has helped many countries achieve democracy and prosperity, sometimes by intervention. The US imposed a democratic constitution upon Japan with great success. We kept China from taking Taiwan so that it could achieve democracy and success after a period of dictatorship. We prevented the communists from taking South Korea. They also have achieved democracy and success. Many countries of Europe were threatened by communism and were saved by the US often by economic help, sometimes by meddling as in Greece and Iran. We eventually helped the countries of Eastern Europe to become free of Russian domination and to achieve democracy. Reagan and Bush worked with Gorbachev, essentially convincing him that we could outspend the USSR. Sometimes it did not work out. We failed to protect South Vietnam, and the communists killed and estimated 500,000 when they took over. It was a noble effort, but we failed in the end to protect them.

 

[R.B.S.]

The USA killed much more people in Vietnam than communists. And in Iraq the life of people becomes even harder than in the times of Saddam.

In Russia it not just did not work out. A lot of people in Russia were killed in 1990s by criminals. Or committed suicided. The war and the raise of terrorism was also one of the results of the collapse of the USSR.

Do you believe that you can kill thousands of people just to "save" them from communism? Your logic is inhuman and immoral.


BBC is not a communistic media. Look:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7828901.stm

 

[Benvolio]

The USA killed much more people in Vietnam than communists. And in Iraq the life of people becomes even harder than in the times of Saddam.

In Russia it not just did not work out. A lot of people in Russia were killed in 1990s by criminals. Or committed suicided. The war and the raise of terrorism was also one of the results of the collapse of the USSR.

Do you believe that you can kill thousands of people just to "save" them from communism? Your logic is inhuman and immoral.


BBC is not a communistic media. Look:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7828901.stm

Are you blaming the US for the deaths in Russia in th 90s. How so? Do other people in Russia think we caused those deaths?

 

[R.B.S.]

Some Russians say so. I don't.
I think that we can learn much from America. I think that America is a democratic society, unlike Russia, but I think that American foreign policy is sometimes too arrogant. Americans can't understand that other people have different history and what's work in America may not work in other countries.

I blame the leaders of America only for one thing: they should have explained Yeltsin that his country need slow and moderate reforms, not fast and shock. But the USA just gave him more and more money, that's all. And at first in the USA politicians believed in fast an radical reforms, only later they found that the result is chaos.

I think that Americans didn't understand Russia well. They were just happy that they won in the Cold War.

 

[Benvolio]

Some Russians say so. I don't.
I think that we can learn much from America. I think that America is a democratic society, unlike Russia, but I think that American foreign policy is sometimes too arrogant. Americans can't understand that other people have different history and what's work in America may not work in other countries.

I blame the leaders of America only for one thing: they should have explained Yeltsin that his country need slow and moderate reforms, not fast and shock. But the USA just gave him more and more money, that's all. And at first in the USA politicians believed in fast an radical reforms, only later they found that the result is chaos.

I think that Americans didn't understand Russia well. They were just happy that they won in the Cold War.

You are probably correct that we do not understand Russia well. We do try to do the right thing and often succeed. But people think we have more influence than we do. We get blamed for doing too little and get blamed for meddling. I do not think the US had much influence in bringing Yeltsin to power. We just wanted to help democracy get started, and would have supported any movement toward democracy.
I believe from things you have said that you do not like Putin. How popular is he among the people?

 

[Alnitak]

What you are describing when someone hears voices inside their head is schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses.

Sorry it's just my personality, but hallucinations are a symptom of some varieties of schizophrenia.

 

[R.B.S.]

Benvolio

People supported Putin ten years ago. Now his popularity fades.
He is afraid of it. So, all this anti-gay sh*t have only one aim: to use more conservative part of electorate.
To use the people, who still afraid of anarchy, who are poor and who still afraid of the future.

 

[T-Rexx]

I want to remind you the role of Gorby in the ending of the Cold War. He is a great man. But the world should have done more to him.

Mikhail Gorbachev is one of the twentieth century's greatest leaders.

I am constantly surprised that he does not get more recognition for his contributions to peace and self-rule in Europe.

What you are describing when someone hears voices inside their head is schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses. Believing the voices are your god instructing you what to do, including committing crimes, is frightening.

Too many political and religious leaders suffer from this condition.

Yeah, that fact often occurs to me.

There is a fine line between hyper-religiosity and schizophrenia, and the entire Tea Party teeters on this brink. God tells them what to do and how to think, so compromise becomes impossible. Compromise - even the most minimal accommodation of someone else's point of view - is insulting to God. But compromise is the foundation of democracy. So Tea Partiers are incapable of participating in democratic governance.

The USA killed Hussein. And so ordinary people in Iraq kill each other. But people in the USA din't undertand this, they believed that you can kill a bad guy and there will be democracy.

This is a remarkable thing.

There is a belief here that the natural evolution of all societies is toward democracy. That if you just get rid of the "one" person holding back the natural evolution of things that democracy would just break out. And everyone will live happily ever after, in peace and prosperity, with justice for all.

It is an incredible misunderstanding of what is democracy from people who pride themselves on being the world's experts.

 

[T-Rexx]

The US imposed a democratic constitution upon Japan with great success.

Democracy only survives by the consent of the governed. It cannot be imposed from without. The government established in Japan after WWII is a Japanese creation. Japan had a Parliament beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and a long history of democratic institutions. Same for Germany. Absent of this cultural experience, neither country could have had democracy "imposed" upon them successfully. The governments which survive today in those countries work because it is what their people want, not because the USA brilliantly imposed upon them a perfect design for their governance.

Reagan and Bush worked with Gorbachev, essentially convincing him that we could outspend the USSR.

I don't know who started this fantasy, but it is absurd.

The Soviet Union was not dissolved because a demented president threatened to spend trillions of dollars to defend America from a country which did not want to attack it. It was dissolved because Mikhail Gorbachev realized the impossibility of forever enforcing central authority over a vast and diverse land whose inhabitants increasingly yearned for self-rule.

Gorbachev knew the USSR could not survive indefinitely. He believed its peaceful dissolution would be preferable to Russia versus innumerable violent revolutions. That insight - and Gorbachev's remarkable success in achieving it - is what makes him one of the great leaders of modern times.

Benvolio

People supported Putin ten years ago. Now his popularity fades.
He is afraid of it. So, all this anti-gay sh*t have only one aim: to use more conservative part of electorate.
To use the people, who still afraid of anarchy, who are poor and who still afraid of the future.

Yes, exactly.

Putin is doing exactly what GWB did. He is attacking gays to reinforce his own, declining popularity. I am convinced that Putin chose homosexuals to attack because of the success he saw GWB achieve with this approach in the USA. Putin's "gay propaganda" laws are a legacy of GWB.

 

[opinterph]

The USA killed Hussein.

The Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal convicted Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi government executed him.

 

[opinterph]

We kept China from taking Taiwan so that it could achieve democracy and success after a period of dictatorship.

The US pledged to protect Taiwan from Mainland Chinese aggression at the outset of the Korean War. That pledge started to change when President Nixon normalized relations with China. The present US position is neutral “non-support” for Taiwan’s independence.

Is that what you mean by “kept China from taking?”

 

[EastMed]

The Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal convicted Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi government executed him.

Same difference.

 

[Kulindahr]

The US has helped many countries achieve democracy and prosperity, sometimes by intervention. The US imposed a democratic constitution upon Japan with great success. We kept China from taking Taiwan so that it could achieve democracy and success after a period of dictatorship. We prevented the communists from taking South Korea. They also have achieved democracy and success. Many countries of Europe were threatened by communism and were saved by the US often by economic help, sometimes by meddling as in Greece and Iran. We eventually helped the countries of Eastern Europe to become free of Russian domination and to achieve democracy. Reagan and Bush worked with Gorbachev, essentially convincing him that we could outspend the USSR. Sometimes it did not work out. We failed to protect South Vietnam, and the communists killed and estimated 500,000 when they took over. It was a noble effort, but we failed in the end to protect them.

Japan was already past the Magna Carta stage, and had some limited democratic institutions, so the US didn't impose anything, just set them back on a track they had going.

I don't know enough about Taiwan to comment, except that it's still not hard to find native Taiwanese complaining that they remain second-class citizens under mainland invaders.

I don't know if Korea had any form of power sharing before the war that left us with two countries; I do know that there's still a movement in South Korea fighting for better democracy, and that South Korean government has stumbled into differing degress of authoritarianism since the First Republic.

US influence in Iran has been almost entirely negative in terms of democracy.

"Reagan and Bush worked with Gorbachev"? Internationally, yes. But Reagan's real contributions to the fall of the USSR were adversarial, e.g. acting as though the U.S. could actually win a nuclear exchange (terrified those old men in the Kremlin, who, having experience of their own with senescence, considered Reagan to be unstable and having more than one screw loose upstairs), and famously in his "tear down this wall" challenge. But without his S.T.A.R.T. endeavor, all that could have just tipped them into a violent internal revolution. I think he was brilliant; others say he was lucky -- but at any rate, what Russia ended up with is only a charade of democracy. And meanwhile, all of those Eastern European nations had their own traditions of power sharing and/or democracy.

As for Vietnam... they would have been better off if we'd told the French to go fuck themselves; if they weren't going to fight, then we saw no treaty obligation compelling us to do so.

 

[opinterph]

The Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal convicted Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi government executed him.

Same difference.

Is it?

Does the “same difference” also mean that the US caused today’s ordinary people in Iraq to kill each other?

The USA killed Hussein. And so ordinary people in Iraq kill each other.

 

[Benvolio]

The US pledged to protect Taiwan from Mainland Chinese aggression at the outset of the Korean War. That pledge started to change when President Nixon normalized relations with China. The present US position is neutral “non-support” for Taiwan’s independence.

Is that what you mean by “kept China from taking?”

No, this is what I mean, from Wikipedia, Taiwan:

"The United States remains one of the main allies of the ROC and, through the Taiwan Relations Act passed in 1979, has continued selling arms and provide military training to the Republic of China Armed Forces.[100] This situation continues to be an issue for the People's Republic of China which considers US involvement disruptive to the stability of the region. In January 2010, the Obama administration announced its intention to sell $6.4 billion worth of military hardware to Taiwan. As a consequence, the PRC threatened the US with economic sanctions and warned that their cooperation on international and regional issues could suffer.[101]

The official position of the United States is that the PRC is expected to "use no force or threat[en] to use force against Taiwan" and the ROC is to "exercise prudence in managing all aspects of Cross-Strait relations." Both are to refrain from performing actions or espousing statements "that would unilaterally alter Taiwan's status."[102]

Source Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan#Foreign_relations

 

[Kulindahr]

The US pledged to protect Taiwan from Mainland Chinese aggression at the outset of the Korean War. That pledge started to change when President Nixon normalized relations with China. The present US position is neutral “non-support” for Taiwan’s independence.

Is that what you mean by “kept China from taking?”

The US wasn't quite that blatant. Truman decided that hostilities in the channel between Taiwan and the mainland wouldn't be good considering that the US was fighting in Korea, so he parked the Seventh (IIRC) Fleet in the strait and announced that further hostilities wouldn't be tolerated. That had the effect of protecting Taiwan, but it wasn't a direct pledge.

I suspect he had a good advisor on that, since the ambiguity of the whole situation has kept China on edge whereas a blunt statement of support would have engendered hostility.

 

[Kulindahr]

No, this is what I mean, from Wikipedia, Taiwan: "The United States remains one of the main allies of the ROC and, through the Taiwan Relations Act passed in 1979, has continued selling arms and provide military training to the Republic of China Armed Forces.[100] This situation continues to be an issue for the People's Republic of China which considers US involvement disruptive to the stability of the region. In January 2010, the Obama administration announced its intention to sell $6.4 billion worth of military hardware to Taiwan. As a consequence, the PRC threatened the US with economic sanctions and warned that their cooperation on international and regional issues could suffer.[101]

The official position of the United States is that the PRC is expected to "use no force or threat[en] to use force against Taiwan" and the ROC is to "exercise prudence in managing all aspects of Cross-Strait relations." Both are to refrain from performing actions or espousing statements "that would unilaterally alter Taiwan's status."[102]

In other words, we don't even discuss the issue of who really owns Taiwan, but we expect them to be adults about it.

 

[EastMed]

Is it?

Does the “same difference” also mean that the US caused today’s ordinary people in Iraq to kill each other?

​

The US broke Iraq in an illegal war, and walked away from the consequences. Mission accomplished.

 

[Benvolio]

Japan was hardly a democracy before the war, but like many authoritarian regimes maintained a formal pretense toward it. The Potsdam conference demanded that Japan adopt democracy. The Japanese redrafted their old constitution. Then, from Wikipedia, Japan:

"MacArthur rejected them outright and ordered his staff to draft a completely new document. An additional reason for this was that on January 24, 1946, Prime Minister Shidehara has suggested to MacArthur that the new Constitution should contain an article renouncing war.

Much of the drafting was done by two senior army officers with law degrees: Milo Rowell and Courtney Whitney, although others chosen by MacArthur had a large say in the document. The articles about equality between men and women are reported to have been written by Beate Sirota.[3][4]

Source Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan#Drafting_process