France -- Its Selfishness Knows No Bounds

raid517

But back on topic, I believe the question is, 'Are the French government a bunch of selfish SOB's?' My answer is yes, but no more so than the American government, or indeed any other modern Western government around the world. Politicians do nasty things. I'm sorry if that sounds like news to some people, but hey politicians have always been vicious b*stards. Right back to the Greeks and further back still politicians have being doing nasty stuff, supposedly all in our names. I don't know why the world works this way, I don't know why people can't just grow up an get along. But since this isn't how things work, we hire politicians to do some of the things we might not like to do ourselves. Politics is a mixture of pursuing self interests first and national interests second. Just because different governments self and national interests do not always coincide with each other, does not necessarily make one government's stance any more morally preferable than another. It is just a different position. The trade off normally comes in the process between what it takes to bring these two positions together.

So yes JF if that's the answer you've been so desperately looking for the French are selfish - and with damn good reason for it too. See how unselfish you feel about all this, when in under a years time the price of a gallon of gas for your car drops to below half its current price. (This is the most recent projections of a successful outcome to this war). Come back then and comment about how it is wrong for some countries to pursue what they see as their important national interests. I dare you then to preach to the world about America's mission to bring freedom and democracy to the people's of the world. It will sound even less credible then, than it does now.

Q

Smoothdrive

As long as it would be awareness it would be fine..but it is not in many cases. Recently i was reminded on the anti-nuclear bomb protests in the 80's..and how people that protested still think they were right and were touched by how the eastern-european people joined in the protests..

Litlle did and do they know that the people in Eastern Europe were forced (by Causescu a.o.) to protest..that people who refused where thrown in prison or worse..that many people even died that day in Eastern Europe..that those western-european protesters were just used by Eastern European dictators to do some pr work..long live Causescu who was at that time massively supported by the western european protesters..do the homework and you will see how much that situation looks like the one at hand with Saddam and the follish anti-war demonstrators.. I know some people are against truly and well-tought..but far too many are against because it is so "cool" to be anti-american these days.

people simply seem to forget what Saddam did and still does in Iraq..he's up there with the cruel dicators of history without a problem..is this the man that a lot of western europeans want to protect ?? madness

Is refuse to see this as a US against the rest of the world problem..all UN resolutions against Iraq were signed UNANIMOUSLY. If some European countries are reluctant to enforce there own resolution..well that says more about how much they tought about it at the time the resolution passed than that it would say anything about US wanting war. The resolution clearly indicates counter-actions such as the US are building up to..the UN signed the resolution unanimously and now some countries choose to pretend they were not there or did not support it.

I am against war..but the one who is asking for and taking the initiative in this war is Saddam..he's been warned and he chooses to call out the UN..the US is simply following the resolution it signed..so should the others if their signature is worth anything.

Smoothdrive

Woops also way off topic

The French are an arrogant breed, not only their leaders but 80% of the French population is like that. Man the stories i've heard from people visting France..i was lucky to get out of France with "only" a food poisoning. If you don't speak French you're like wild game in France.

They feel France is a world power and should be respected as such..most Europeans think France is a beautiful country but it is a shame the French live in it.

Why Americans always want to go to Paris is a big riddle to us..there's much more beautifull cities with much friendlier people in Europe. I'ld prefer Barcelona over paris any day..and Amsterdam of course but i live there so that's kind of weird to recomend.

SO yes the French are selfish beyond believe..and the quickest way to deal with them is making them feel important while they do what you want..they get their kicks from being important..or at least thinking they are important

raid517

Mmm well I don't think this thread is raelly about peace protestors and the like. Hey, they voiced their concerns as is their democratic right to do. What are you gonna do about it? Prevent them? Set the army on them? what? So long as we have a democracy, people will have a right to protest and express their views. Whether they are right or wrong is irrelevant, that is just exactly how it should be.

But I see that the point I made isn't sinking in. You still want to blame the UN and everyone else for the policy of containment, and the various sanctions the US has tabled against Iraq through the last 12 years. Sure everyone signed them too, but this was in support of the US. And in any case I don'r remember seeing the US rushing to do much to enforce them during this period either. So yes, it might be cool right now for some people in America to blame the UN and the EU for America's past mistakes. However the truth is that this does not reflect the reality.

Q

raid517

Now if you want to ask are the French arrogent. Well that's a whole other issue....

Smoothdrive

Indeed everyone has a right to express his own opinion..and i do not wish to stop them..i do wish however that they look further than the length of their nose..

I hate it when people are just "against" without being willing to come up with good alternatives.

We've recently had a protest here in Amsterdam..little people turned up and the ones that did looked more like a group celibrating something than to protest something..they carried slogans like "Not on my behalf"..which is a good sign of todays anti-american thinking.."not on my behalf" I am important here I do not support you..who the f#ck cares about what a protester in Amsterdam wants..the parties involved here are the UN, Iraq and most of all the people of Iraq. Those people get killed (either by Saddam or by bombing raids)..but hey as long as it is "Not on my behalf" than it is fine ??

Think SOLUTIONS..that's what we need..we don't need people shouting Booooh America and Booooh attacks..we also don't need Boooh France or Boooh Germany..the one thing that people SHOULD protest is Boooh Saddam..show the people of Iraq that we care and that we want Saddam out..that is the only protest without solution that i can support.also because i think this is the common feeling in the UN..they all agree Saddam should go..concentrate on what unites us..not what devides us.

Being against an attack does not imply that you have to potest against it or blame the US. I am against an attack...for me this implies "How is the UN going to stay a believable force without attacking" people who are against an attack should realise that this is the most important question that arises when you are against an attack.. In general there are 2 world powers.. the US and the UN i'ld hate to loose the UN and be left to whatever the US wants. Secondly..how do think Saddam is gonna be overthrown witout an attack ??

Smoothdrive

Ooh yes young Jedi..French leads to arrogance..arrogance leads to selfishness..selfishness leeds to suffering.

FuNsTeR

typical thick pig ignorant yank that knows F... all Scotland is part of the UK (for now) Scotland makes up 38% of the UK armed forces out in the gulf with 9.5% of the UK total population ... Scots soldiers will be the first in ... like in most previous conflicts ... as we know how to fight ... Scotland has suffered more loses than any other part of the UK per head of population during WWW1 & WWW2" ... because unlike yanks we are willing to get into the nitty gritty of a battle ... see dumb yanks and facts ... stick to ferming ya redneck


BTW yanks poeple know f... all about war your cities and towns have never been flattened by bombs and shells ... only your poorly educated arm forces know about war ... even then they blow up their allies soldiers ... with allies like you who needs enemies

ToshiroOC

Funster, that sort of posting is utterly unacceptable. Please read this warning here. I don't want to see that sort of attack again. If you feel the need to say things like that, post them in the flame warzone and leave them in the flame warzone.

bluelight

Its funny.....what would be called pure racism had it been a question of nations of different races continues.........

And above all is purity itself....Usa...cant even be questioned...

Saw a debate between Americans yesterday on another board...they were discussing the worst genocides and spewing out hate against europe and russia for being ..."the worst offenders to human values"...and yet one of the biggest genocides in histotry was performed by the ancester s of todays americans....and they didnt even mention it in their never ending count of atrocities...


Wonder what creates denial like that??...Power? Nationalism?...Lack of knowledge (if so why does this lack exist?).......i dont know..

Funny....Indeed funny..

Bluelight

FuNsTeR

Ferming = Farming

so its basically ok for that clown to slag Scotland's contributions to WWW1 & WWW2 and other post WWW2 conflicts ... unlike other nations we are not scared of fighting our actions are louder than our words


ps if your gonna drop bombs then this time drop them on your intended targets not on your allie's forces ... as your very good at that during the last Gulf War ... just like you were good at raising money for the IRA to kill our soldiers

bluelight

I asked them about their money to Ira...but for some strange reason they dont even wanna recognoize it.


BlueLight

FuNsTeR

aye mate they body swerve it like it never happened and when you mention things about their terrorism and dictators in the past and current support of Dicators in power ... they like to brush over it as if it never happened .... too many hypocrites in the USA for my personal liking

raid517

French leads to arrogance..arrogance leads to selfishness..selfishness leeds to suffering - and this chain of 'reasoning' leads to you chasing yourself up a very dark part of your own anatomy. Kitch empty statements like this are meaningless. People tend to learn them from the propoganda they see on TV. It is the politicians way of simplifying the world for thjeir public so that people can have a quick and easy way to 'understand' it. If this statement were true it could be equally applied to any country in the world.

Now if you were to ask me if some Americans could be arrogant too? I would have to say yes! Almost certainly. But ultimately such statements aren't 'about' anything. Just like the title of this thread they only serve to whip up misunderstanding and mistrust against an entire race of people. Are all French and Americans arrogant? No! Definately not... But the current administrations of both these govenments are definately as equally guilty of ignorance and arrogance in this regard.

It is unsurprising I think that a thraed with such a racist title should serve only to inspire several counter instances of racism. But in this respect I am certain that it has achieved exactly what it set out to do.

Q

JavaFox

Oh really? What genocide would that be? Typically when people think of "genocide," they think of the Holocaust, the murder of intellectuals in Maoist China, or Stalin's communes of death.

UberLord

There don't seem to be many Native Americans - or Red Indians as they're more commonly known as there used to be when you guys first stepped foot from the Mayflower.

JavaFox

If you call that genocide, then you just don't know what genocide is. Genocide is the intentional killing of an entire generation or group of people. The vast majority of Native Americans died from unintentionally trasmitted disease.

JavaFox

I am willing to admit that the US has been, in the past, lackadaisical in its policy towards Iraq. But the rest of the world was complicit in this. Of course, there was a somewhat maligned military strike against Iraq in 1998 by President Clinton, but we'll ignore that little fact for the sake of your argument (facts are, after all, stubborn things).

At any rate, your critique is really quite dishonest. Because you criticize the US for being inactive, yet then criticize the us for being active. Huh? This is what anti-Americanism is: taking a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" attitude towards all things American. If it is truly your contention that the US made a mistake in doing little about Iraq in the past, how then can you critisize us now for trying to fix our error? But if you are protesting the US' action now, how can you critisize them for "letting the sanctions work" in the past?

Is it consistency in foreign policy that we must value above all else?

Remember, if the US was always consistent in its foreign dealings, you'd probably be speakin' German right now.

UberLord

I always thought that the "cowboys" intentionally killed loads of 'em.
Got any linkage to back up your statement? I got loads of old western movies to backup mine - like "How the West was won"

bluelight

No they died from you taking their land and from your ancesters deliberatly killing and exterminating them and placing them in concentration camps.This killed their culture.

No people can live without culture.

it is certainly true that many indians died from diseases but....diseases did not kill their culture.You culture did.

For some reason i knew you would deny this.

I see little point in doing so...The world is not the same today as it was 1650,1750 or 1850....there has been some...improvement since then....but at that time...one normal mans mans life was worth ...nothing (totally free capitalism ruled at that time..;-) ...and even less if you were not a white person of European origin in a land about to be colonised.

My country was att war killing other europeans i large quantities at that time and before it..for no other reason than money and power. and even pleasure of the rulers.....Im not gonna deny that for anything in the world.

Looks like were back at the "Who is worse than the other discussion"....And the answer is...nobody seems to be much better and more righteous than the other .....However fancy the cover is....


BlueLight

JavaFox

Before we get into this debate, I am sure I am going to have to say this at one point: I never said that the American settlers did not commit unspeakably brutal acts against the Native Americans. I do not deny that these people were in some instances viewed as sub-human. They were killed by some Americans. These facts are undeniable. But to call what happened "genocide" is just plainly wrong.

Wow, you are giving me the most outrageous sterotype imaginable (based on movies), and yet you are the one asking me to back myself up?

Easily done.

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JARED DIAMOND, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel:

We now know that smallpox, measles, and other epidemic diseases of humans like that evolve from epidemic diseases of our domestic animals with which we came into intimate contact when we started to domesticate them 11,000 years ago. [...] And so Eurasian people were exposed to these nasty diseases, gradually evolved immune and genetic resistance to them, but Native Americans, without big domestic animals, except the llamas and El Pacas, did not evolve nasty germs of their own, and so had no immunity when Europeans arrived, bringing smallpox and measles and these other nasty germs. So most native Americans died before they could even reach the battlefield. They were killed by Eurasian germs.

DIAMOND further concludes that 95% of Native Americans died from diseases brought by Europeans.

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The City of Philomath, Oregon:

In the late 1700s, maritime explorers and fur traders brought smallpox to the Pacific Northwest. Lacking immunity to the disease, many Northwest Native Americans died. In the mid-1830s, the Kalapuya, already weakened by the earlier epidemic, were all but wiped out by malaria. An estimated ninety- percent of the population perished.

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Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen:

In 1618, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern New England. For decades, British and French fishermen had fished off the Massachusetts coast. [...] It is likely that these fishermen trasmitted some illness to the people they met. [...] Within three years, the plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coastal New England."


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Duke University:

1617-1619 A smallpox outbreak killed 90% of the Massachusetts Bay Indians, probably introduced from fishing boats that visited the coast before there was a permanent English settlement there

1633 Smallpox again struck the Indians in Massachusetts, probably brought on arriving ships of settlers. At least 15 children died on incoming ships, as well as about 20 colonists already resident.

1634 Smallpox in Connecticut, a catastrophic epidemic that was introduced by Dutch traders and killed 95% of the Indians along the Connecticut River

1662 Smallpox killed more than a thousand Iroquois in central New York state

1802 Smallpox killed about two thirds of the Omaha Indians in what is now northeast Nebraska

1837 Smallpox started with a Sioux tribe in Missouri in June 1837, then spread to Blackfoot and other tribes in Montana and Saskatchewan.

1847 Hundreds of Cayuse Indians in the Pacific northwest were killed by measles.


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Listen, I know a lot of you don't like the United States, and I don't like a lot of what we've done in the past either. But by calling what was unintentional a "genocide" you lose credibility. Yes, the US killed Native Americans. Yes, the US put Natives on reservations. Yes, the US failed to give Natives proper legal rights. AND YES THE NATIVES WERE TREATED BADLY. But they weren't extermined systematically.

I mean, listen, the Black Death probably came from China to Europe. 25 million Europeans died in just under five years between 1347 and 1352. Do you blame the Chinese for that "genocide"? No. Do you blame the Italian traders that may have brought the bubonic plague back from China? Of course not. And if it wasn't delliberate, it wasn't genocide.

raid517

That's BS JF, the point that was made was that you were accusing the rest of the world of inconsistency and for the mistakes America made. This is clearly not the case. All that ever happened is that the majority of the rest of the world agreed with your policies during that time. Call it complicities if you want, but it was good enough for you then. What we object to is taking it in the neck for whatever America now deems as her past foreign policy mistakes. Own up to your own mess (if that's what you now view this to be) and quit blaming everyone else because things didn't work out the way you expected. Then maybe we can move on a little. All we find difficult is to keep up with the frequent 180 degree policy shifts in America's approach to the rest of the world - and to keep up with who is and who is not America's most popular friend of the month any more. You ought to publish a chart every month, so people know where they stand with you these days.

All that is happening is people are waking up to the US' fast and loose foreign policies - and now that even long standing old allies are being subjected to them too, people are just more aware of it and are understandably angry. But that doesn't mean we won't play ball. It just means we all know now where we really stand with you. Maybe that won't be such a bad thing after all...

Q

JavaFox

Okay, let me see if I understand. So the US decided to do very little about Iraq in the past (you know, with the exception of waging war, and launching missiles), and that is bad and worthy of criticism. The rest of the world was completely fine with this policy, and adopt it as their own, but they deserve no criticism. So the US changes its position, decides to do something about the mess and that too is worthy of criticism. Much of the world is content to do nothing (just like the US did in the past), and this warrants no criticism. Going at it alone is bad, but asking for help is bad too. Oh, and this is our mess.

Hmm.