Syria and Ukraine, Catalan and Kurdistan: what do they have in common?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Saturday, November 16, 2024 22:06
VIEWED: 16012
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I thought it would be instructive for us to do a point-to-point comparison of Syria and Ukraine, as they are in some ways very similar to each other.
In Ukraine, we have a pro-western government which overthrew a previously elected government, peaceful protests followed by a non-democratic (ie non-election) coup. Part of Ukraine has been absorbed into Russia after a local referendum. Part of Ukraine is attempting to break away/ defend itself (depending on how you look at it) with foreign help, and part of Ukraine is being supported by foreign (western) help.
In Syria, we have an elected anti-western government that was attempted to be overturned by peaceful protests (some say) followed by violent rebellion. The rebles now appear to consist of many foreigners who are receiving considerable foreign aid, The current government is also being supported with foreign (nonwestern) help.
I guess if we want to do a point-to-point comparison, the first thing to do would be to look at the election processes in which Yanukovich and Assad came to power, and determine if the results were legitimate.
However this goes, I think it would be a useful discussion, provided we can stick to facts and not just sling insults.
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thread now broken
idiot asshole kpo totally fucked it up with an error posting
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I guess if we want to do a point-to-point comparison, the first thing to do would be to look at the election processes in which Yanukovich and Assad came to power, and determine if the results were legitimate.
Forget elections, the spread of Jihad and Sharia has nothing to do with elections. It is a very simple primitive and effective strategy, be at war with others who don't share your pagan god Allah....muslims have the mindset out breed them when the wars become stalemates and have a strategy to win by numbers in wars of attrition. Radical islamic muslims think when you can not kill them make more babies than them, immigrate to their lands and change them, the man they worship mohammed more or less commands hijrah to europe or jihad by immigration .... and finally Muslim jihadists use lies and deceipt Taqiyya and Kitman when they can not win on the battlefield they try to win with propaganda. They have been at war with the West, at war with Hindus, at war with Buddhists before the United States gave the world her constitution, they have been at war before America was even a breath
A primitive thug mindset with more sophisticated weapons and instant email messaging
An old ideology updated with heavy machine guns and twitter accounts
Jihadist Islamists have been at war with the West before the USA was even born, looking back on the history of the last 3 century we saw the decline of powers like France and the fall of the British Empire other players took over with WW1 with Russia and with the USA rising and became the major players in the 19th and 20th Century
Technologically these islamists are nothing, but they have a simple effective strategy like some anarchist thief breaking into peoples homes and burning them down to cause fear and chaos. One of the most interesting comments I have seen on the radicals came from the Batman and Daredevil comicbook writer Frank Miller -
Quote:
"Well, okay, then let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built."
Radical muslims are not much of a technological threat, they have no real Airforce, no ecnomic diversity, no solid military strategic alliances, no threat via economics and science, no high tech weapons, no Navy....everything they have they have to be given by the West or given by British or Russian arms manufacturers.
Islam was at war with the West long before the British, Portugese and Spanish sailed for the Americas, at war with the West long before Ivan the Terrible united the Russian peoples, long before George Washington was born
President Ronald Reagan may have also made simple mistakes, meeting mujahideen in the White House giving them support against the USSR would later help create the Taliban and the blowback would later come crashing into the WTC. The Cold War allowed muslim Islamists grow stronger, the USA started Sleeping With the Devil helped Saudi Backing of Al Quaeda, oh yeah and let's not forget the dumbass Turks helping out ISIS and Turkish twists, tricks and turns which are betraying America's goals and values, the Russians backed Iran after the Iranains made a fool of Carter in the Embassy hijackings...the long Arabian proxy war has only made Russia and America weaker and given strength to the Islamists.
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Having delved into it at length, what I can tell you about the Yanukovich government (that was eventually deposed in a coup) is that the election was monitored by international observers. And while they noted some problems, they said it was a legitimate election.
I can't say much about the Assad election.
Well, ok, here's a first run through of the 2014 election:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_presidential_election,_2014
Presidential elections were held in Syria on 3 June 2014. It was the first multi-candidate election in decades since the Ba'ath party came to power in a coup.
As a result of the ongoing Syrian Civil War, Syria has the largest refugee population in the world, and voting for refugees in certain foreign countries began at Syrian embassies several days before voting took place in Syria itself.[1] Domestic and foreign-based Syrian opposition groups boycotted the election,[1][2] and the vote did not take place in large parts of Syria under rebel control.[3] The areas under Kurdish militia control also did not allow voting, though some people still traveled to Assad regime held areas to vote.[4]
The Gulf Cooperation Council, the European Union and the United States dismissed the election as illegitimate.[5][6][7][8] Attempts to hold an election under the circumstances of an ongoing civil war were criticized by UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon,[9] and it was widely reported that the elections lacked independent election monitoring.[10] An international delegation led by allies of Assad[11] from more than 30 countries including Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, India, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, Russia, South Africa and Venezuela[12][13] issued a statement claiming the election was "free, fair and transparent".[14]
Some rebel groups vowed to disrupt the elections in any way possible, including bombing and shelling polling stations and government-controlled areas.[15][16][17][18] Another statement, issued by the Ajnad al-Sham Islamic Union, the Sham Corps, the Army of Mujahedeen, and the Islamic Front, said they would not "target voters but warned people to stay at home in case the Syrian government did". There were 50 reported deaths from the shelling by the rebels.[19]
There's also this from a link to SCGnewws.com:
Assad Wins Syrian Elections by a Landslide - International Observers Claim No Violations - Washington Balks
http://adam.curry.com/art/1402028893_CzNRNkKs.html
I have no idea who SCGnewws is, having gone up to their website and over to other articles they seem to be a news compiler. Who who is Adam Curry, who seems to have been reproduced there? "Adam Clark Curry (born September 3, 1964) is a podcaster, an announcer, internet entrepreneur and media personality, known for his stint as VJ on MTV and being one of the first celebrities personally to create and administer Web sites.[2] Now known mostly for co-hosting the No Agenda show, in the 2000s, he first became involved in podcasting, and has been called the 'Podfather' because of his efforts.[3]" For whatever that's worth.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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Syria was total fakery, a theatre of smoke screens to help the barbaric islamo jihadists invade
You think it impossible the USA in some way is not in bed with Jihadists? Was Clinton not in bed with jihadists as they helped the Kosovo Albanians against the Serbs Yugoslav dictator? Was Reagan not in bed with Jihadists when he dedicated that Shuttle speech to the muslim bombers of Afghanistan?
You think the USA is not in some way paying al-Qaeda not to attack overseas US military bases, and instead of taking the money and going away quietly the radical muslims take the protection money to buy more guns and more bombs
now dumbass political elites like McCain and Kerry try to save face, Obama has almost has pulled away from international politics....he wants more refugees in....when he can't do that he goes play golf
Quote:
The Institute of War, whose Elizabeth O'Bagy made the news, called the Farouq Brigades "moderately Islamist". I guess that's what is meant by a moderate faction.
One militia leader affiliated with the FSA—his brigade has since been kicked out—was filmed eating a dead soldier's heart. "This stuff happens rarely, but it's unfortunate," Layman says. "With the guy who was eating a heart, he was part of a moderate faction…We work with Idriss and let him know that he needs to prevent these things."
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/204261/syria-guy-who-was-eating-hear
t-he-was-part-daniel-greenfield
Quote:
A expert on Syria whose work was quoted by senior politicians as they debated military action has finally admitted she that she lied over her degree and said sorry.
A week after she was sacked from her job as an analyst with the Institute of War, Elizabeth O'Bagy has said that not only did she not earn a doctorate from Georgetown University, but she never even attended the PhD program there.
And the researcher, whose op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was cited by Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain in discussions over whether to launch a missile strike on Syria, has apologised for her 'many mistakes' and 'extremely poor judgement'.
O'Bagy, who was hired by the Institute of War a year ago as a research analyst, wrote an opinion piece in the WSJ on 30 August entitled On The Front Lines Of Syria's Civil War
Kerry and McCain agreed that Syria was a secular state and hailed her op-ed as evidence that the rebels were not the jihadists that some were suggesting. McCain even said her article was 'important'.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2423500/Syria-expert-Elizabeth
-OBagy-work-hailed-John-Kerry-John-McCain-lied-qualifications.html
i wonder if this is true?
...the middle east is now a messy meat grinder which is allowing the spread of radical islam, the region now produces mostly radical muslim imbeciles and wacko muslim idiot degenerates...why would you want to take these refujihadists and fake-ugees into America?
the Syrian opposition never existed, it was fakery
this girl called it 3 years back
and some more
is there reality to these vids or is it conspiracy? Turkey being involved in people trafficking into Europe, shipping arms, doing oil sales with the islamo jihadists? Are these vids alarmist or is there turth to the videos?
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JAYNEZTOWN, you're right: The USA has been tacitly or actively supporting jihadism for decades. It can be traced back as far as Jimmy Carter, who supplied various Afghani-based terror groups - including the Saudi Osama bin Laden- with shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to drive out the Russians.
I used to think that the USA support for terrorists was sporadic and opportunistic ... Afghanistan, Chechnya, Libya .... but over the last couple of years, as I've educated myself, I see now that our support has been there all along ... that we have "given up" large swaths of the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the planned addition of Syria) to Saudi-Wahhabi terrorism, that these were not repeated military/ foreign policy "failures" or "mistakes" on our part, but part of our payment to Saudi Arabia for maintaining our petrodollar-Treasury deal.
In fact, one possible USA motivation for destroying Iraq and Libya ... which had nothing to do with "WMD" or "massacres" .... was that BOTH nations were about to embark on non-dollar-denominated oil sales. Iraq was about to ink deals with France and Russia just before the invasion, sales denominated in the Euro and gold, and Libya was about to embark on a gold-backed African currency. If you're a ME nation whose wealth totally resides in oil, dollars, and US treasuries, and .... hmmm.... that's it ... to contemplate a serious decline in dollars/Treasuries must be butt-puckering moments. But I digress...
The real underlying drivers of our support for Wahhabi terrorists has to do with supporting our dollar, our banks, our oil supplies, and "capitalism", and the largest perceived enemy at the time was Russia, so our anti-Russian strategy was conflated with our pro-Saudi-Wahhabi strategy.
You still see this TODAY, when (some) posters here just can't get over their anti-Sovietism long enough to stop dancing around gleefully whenever the international brigade of Wahhabi-terrorists manage to damage Russia. These idiots still think that Russia is the biggest enemy, and that the terrorists are our friends.
To those others who are reading this besides JAYNEZTOWN, if anyone ... I know this just sounds like crazy-making blah-blah-blah. But there is one thing that the necroposting has demonstrated, is that while I do my best to RECOGNIZE what is happening, I tend to think only within the boundaries of what has already happened. I rarely make large sweeping projections, and most of my posts tend to be overtaken by reality. For example, while I was posting a year or so ago that Turkey served as a trans-shipping point for the hundreds of tons of weapons from Saudi Arabia/Qatar to jihadists in Libya, and again from Libya (Benghazi, specifically, under Clinton) to jihadists in Syria, I never projected that Turkey would be actively laundering ISIL oil or that Turkey would attack Russia. So in many ways my posts.... as unconventional as they sound ... are actually fairly conservative and behind-the-times. I tend not to reach conclusions until they're damn-near inescapable. So when I opine that the USA government has been tacitly or actively supporting the Saudi-Wahhabi project for decades, I think that's just a belated recognition of fact.
Anyway, I don't think that for TPTB (at least, not the USA deep state) that this is a "religious" war. I'm not sure that even the Saudi deep state sees this as a "religious" war; therefore, DON'T TURN IT INTO ONE. There are a billion Muslim faithful who are more than willing to live-and-let-live. Don't make THEM the enemy, because you won't win.
The Saudis HAVE however fanned the flames of jihadism hot enough that they now have hundreds of thousands of religiously-indoctrinated tools who are willing to enforce their masters' interests by proxy.
How do you fight a violent "ism"? Well, first you defang it by removing its weapons and its violent actors and removing i
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I guess that few people are ready to do a point-to-point comparison. I suppose some posters here are afraid I might pounce. But the reality is, I don't know how this discussion might turn out, because it's a comparison I haven't done myself yet, and people might turn up information or viewpoints that affect how I look at things.
Another problem is the difficulty of even "where to start"? I can think of several ways to think about this:
Procedurally. Start at the beginning: Who was in power before the (attempted or completed) coup? Were they democratically elected? Were the elections found to be "free and fair"? Were there institutional mechanisms in place for leadership/policy change? (i.e Was there an electoral process in place?) Or was violent coup the only way forward?
Ideologically. Do you support the rebels in Syria? Why or why not? Do you support the rebels in the Donbas? Why or why not? How are the rebellions the same or different? Do they share the same mechanisms (ie terrorism) and goals? Does this boil down to "he started it", or is there some other way to parse the use of violence?
International involvement. What are the international norms for statehood and national sovereignty? Are nations (under UN Charter) required to be democracies? When should international actors become involved, if ever? If a nation is deemed repugnant, what other mechanisms are available for promoting change? Does the involvement of some international actors automatically require the involvement of another?
Resolution. Even if the origins and processes of a rebellion are murky and ultimately not subject to resolution, what is the best way forward?
There are a lot of interlocking/overlapping questions. It would certainly help MY thought processes if people would work their way thru these questions with me.
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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Quote:
I guess that few people are ready to do a point-to-point comparison.
Try rewriting the OP without the Kremlin talking points. After all, you said you wanted a fact based discussion.
Quote:
I guess if we want to do a point-to-point comparison, the first thing to do would be to look at the election processes in which Yanukovich and Assad came to power.
Yes, there are quite a few similarities between Yanukovich and Assad:
- Neither has ever held a fair election, and both have held elections criticised by the outside world
- Both used violence to suppress peaceful popular protests, which led to the protests becoming violent
- Both are/were heavily supported by Russia
It's not personal. It's just war.
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and both have held elections criticised by the outside world
In fact the US doesn't allow international observers to view its elections at all. But when studied, those elections have been deemed irregular by statisticians, particularly the first dumbya one. Are you going to apply the same objections to US elections that have evidently been rigged?
No, of course you won't. Because you don't look at a broad scope of facts to draw a conclusion. You draw your conclusion, then narrowly select your 'facts'.
You know you do. ;)
Both used violence to suppress peaceful popular protests, which led to the protests becoming violent
And that's different from the US - how?
Both are/were heavily supported by Russia.
And now we get to your irrational biases as your real motivation.
It's a problem (whatever 'it' is), because, yanno ... Russia.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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Quote:
Originally posted by kpo:
used violence to suppress peaceful popular protests
Syria was totally FAKE, actors who failed auditions for Turkish Hollywood style movies or failed in castings for Egyptian tv shows ended up in Syria making a false movie about supressed protestors...the foreign pally-wood actors were flown in to create controversy, create false oppression....then all of a sudden with fake news reports were suddenly seen as credible, they and by 'they' i mean the elites who backed these islamists get the green light to flood Syria with foreign jihadists, foreign terror groups would flood in days later, foreign al-qaeda, foreign muslim islamist mercs, foreign muslim brotherhood thugs soon fly in and start burning, foreigners killing, looting and start an internal war
I'm no fan of Assad, he's an A-hole and a dictator
however the way the media spun this one was ridiculous, and flying planes of islamists in and sending busses of jihadists into Syria .....the elites jumped the shark here, beyond stupid
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Quote:Insults right away.
I guess that few people are ready to do a point-to-point comparison.-SIGNY
Try rewriting the OP without the Kremlin talking points. After all, you said you wanted a fact based discussion.- KPO
Quote:Were ANY of those elections certified as "free and fair" by international monitors?
I guess if we want to do a point-to-point comparison, the first thing to do would be to look at the election processes in which Yanukovich and Assad came to power.-SIGNY
Yes, there are quite a few similarities between Yanukovich and Assad:
- Neither has ever held a fair election, and both have held elections criticised by the outside world
Quote:Evidence, please.
Both used violence to suppress peaceful popular protests, which led to the protests becoming violent
Quote:So? There are a lot of nations supported by the USA- does that make them illegitimate?
Both are/were heavily supported by Russia
Quote:Any you will do ANYthing to "win", irrespective of facts. Apparently, you can't even hold a decent discussion.
It's not personal. It's just war.
When you can bring something other than insults, unsupported opinion, and 100% prejudice to the thread, please come back.
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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