Destructo6
Member
Somehow I get the feeling that the life of a stinkbug is quite a bit more important to you than anything regarding GW's reelection.
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U.S. Troops to Liberia?
- Thread starter Mil Novecientos Once
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HeavyHaul
Member
My granddad told me to clean my own backyard, before complaining about, or cleaning, my neighbors. Seems to me, that's what we need to do now. Get our own country's problems fixed, before trying to fix everybody else's country. Lock the doors, fix our problems, then kick anyones butt that don't like it. JMHO.
Bill
Bill
Preacherman
Member
Interesting editorial in the Telegraph, London (http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/...xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/07/09/ixopinion.html):
The tragedy of Liberia is entirely of its own making
By Anthony Daniels
(Filed: 09/07/2003)
There is only one thing worse, morally speaking, than American intervention, and that is American non-intervention. With President Bush in Africa this week, attention turns to a much-cited example of what the latter can do.
Liberians of every political stripe compare American activism in Iraq with American passivity in Liberia and they take the view that the great Republic over the water is acting less as Liberia's benevolent godparent, than as its neglectful stepmother. American inaction, they believe, is responsible for the way Liberians have been slaughtering one another for the past 14 years.
Much of the world agrees. After all, as Liberians never ceased to point out to me when I visited Monrovia during a brief lull in the civil war, a detachment of 500 trained troops could have put an end to the violence there in a couple of weeks. A few marines would have saved 200,000 lives.
The trouble is that life is lived forwards, not backwards. If the marines had been dispatched, no one would have known how many lives they saved, and then the very same people who condemn the Americans for not having dispatched them would have blamed the Americans for other reasons. They would have said that the Americans were trying to secure West African diamonds, or its iron and manganese deposits. There is no pleasing some people.
But why should the Americans be more responsible than anyone else for what happens in Liberia? It is far from being the only country able to dispatch 500 troops sufficiently well-trained to bring order to Liberia.
What, then, gives America its special responsibility towards Liberia? The answer is always that the historical links between the two countries create this special responsibility: no mention of Liberia is ever quite complete without reference to the fact that it was founded as a refuge for freed slaves from America.
Whether this foundation was an act of generosity or was intended to remove free men of colour from America lest they infect slaves with dreams of freedom is still debated: but what is never disputed is that the foundation conferred on America a moral responsibility that, presumably, will stretch to all eternity.
Liberia attained its independence as a republic in 1847. The Americo-Liberians, or Congos as they came to be called, stood in more or less the same relation to the native population as white colonists in Africa were later to do. Only three per cent of the population, they believed themselves to be in possession of a superior civilisation whose advantages it was their duty to spread to the benighted tribes around them.
The Americo-Liberians remained in power, through the influence of their all-pervasive True Whig Party, until 1980. Under the leadership of President Tubman (who died in 1971 after a cataract operation at the London Clinic), Liberia enjoyed for some years the highest growth rate of any country in the world.
At that time, the country seemed almost a fiefdom of the Firestone Rubber Company, Harvey S Firestone having planted 1,000,000 acres of Liberia, granted on easy terms, with rubber in the 1920s to break the British world monopoly on rubber production. To the American cultural influence was now added economic predominance.
Moreover, Liberia had suddenly become politically important to America. During the Second World War, the airfield at Robertfield was granted to the Americans as a re-fuelling station; and during the Cold War, Liberia became America's principal strategic listening-post and satellite station.
As the economy developed, the Americo-Liberians were forced by reality to co-opt more of the "native" population into the elite. Ever more students were sent to America for higher education, where many of them picked up the radical ideas of the time, and became rabble-rousers and demagogues.
After the violent and destructive riots in 1979 about a rise in the price of rice, fomented and fanned by the demagogues, William Tolbert, the last True Whig president of Liberia (who was also a Baptist minister, and was soon to be disembowelled in his bed), felt constrained as a sop to the demagogues to distance himself from Liberia's traditional policy of alliance with America, and turned, rhetorically at least, to the Left.
When Tolbert was overthrown in 1980 by a group of NCOs, of whom the semi-literate Samuel K Doe was soon to emerge the leader, and his cabinet massacred on the beach, there was popular rejoicing, and the demagogues thought they had come into their own. It appeared for a time as though the people had taken power from the top-hatted and tailed Americo-Liberian elite.
But Doe's idea of a popular revolution was soon revealed to be a clan-based kleptocracy, with himself as kleptocrat-in-chief. His ethnic group, the Krahn, was, by coincidence, three per cent of the population, the same proportion as the displaced Americo-Liberians. After a brief burst of revolutionary rhetoric, he discovered which side of his Cold War bread was buttered, and he chose the Americans.
After Doe turned to America, the Liberian demagogue-class, of whom Charles Taylor is the finest flower, discovered the hidden hand of the CIA in the 1980 coup. The CIA wanted Tolbert out of the way: and not a sparrow, let alone a president, fell in Liberia without a push from the Americans.
Undoubted American influence was thus inflated in the minds of Liberians into American omnipotence. With omnipotence, however, comes responsibility for everything: and so Liberians could slaughter one another, and it would still be the Americans' fault. Only the Americans could act of their own volition: that is to say, only they were full members of the human race.
From a combination of abject psychological dependence and deep resentment, no decent political culture can possibly emerge. American-led intervention in Liberia would bring about peace, but it will be an imposed, imperial peace. The underlying problem would remain: a problem that only Liberians, freed of their own psychological dependence, can solve.
Anthony Daniels is the author of Monrovia Mon Amour (John Murray)
The tragedy of Liberia is entirely of its own making
By Anthony Daniels
(Filed: 09/07/2003)
There is only one thing worse, morally speaking, than American intervention, and that is American non-intervention. With President Bush in Africa this week, attention turns to a much-cited example of what the latter can do.
Liberians of every political stripe compare American activism in Iraq with American passivity in Liberia and they take the view that the great Republic over the water is acting less as Liberia's benevolent godparent, than as its neglectful stepmother. American inaction, they believe, is responsible for the way Liberians have been slaughtering one another for the past 14 years.
Much of the world agrees. After all, as Liberians never ceased to point out to me when I visited Monrovia during a brief lull in the civil war, a detachment of 500 trained troops could have put an end to the violence there in a couple of weeks. A few marines would have saved 200,000 lives.
The trouble is that life is lived forwards, not backwards. If the marines had been dispatched, no one would have known how many lives they saved, and then the very same people who condemn the Americans for not having dispatched them would have blamed the Americans for other reasons. They would have said that the Americans were trying to secure West African diamonds, or its iron and manganese deposits. There is no pleasing some people.
But why should the Americans be more responsible than anyone else for what happens in Liberia? It is far from being the only country able to dispatch 500 troops sufficiently well-trained to bring order to Liberia.
What, then, gives America its special responsibility towards Liberia? The answer is always that the historical links between the two countries create this special responsibility: no mention of Liberia is ever quite complete without reference to the fact that it was founded as a refuge for freed slaves from America.
Whether this foundation was an act of generosity or was intended to remove free men of colour from America lest they infect slaves with dreams of freedom is still debated: but what is never disputed is that the foundation conferred on America a moral responsibility that, presumably, will stretch to all eternity.
Liberia attained its independence as a republic in 1847. The Americo-Liberians, or Congos as they came to be called, stood in more or less the same relation to the native population as white colonists in Africa were later to do. Only three per cent of the population, they believed themselves to be in possession of a superior civilisation whose advantages it was their duty to spread to the benighted tribes around them.
The Americo-Liberians remained in power, through the influence of their all-pervasive True Whig Party, until 1980. Under the leadership of President Tubman (who died in 1971 after a cataract operation at the London Clinic), Liberia enjoyed for some years the highest growth rate of any country in the world.
At that time, the country seemed almost a fiefdom of the Firestone Rubber Company, Harvey S Firestone having planted 1,000,000 acres of Liberia, granted on easy terms, with rubber in the 1920s to break the British world monopoly on rubber production. To the American cultural influence was now added economic predominance.
Moreover, Liberia had suddenly become politically important to America. During the Second World War, the airfield at Robertfield was granted to the Americans as a re-fuelling station; and during the Cold War, Liberia became America's principal strategic listening-post and satellite station.
As the economy developed, the Americo-Liberians were forced by reality to co-opt more of the "native" population into the elite. Ever more students were sent to America for higher education, where many of them picked up the radical ideas of the time, and became rabble-rousers and demagogues.
After the violent and destructive riots in 1979 about a rise in the price of rice, fomented and fanned by the demagogues, William Tolbert, the last True Whig president of Liberia (who was also a Baptist minister, and was soon to be disembowelled in his bed), felt constrained as a sop to the demagogues to distance himself from Liberia's traditional policy of alliance with America, and turned, rhetorically at least, to the Left.
When Tolbert was overthrown in 1980 by a group of NCOs, of whom the semi-literate Samuel K Doe was soon to emerge the leader, and his cabinet massacred on the beach, there was popular rejoicing, and the demagogues thought they had come into their own. It appeared for a time as though the people had taken power from the top-hatted and tailed Americo-Liberian elite.
But Doe's idea of a popular revolution was soon revealed to be a clan-based kleptocracy, with himself as kleptocrat-in-chief. His ethnic group, the Krahn, was, by coincidence, three per cent of the population, the same proportion as the displaced Americo-Liberians. After a brief burst of revolutionary rhetoric, he discovered which side of his Cold War bread was buttered, and he chose the Americans.
After Doe turned to America, the Liberian demagogue-class, of whom Charles Taylor is the finest flower, discovered the hidden hand of the CIA in the 1980 coup. The CIA wanted Tolbert out of the way: and not a sparrow, let alone a president, fell in Liberia without a push from the Americans.
Undoubted American influence was thus inflated in the minds of Liberians into American omnipotence. With omnipotence, however, comes responsibility for everything: and so Liberians could slaughter one another, and it would still be the Americans' fault. Only the Americans could act of their own volition: that is to say, only they were full members of the human race.
From a combination of abject psychological dependence and deep resentment, no decent political culture can possibly emerge. American-led intervention in Liberia would bring about peace, but it will be an imposed, imperial peace. The underlying problem would remain: a problem that only Liberians, freed of their own psychological dependence, can solve.
Anthony Daniels is the author of Monrovia Mon Amour (John Murray)
longeyes
member
And you guys think that the messianic Christian who delivered the
eloquent speech on the rights of man in Senegal is really PRO-GUN?
Bush is either obsessed with his own righteousness or he's one of the
most opportunistic vote-addicts in recorded political history.
Bush gives homilies abroad but is oddly quiet about many issues that
affect Americans here at home. He had precious little to say about
that grossly misguided affirmative action decision. Leave Africa
to the Africans.
eloquent speech on the rights of man in Senegal is really PRO-GUN?
Bush is either obsessed with his own righteousness or he's one of the
most opportunistic vote-addicts in recorded political history.
Bush gives homilies abroad but is oddly quiet about many issues that
affect Americans here at home. He had precious little to say about
that grossly misguided affirmative action decision. Leave Africa
to the Africans.
Sean Smith
Member
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- Dec 28, 2002
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There is only one thing worse, morally speaking, than American intervention, and that is American non-intervention.
Well, at least they are admitting that they will talk smack about the U.S. no matter what we do. :banghead:
Nice to see that SOMEBODY over there recognizes the absurdity of it all.
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