A big challenge for Western Democracy and the UN.

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

I have heard people say that they are sometimes ashamed to be Americans, in the light of what Bush did, or even the fact that Bush got elected under the most questionable of circumstances.

I love my own country, it's traditions and its cultural achievements - even so, I loath what the British government has done in recent decades. Not neccessarily the Blair government, or the present Tory coalition government- it just seems that whoever was working 'in the national interest' at the time did a lousy job, and I'm ashamed of what they did to our nation's reputation abroad.

For the record, it is not just the BP oil spill. Many years ago, there was a demonstration outside the Libyan Embassy in London, and a machine gun, inside the building , was fired from the embassy into a crowd of dissedents demonstrating against Gadaffi and the Libyan Government outside.

That burst of gunfire also killed a female police officer, WPC Yvonne Fletcher. She was 23, as I recall. the killer walked away without charges being pressed. Diplomatic immunity.

And when a bomb exploded over Scotland , in a place called Lockerbie, it was a Libyan who was tried and sentenced in a court of law for this cowardly terroist attack.

So, it really sticks in my throat that BP, and other oil companies have used their influence over the years to get our Government to be nice to Gaddaffi, and then use these 'good diplomatic relations' to go to libya and make vast profits.

There was a great scene in a movie once, where Hugh Grant played a British Prime Minister, and said "ours is not a big country, but it is a great country". But that was just a movie.
Yes, we are a great country. We did not just give the world William Shakespeare, we gave it Winston Churchill and Tom Paine. We gave America many of its Founding Fathers. We gave Magna Carta and the example of free people who were prepared to go on strike and on marches- often in the face of brutal repression - in order to demand basic human rights like the right to vote and free assembly.

And a great country like ours deserves a great government. A government that is big enough to stand up to oil companies and other profiteers who stain the beaches of the America with slicks of oil and tyrants like Gaddaffii who stain the streets of London and many other cities with pools of blood.

it's time we in Britain had a government that was not driven simply by profits and share prices but ws prepared to regulate industries for the benefit of those who worked in them and those who live in the shadow of their operations, instead of just the business owners.

And it's time we reorganised the UN and made it possible to for international law to have some impact. if we don't , the multinational companies will run the world. seriously, I think they already have too much clout.

The UN should be freezing Gaddaffis assets. Mubarak, it is reported, has fled to Britain . funny how so many deposed dictators come here. i feel that if any democratically elected Government in egypt demands his return to put him on trial, that we have a duty to hand him over.

Britain , and the UN , have got to make a stand, or lose their standing in the world.
Gaddaffi, however he wants to spell and pronounce his name , has got an awful lot of blood on his hands, including the blood of his own people. he really has it coming to him , and I hope that whoever is in charge will see to it that he doesn't end up in a private villa somewhere in Sussex.

Comments

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Gaddafi has not fled anywhere and he's not going anywhere just yet. No Venezuela, no Britain, nowhere. He's still got too much to lose to just flee like that, contrary to what some online rumor outlets would like to circulate as 'fact'.

Also agree about the damaging effect on UK's image that the recent diplomatic stances of your politicians have had. The Megrahi (Lockerbie bomber) case was particularly enraging for many people - realpolitik played there again, and he was released as he was allegedly "terminally ill" to see his family in his last days. But that was a lie. It was all part of a bargain where UK would get privileged access to the arms markets of Libya and BP would get privileged access to Libya's oil, in exchange for granting political and diplomatic legitimacy for Gaddafi the murderer.

It's all part of a game, and whoever believes what those fuckers are telling on the telly, are stupid dumbfucks and deserve exactly the crappy leaders they get, period.

(Sorry for my tone, but I can't talk about Libya and stay calm).

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

OK, he said Mubarak has fled to UK. I thought he had fled to UAE.

The rest I basically agree with.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Yep. My bad. Mubarak, then. I need a rakia now.

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

The truth is, I was a bit off beam here myself.

The families of both these dictators are washed up on our shores, according to this morning's Times.

Mubarak is in Europe, as you say , and Gadaffii was in deep shit, I mean Libya, when I last looked at the news on the Beeb.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure if he COULD flee at this point. Given the atrocities he unleashed in the past few days, what country can possibly offer him safe harbor except in a jail cell awaiting extradition to the Hague?

He's going to stay to the last at this point -- he has no other option that suits his ego.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

The Axis of Evil would be delighted to assist him with showing a finger to us freedom-loving democratic peoples around the world, dontcha think?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I love my country, but we went to Iraq and Afghanistan, have a horrible human rights record with our indigenous people and refugees and we're also the home of BHP. If you don't know why that's bad look up Ok Tedi.

[jlc20thmaine.livejournal.com]

I supoprt the president, just none of his policies.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Similarly, I adore the American people. I just hate most of your foreign policies.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Which particular policies do you disagree with the most?

[farchivist.livejournal.com]

From the comments you've made support, I doubt you support the President at all.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And in Winston Churchill you gave it a man who was a racist bastard willing to induce an artificial famine that starved to death 3,000,000 Indians and perfectly willing to use religion to play divide and conquer just like his precursors. Not to mention that Churchill was himself a Jew-hater. Of course not to the extent that the German dictator was, but still.....

Magna Carta was also the result of a successful Baron's Revolt. Not a lead-in to freedom in any sense of the term. And even then it was because John Lackland couldn't keep the Angevin Empire.

Unfortunately while not the League of Nations, the UN was compromised from the first with "freedom" due to the reality that when the USSR is one of the first people on the Security Council human rights will forever only receive lip service. And by any consistent standard much of US behavior in Central and South America and with supporting Apartheid had the same result.

So I'm not sure how to fix that beyond turning peacekeepers into a real military.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

The past sucked big time, didn't it?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I should note that I do not dislike the British people, I merely detest people who romanticize any Empire. Nobody ever does this with the Tsars, Belgium, Germany, or even the USA in the Philippines (albeit that's because most people think the Philippines are the capital of Pennsylvania. /snerk). The British Empire, however, was solidly typical of others of its time and under Lord Curzon starved 9,000,000 Indians in an artificially induced and entirely preventable famine in the 1890s before repeating that under Churchill in the 1940s.

That, however, is not to say the USA is any better. We ignore for instance that a big part of the BP Oil Spill was the result of Bush's deciding to trust an oil man to regulate the oil industry.......and that Halliburton had at least equal shares in Deepwater Horizon.

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

Ok - everything had it's limitations. I am not saying it didn't. But don't forget that ( what did you call him ?)" racist bastard willing to induce an artificial famine" was the guy who stood up to Hitler while Standard Oil game thim all the fuel he needed to invade Poland.

And, yeah , the barons only had themselves in mind when the ctook King John down a peg or two. And don't tell me that all that crap about ' we the people' was anything more than Americans who were rich enough to get to #2 was a blatent attempt by them to get to #1 on the food chain. But still, I like that kinda stuff.

LOL.....

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://pages.interlog.com/~fatjack/vimybattle.htm

The Canadians have plenty of badassery.

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

I think it is the french you have to blame for that :)

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

The maple leaves got a bunch of French people hanging around watering stuff down.

[anadinboy.livejournal.com]

realpolitic should be a forced option not a goal or a fetish. Gladstone was so angry about us not being able to help the bulgarians in the 1870s he had to go into his garden and chop a tree down in his rage, the same impotant rage we might be feeling now, but theres no need because now we can help.

The british empire, in the eyes of the british public was always a non-issue, we never had any love or hate towards it. It was considered something toffs did abroad really. Though none of us really care about starving indians or chinese opium or any of that, for the reason given, we considered ourselves to be highly detatched.

Churchill , personaly i like him, but he was considered a madman brought in in an emergency and booted out again at the first chance. A kind of emergency pitbull if u like.

and americas a evil empire because of the bp oil spill? lol. America is the greatest act of charity the worlds ever seen, the reason we can sleep safe in our beds at night.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Naturally. Because if we just count the death toll produced by the Raj alone it matches the 20th Century totalitarians. And that's not counting the fate of Indigenous Caribbean, Australian, and Pacific Islanders. Nor does it take into account that Britain's tendency to use poison gas and massed gunfire to end colonial revolts adds a pretty good death toll in its own right.

US callousness has tended to be smaller scale, even our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have yet to match what we did to the Indians. It's much more widespread, but the death-toll is far smaller.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry for Sir William's tree, I really am. :-)

Would it make the good Sir feel any better if he learned that there are streets named after him in almost every Bulgarian city with a population above 100,000? :-)

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

The british empire, in the eyes of the british public was always a non-issue, we never had any love or hate towards it. It was considered something toffs did abroad really. Though none of us really care about starving indians or chinese opium or any of that, for the reason given, we considered ourselves to be highly detatched.

Churchill , personaly i like him, but he was considered a madman brought in in an emergency and booted out again at the first chance. A kind of emergency pitbull if u like.
Quite.

But lets not that ~we Brits~ caused the BP oil spill, not the Septics. Really.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

A very appropriate and interesting article in The New Statesman: Britain’s two-faced relationship with Middle-Eastern tyranny has to end (http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2011/02/bahrain-british-middle-egypt).