Walking on the threadmill this morning I watched on the Russian TV an interview with the Iranian Ambassador. He said that his country was not trying to build a weapon and no weapon grade uranium was found in Iran. That the US, Great Britain and France are trying to topple Iran's government, just like they did with Khaddafi. Not a word about Israel.
As he sees it, once a regime achieves nuclear status, it is safe and untouchable. Like North Korea, like Pakistan. Without that, it can be demonized and its leaders hanged or shot, like Saddam Hussein and Cnel. Khaddafi. And Syria's Assad Jr.
21 comments:
One certainly gets a slightly different perspective from RT.
Anon.
I'd also add like US UK and France.
Or Russia.
The country is safe. You can build apartments and factories in the knowledge they won't be destroyed or taken away by some well armed thug.
Used the example with factories because the iranian construction sector is larger then the american one. And with embargo and threats and all that auto industry grew to a fifth of the american one. So they would have a lot to defend. If they get to keep the wealth remains to be seen of course.
All that are stolen money from the american budget and financial sector. Stolen meaning that with some regime change the wealth can grow directly into the US/UK treasury bonds and financial funds. And now it doesn't. Bad bad people those iranians LOL.
It pretty interesting to see. Iran is much weaker then Russia - to be left alone and just swearen in media - or small enough like Irak to be crashed safely.
For passionates of history like me these are fantastic times. The empire turned into armed robber officially, brought back and legalised terror, murder and torture by the imperial mercenaries. At a certain moment the resistance to imperial actions will become very strong. You can't just kill your way all the time. Adolf himself with a far larger power base discovered that.
If you neglect completely legitimacy and diplomacy will come a time when your generals will not be able to advance or even keep the line.
Well that moment will be recorded in history and to be able to see it in real time is absolutely fantastic.
Murder is just a tool. It's identical as in organised crime , just the scale differs. Murder is absolutely necessary and useful but it's not the only tool.
If you start reducing your action to that you will brand yourself as a psychopatic criminal. and that is bad. Those are always put down.
theo, It is difficult to define Obama as a psychopatic criminal. If anything, he is a professor of constitutional law. And in these parts, we rather like having a policeman in the neighborhood.
North Korea is a living hell for most of its citizens. Iran is already barely livable - once the mullahs have an ironclad hold on power, it will get worse. For the sake of the Iranian people, we should destroy their nuclear capability. If the leadership is invincible then there are no checks on their power at all.
K
'For the sake of the Iranian people.."
Come on, K.
Anon.
'For the sake of the Iranian people.."
LOL.
Problem is not about Obama and anything related to law. He's just an activist. That is all.
But the empire went awry. It's not anyones fault. Society evolves and changes in time. Too much power corrupts. And protection taxes have a tendency to grow in time. Imperial center always degenerates.
I am not by any means anti american. It saddens me to see their evolution. Because it leads toward the empirial end. And very unpleasant times will come for all of us. But allas nobody can stop the empirial decay with corruption, social degeneration at the center, increased relaince an raw violence etc.
So if we can not stop the unhappy times to come at least to enjoy them from a scientific point of view.
Yes, really. Don't you think the Iranian people would be better off without the mullahs? Iran was almost a civilized country once, just before the fall of the Shah. Same thing with Cuba - the richest island in the Caribbean before Castro got to it. All of these places had a poor underclass that would have been middle class by now if the countries had been able to evolve naturally - look at N vs S Korea. Very rarely does any good come from a revolution, even for the ostensible beneficiaries. One dictator replaces another dictator - the one who comes later is 9 times out of 10 even worse than the one he replaced. The only one who benefits is the new nomenklatura.
K
Well I don't know if it might be better in a different configuration.
But a complete destruction of society by western forces like in Lybia or Irak, folowed by endless civil war financed and helped by US/UK is much worse for the population. Not for me.
If Iran stops being the 3rd world producer of cement - meaning the 3rd construction sector - because US destroyed the country will afect the natives not me. Of course if their hopes of having an apartment and a job are destroyed by US bombs means nothing for US citizens. Just probably a happy event to be celebrated. Naughty brown people wanting to have cars and apartments. And not having nukes.
Hmmmmmm.
Not possible to allow something like this. Got to bomb and turn to rubble.
LOL.
Revolutions are always bad. The more they are about brotherhood the worse they are. That's how it is on planet Earth.
As I said. It's about raw power. If they are strong enough they will continue to build and grow.
If they are weak the country will be destroyed with their lives and hopes.
We shall see how strong they are in the next few years.
And of course we shall se how much can China accept. How many of their energy suppliers going down under US bombs.
So we shall also see how strong China is.
Nice times to live. And we just reached peak oil. It's gonna be a lot more interesting into the future.
Don't be fooled by isolated statistics - the Soviets wanted the USSR to be a leading steel producer but they didn't really have an outlet for all that steel, so a Russian refrigerators were made from heavy gauge steel and weighed 400 kilos. Iran is not #3 in the world in anything except maybe religious fanaticism.
If you don't want the US/UK messing around in your country, adopt the Google motto: "Don't be evil". Anyone who is not evil has nothing to fear - there are hundreds of countries that NATO has never invaded and never will invade because they do not oppress their own people or pose a threat to world peace. The US did not target Iraq because they enjoy turning happy and peaceful 3rd world countries into rubble.
K
Just imagine theo that you are in the university and suddenly one of your colleges starts to use a Far West type revolver and shooting cats. Soon you would feel menaced and buy a gun for yourself. In no time everybody would be armed to the teeth and any small dispute would end in a High Noon shootout. Iran is starting a process in the Middle East that could end tragically for everybody, including its neares neighbors such as Iraq, Saudia and other countries with teritorial disputes.
The real question is, in regards to the Iranian people, the Syrian people, the Egyptian people, or whatever, is what they would really want in a truly democratic system; who would they really vote for, what sort of a society do they really want, given an open and genuinely representative mass plebiscite.
The answer would not be congenial to the gullible Western public, who are being indoctrinated into the belief system that democracy and civil rights are one and the same thing.
Anyone who has traveled in the Middle Easts, and understands the mentality, and the hatred for Israel, the contempt for secularism, will understand what is really the case; that democracy may eradicate the corrupt elites, but as to the prospects for mutual tolerance and personal liberty, this is just an infantile fantasy.
Pedaling this nonstop are snake-oil salesman like Blair, Obama, Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron, funded by "open society" businessmen who are either suffering serious delusions of grandeur, or who are seriously Machiavellian, or in certain cases, both.
Democracy is not the means to get rid of authoritarian theocracies; this is the real reason why Netanyahu & supporters are interested in violence. At least they have diagnosed the issues; but to suggest that violence is in the self-interests the majority of the people in these countries like Iran is simply not the case.
Just watch the outcome in Afghanistan, and in the meanwhile, listen to the lies of our "leaders" and their satraps in the "media".
Anon.
I didn't say anything about democracy. Consider S. Korea and Taiwan - they did not make the transition to democracy until the economy had caught up. Yes the leaders were dictators but their goal was to modernize their countries and integrate them with the West. Ditto Attaturk. This is what the Arab countries need now.
K
You are right.
But what they want, and what they need, are not necessarily one and the same thing.
And look at Turkey; it's already had a highly successful modernizer in the form of Ataturk, but it now seems bent on heading in the other direction.
Anon.
"Just imagine theo that you are in the university and suddenly one of your colleges starts to use a Far West type revolver and shooting cats. Soon you would feel menaced and buy a gun for yourself. In no time everybody would be armed to the teeth and any small dispute would end in a High Noon shootout."
Close to the same subject but from a different angle.
The rules US now treats with absolute indifference and breaks at will were created by one of the great human beings to ever live. The man who more or less created the world we live in. And the greatest empire builder the world had ever seen.
President FD Roosevelt.
He created checks and balances. He created a system in which the use of violence had to be justified and legitimised. Not because he was weak. The guy burned a few million civilians without a trace of remorse.
But because he was smart.
What I am saying is that the policeman turned into a vicious thug. And started to harrass and kill at will. This is a dangerous development. It's the difference betweeen Lucky Luciano who brought peace and properity for the gangs everywhere and peace for the neighbourhoods and a mindless thug like Dutch Schultz.
Real life is quite complicated. If you simplify you get I got gun you got car. I want car gimme or I shoot you dead.
It's not the good way. It leads to blowback and cemetery not to wealth and power.
Just like FDR, Luciano was not weak or peaceful.
And todays american leadership like Dutch Scultz are not strong. They are just incredibly dumb.
And the danger of proliferation is in large part an american creation. Todays america. If you want to live another day with the former policeman turned thug on the loose you'd better be armed.
Just think for a second. These guys inherited from the long gone FDR the empire of good. And almost all the planet. And they are trying hard to turn it into a sort of caricature nazi empire with agressions for plunder, concentration camps, torture, reprisals policy against civilians etc.
In FDR's administration they'd have probably had nice cariers as cooks or drivers.
I keep repeating in order to underline precisely what I try to say.
They'd have been cooks for being dumb.
FDR's hand did not tremble when it came to killing. Japanese cities from 70 years ago are a testament to this.
But violence is a tool used with great care. As Asimov said a weapon has two heads.
The fact that you can do something does not mean you should. You got to think about consequences.
On the same line the apparently soft israeli left created the country. By violence. And threw out a lot of arabs in order to create a demographic majority on a piece of land. Weak they were not. Results talk.
Now the screaming warrior. Bibi Netanyahu. Results he does not have.
But he keeps screaming for blood.
That's well not strenghth I might say. But imbecility. Pure imbecility.
When I see him talking it reminds me of another great political peak. Kaizer Wilhelm the second.
Results of course none. But god the guy knew how to talk tough and threaten. Always wasted an opportunity to shut the frack up. Just couldn't keep his mouth shut. Of course having US behind makes Israel a lot safer then the second Reich. But it does not make Bibi smarter.
The problem w/ the Muslim world is that the cities Westernized before the countryside (which never Westernized at all) and so the countryside won the demographic race and overwhelmed the Westernizing forces. That the West has had a crisis of confidence and no longer believes in itself was no help to the Westernized minority. This is not a new problem - the same scenario played out in Roman Judea. What are the ayatollahs but the modern version of the zealots camped out on top of Masada?
K
"The problem w/ the Muslim world is that the cities Westernized before the countryside (which never Westernized at all) and so the countryside won the demographic race and overwhelmed the Westernizing forces."
I absolutely agree with you.
Demographic booms always change a society.
Explosions in Egypt, Syria,Yemen etc were inevitable. Europeans would have made revolutions far far sooner.
Orientals are quite peaceful and submissive it seems.
Great analysis on the subject of demography and war/revolution by Gunnar Heinsohn.
What may be unprecedented, however, is the barely concealed hostility and contempt of the Western elites for their own people,translating into a demographic collapse which doesn't seem to bother them one whit.
This is different from what has gone on before, and being so grotesquely maladaptive, is virtually a mass psychosis.
What happened? It's like aliens control their brains (such as they are).
Anon.
The era of the collapse of the Roman empire is not well documented, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing went on at the end.
K
No aliens controlling brain. Gold bug controling.
The most interesting case of empirial succes killing the empire creating ethnical group is the Assyrian Empire.
Even the language was gone by the end.
Elites receive tributes. Enormous amounts. And this changes completely the social fabric.
The process of social segregation can be observed in real time right now. What does the new aristocracy have in common any more with the rednecks? The appearence of belonging to the same specie? Even that is debatable and is more or less shamefull to contemplate for the the young aristocrats.
Trends can be reversed. When I was growing up, most Americans made at least a pretense of all belonging to the same class - the "middle class". Maybe the corp. pres. made 5 times as much as a line worker but not 50 or 100x, so they were in more or less the same league, outside of a few hundred people in the "social register". People can be shamed back into this position again, if society had any shame left. I'm not sure that it does though - people in decadent societies are shameless.
K
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