I agree that I got a little over heated, but mingshey’s first post sounded very neagtive to me. This is what I got from it, “Americans used tanks in an anti-war protest so they should not be hypocties and try to bring up a human rights act in korea.”
Could be that. A peaceful antiwar protest turning into a rioting and looting. Very probable.
Sure is.
Could be that. A peaceful antiwar protest turning into a rioting and looting. Very probable.
Sure is.
No, it is not very probable. There is no evidence that anyone was looting during that event in L.A. Who said anything about looting?
What are you talking about? All I said was that the tanks could have been brought out to discourage raudy behavior and things like looting, to which mingshey replied with sarcasm. I used that picture to show it is justified to say peace protestors do loot. I can testify that a tank would deter me from looting a building, so it seems a tank is an effective way of scareing the baffon protestors into acting reasonable so not to ruin it for the other protestors.
Did anyone actually watch the video? Rhuiden’s assumption is pretty close. I’d like to just say exaggerated though…
http://la.indymedia.org/uploads/tanks-on-la-streets.mov
It’s LA. I assumed lost movie extras.
Extras don’t drive tanks, transportation dept. does the driving to locations. 
Also, they are the least likely to get lost too. Although their attitudes about parking are sometimes totalitarian, they won’t run you over …unless you get in their way and block them from parking 
EDIT:
Oh, you mean the protesters… silly me. 
Well, they are herded pretty well and aren’t likely to get lost. Food is provided so they don’t need to leave the stage set or the location set. 
The tanks are easy to answer. The arseholes walked out in the middle of the street and were nearly hit by that bus in the beginning; they easily could have caused a car accident, and when they happen in LA they aren’t small. You’ll notice the police in the background (almost entirely edited out, thanks to the maker of the video) had been there and looked unable to control the mob. The National Guard were deployed to insist the fools keep distance from the road so they wouldn’t cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in insurrance loss or the lives of drivers or their own pathetic lives.
In Tianamen, the tanks rolled over the protestors. Kinda different.
brought down the soviet union, brought down the Berlin Wall,
I am most puzzled by your thinking this, Emptyman. I thought it was Russians brought down the Soviet Union, and Germans the Berlin Wall. Can’t remember very many Americans around at either event, or was I just not looking in the right direction?
Cordially,
Phylax
Ah well, he’s probably talking about all the spies, you know - fighting communism like in the movies or something .
Di boni, how insulting! Please remind me whose air force airlifted 2.3 million tons of food and supplies to the West Berliners during the blockade? Or who supplied NATO with the means to defend itself against invasion for four decades?
The Americans did not single headedly tear down the Berlin Wall though, the east German revolutionists did and then there was the round-table revolution. Plus East and West would not have been united were it not for the coming election Kohl had to face in Germany back then.
No ones saying they did nothing, but to just say the American brought down the Berlin wall is a bit insulting too all East Germans who went onto the street and deposed their dictatorship.
Human right is not something you can give to people by forcing the government of a country. The people must fight for it on their own. Minding about the situation of other countries can be your passtime. But it’s only when your own right is secured. I won’t call it hypocricy IF it was a real tank deployed to crush the protesters, to meddle in the other countries affairs. I would call it just a folly. Hypocricy is something different. It’s called as one when you pretend to do something for others goodness when it actually also serves your own interest.
What are you talking about? All I said was that the tanks could have been brought out to discourage raudy behavior and things like looting, to which mingshey replied with sarcasm. I used that picture to show it is justified to say peace protestors do loot. I can testify that a tank would deter me from looting a building, so it seems a tank is an effective way of scareing the baffon protestors into acting reasonable so not to ruin it for the other protestors.
Where’s their pickets and signboards? But let me believe you that the piece protesters do loot occasionally. But I can’t see what a tank could do about looting people. Blow up the stores so they cannot loot? Or kill them all? Or crush them? Not very likely as we already have agreed. Then looters wouldn’t mind anything if there isn’t a police squad around that outnumbers them. A couple of war machine is a poor choice for controlling a crowd effectively.
Di boni, how insulting! Please remind me whose air force airlifted 2.3 million tons of food and supplies to the West Berliners during the blockade?
Certainly, it will be my pleasure to remind you, good Lucus :
The U.S. action was given the name Operation Vittles, and the British one was called Plain Fare.
Hundreds of aircraft, nicknamed Rosinenbomber (“raisin bombers”) by the local population, were used to fly in a wide variety of cargo items, including more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal. At the height of the operation, on April 16, 1949, an allied aircraft landed in Berlin every minute. The aircraft were supplied and flown by the United States, United Kingdom and France, but crews also came from Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand to help. Ultimately, 277,804 flights would be made and 2,325,809 tons of food and supplies would be delivered to Berlin.
The reference is from Wikipedia. You will notice a number of other countries apart from the US were involved.
I remain a bit puzzled, however: the Belin Wall was dismantled 40 years after the the Berlin Airlift. Could you help me with why you see such a direct connection between the events?
Best wishes,
Phylax
Or who supplied NATO with the means to defend itself against invasion for four decades?
I think I may be able to help here, too, Lucus. According to a table produced in 1999 (http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=2976&sequence=4) the US contributed 25%, the remaining 75% being contributed by the other 18 member nations. The two other big contributors were Germany (20%) and the UK (16%) (decimals rounded).
Yours was an interesting question, but equally one might ask “Who helped the US lessen the risk of Soviet nuclear missiles overflying the Pole and landing on American cities?”
Cordially yours,
Phylax
Without pressure from the Americans and the Cold War I do not think this would have ever happened.
Um … yes it is; quo vide Germany and Japan.
Well, the government didn’t care when it’s own Union army burned entire cities to the ground in the 1860’s, and destroyed food supplies and means of food production in vast areas of the South in order to reduce the population by starvation.
It didn’t care about the victims at Waco, Texas in 1993, who also were faced with armoured vehicles. Instead, it slandered their leader with false charges of child molestation, even producing accusers and ‘witnesses’ of dubious credibility.
What about the fire-bombing of German cities in the 1940’s, when entire residential districts, which were not important strategic targets, and were populated mainly by women, children, and the elderly, were incinerated, and they were burned alive by the hundreds of thousands?
What about what was done to the Indians of the Great Plains?
Sure, America has accomplished some good things, but it has done some evil things as well. Americans can rarely take full credit for the good, and we must not turn a blind eye to the evil. Slavery in the South, Nazism, wierd cult leaders, primitive native cultures, none of these things justified mass murder carried out by the U.S. government.
The American government has too often meddled in other nation’s affairs when it should have stayed home and minded it’s own business. If it had done so, then regardless of whether the South were an independent country or not, slavery would have disappeared from the South on it’s own without an unnecessary war, a better peace arrangement would have come about at the end of WWI, and there would have been no Nazism in Germany, and no WWII. We made the Cold War possible by interfering unnecessarily in Europe’s affairs in the first place. America has thrown the course of world events off course, and caused great damage. Time for that to end.
America is not some enlightened superior nation that does no wrong and keeps saving the world. We have never actually saved the world from anything. The self-righteous arrogance of those Americans who believe that silly myth is one reason Americans have lost respect in the world. We are not the ‘greatest nation in history’. We are just a nation like any other, with many faults of our own that we need to work on instead of trying to remake the whole world in our own warped utopian image.
What evil will result on the long run from America’s invasion of Iraq and it’s effort to remake that country into Californiaq? As for tanks in LA, regardless of the reason they were there, they were at Waco eleven years ago so why is anyone surprised? Taste of the future, perhaps?
Without pressure from the Americans and the Cold War I do not think this would have ever happened.
It could be argued that the pressure of the Cold War was what made the USSR actually last so long - almost 70 years. In history the threat of attack has often bolstered regimes that have outlived their usefulness - it will be interesting to see if this turns out to be the case in present day America.
It is important to realize, too, that other countries were arrayed against the USSR (including in latter years, interestingly, Communist China).
It should also be noticed that America’s disapproval of a county’s regime does not automatically cause its collapse. Have a look at Vietnam, for example, or Cuba.
I’ve alluded to the Vietnam War; to Jefferson’s excellent list of less-than-glorious episodes in America’s troubled history, may I add the Phillipine-American War of 1899 -1913? To give you a taste of what horror this was, here are excepts from Wikipedia:
During the war, 4,234 American soldiers were killed and 2,818 were wounded. Philippine military deaths are estimated at 20,000 while civilian deaths numbered in 250,000 to 1,000,000 Filipinos. […] U.S. attacks into the countryside often included scorched earth campaigns where entire villages were burned and destroyed, torture (water cure) and the concentration of civilians into “protected zones”. Many of these civilian casualties resulted from disease and famine. Reports of the execution of U.S. soldiers taken prisoner by the Filipinos led to disproportionate reprisals by American forces. Many American officers and soldiers called war a “nigger killing business”. During the U.S. occupation, English was declared the official language, although the languages of the Philippine people were Spanish, Visayan, Tagalog, Ilocano and other native languages. Six hundred American teachers were imported aboard the > USS Thomas> . Also, the Catholic Church was disestablished, and a considerable amount of church land was purchased and redistributed.
In 1914, Dean C. Worcester, U.S. Secretary of the Interior for the Philippines (1901-1913) described “the regime of civilization and improvement which started with American occupation and resulted in developing naked savages into cultivated and educated men.”
Dean C. Worcester was talking of a country which had been civizilized (in Western terms) from at least the beginning of the 19th century. The Wikipedia article goes on to say that United States military created two service decorations which were known as the Philippine Campaign Medal and the Philippine Congressional Medal. Even were I qualified to do so, these are not medals I’d care to sport on my chest!
Phylax is right on target concerning the Pillipines. I first learnt of the atrocities of that war from Mark Twain, who was bitterly opposed to that war and unleashed both barrels against it. He even rewrote the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ to show the realities of that war. He also wrote of a small island in the Pacific, population 200 or so, where the U.S. Marines murdered every single inhabitant. I cant recall the name of the island. All this was in the book, ‘A Pen Warmed Up in Hell’, a collection of Twain’s political writings.
We also cant forget the conquest and seizure of the Kingdom of Hawaii at about the same time. By right, in a de jure (if not de facto) sense, Hawaii is still an independent country, as is the CSA, and of course I cant fathom why Puerto Rico wasn’t granted independence years ago. The U.S. need not rattle on to the rest of the world about ‘captive nations’. It has plenty of it’s own to set free.
As for the plains Indians, it is interesting to note that the murderous policies carried out against them during the 1870’s and 1880’s had their genesis during the conquest of the Southern States in the 1860’s. The slaughter of the buffalo to starve the Indians out was based on the campaigns carried out against food supplies in the South.
Interestingly, the black slave population suffered the worst from these atrocities. The Union army treated them as subhuman, and often ran them out of the only homes they had ever known, the slave cabins on the plantations. This was not so much liberation as simple eviction. The ‘freed’ slaves had no where to go and no way to feed themselves, in areas already laid waste in efforts to burn and starve the white population out. It is estimated by some scholars that as many as one of every six former slaves died of starvation and disease related to malnutrition in the first couple years after the war ended. The local whites helped them as much as they could, but that was little since they also were starving. The U.S. leaders ‘liberated’ the slaves (which Southerners would have done on their own anyway in no more than thirty years time) by killing one sixth of them. The only reason they did that was to present a very critical Europe with a righteous excuse for their invasion of the South. Now all we hear about that war is ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelua, His Truth Is Marching On’ propaganda, one of the biggest whitewashes in all history.
Now we have the example of the FOX TV anchorman Bill O’Reilly, who, when the bombing was fiercest in Iraq and civiliams were dying quite rapidly, pontificated in arrogant, condescending, and self-righteous tones to the masses that we were actually ‘liberating’ the Iraqis and when the bombing was over, we would feed them and rebuild their country, out of the goodness of our hearts, because, he said with a self-satisfied smirk, ‘that’s the kind of people we are’.
Dear God! This is the face America now presents to the world! 
Don’t worry. I saw the other face, too.
http://www.sorryeverybody.com/gallery/1/
Did PeterD send you that link??